While I see nothing wrong with a breastfeeding mom drinking the occasional alcoholic beverage responsibly, using mom's alcohol consumption as a method to lull baby to sleep really isn't a good solution to improving a baby's sleep. In fact, the strategy is likely to actual backfire and worsen a baby's sleep patterns.

Summary of Drinking and Breast Milk Research

The idea out there that as alcohol transfers to breast milk it will have a soothing effect on the baby is fairly persistent. However, medical research pretty much blasts that theory out of the water. What has been found is that breastfed babies of light drinkers slept less than babies of non-drinkers.

Stepping away from our short simple answer to give a more complicated response, what research shows is that those babies of mothers who drank alcohol experienced disruptions in the amount of time the spent in active sleep. Incidently, it's not just babies who have experienced this disruption, tests run on adults and animals who drank alcohol also experienced issues in the same same area.

What's even more troubling, if a mother would try to use this technique on a regular basis, drinking even one alcoholic beverage on a daily basis can have negative effects on a baby's gross motor development. It is simply not a road that parents should go down.