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Recently Mobbs et al. 2015 describe the need for, and benefits of, immediate and sustained contact, including cosleeping, to establish an appropriate foundation for optimal human infant breastfeeding, neonatal attachment and brain growth. To further support this model, we propose a new concept,‘breastsleeping’, aimed to help both resolve the bedsharing debate and to distinguish the significant differences (and associated advantages) of the breastfeeding–bedsharing dyad when compared with the nonbreastfeeding–bedsharing situations, when the combination of breastfeeding–bedsharing is practiced in the absence of all known hazardous factors. Breastfeeding is so physiologically and behaviourally entwined and functionally interdependent with forms of cosleeping that we propose the use of the term breastsleeping to acknowledge the following:(i) the critical role that immediate and sustained maternal contact plays in helping to establish optimal breastfeeding;(ii) the fact that normal, human (species wide) infant sleep can only be derived from studies of breastsleeping dyads because of the ways maternal–infant contact affects the delivery of breastmilk, the milk’s ingestion, the infant’s concomitant and subsequent metabolism and other physiological processes, maternal and infant sleep architecture, including arousal patterns, as well as breastfeeding frequency and prolongation; and (iii) that breastsleeping by mother–infant pairs comprises such vastly different behavioural and physiological characteristics compared with nonbreastfeeding mothers and infants, this dyadic context must be distinguished and given its own epidemiological …