This natural cluster feeding may dominate an evening.Ī very common call to the National Breastfeeding Helpline goes like this: “My baby used to sleep in the evenings and now he’s awake for 3-4 hours. For periods in the day, a younger baby will often cluster feed and not be happy away from the breast for any longer than a few minutes at a time. Some may feed for 40 minutes every 2 hours. Some may feed for 10 minutes every 2 hours. Some babies may feed every 10 minutes every hour. That means some might be going every 3 hours and others will be feeding more frequently than 2 hourly. A newborn should feed a minimum of 8-12 times in 24 hours. So what is normal? Well, how long have you got? Because there’s a lot of normal. It’s scary and extremely frustrating that basic messages about how milk production works don’t reach the people who need them. There are people who believe that when a baby does want to return to the breast after only an hour that must reflect a ‘problem’ and perhaps the mother even has a supply issue. There are people who believe that you need to wait and hold a baby off to let your breasts ‘refill’. There are still people out there, surrounded by breastfeeding, who believe that a baby who feeds after 4 hours rather than 3 hours will ‘take more milk’. Often they come from mid-20th century ideas based around the norms of formula-feeding and pseudo-science. They seem to come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the science of breastfeeding and breastmilk production. They come from popular baby care books and relatives and peers.
Where do these ideas come from? They don’t come from anyone with any breastfeeding education, nor antenatal classes with breastfeeding professionals, nor books written by those trained to support breastfeeding. When I explained that it wasn’t necessarily, she said she was more than happy to go on as she was. I spoke to a new mother last week who was perfectly happy with her feeding routine but wondered if she should start to stretch her baby’s intervals because ‘that’s what you do’. But yet we expect teeny growing babies to be governed by this artificial notion of time. I don’t know any adults that look at their watch and say, “Only 30 minutes till my next sip of water or mint! Not long now”. Many go to bed with a glass of water or sip from a bottle throughout the day. We respond to our personal cues and we’re flexible depending on time of day, the temperature, our mood, our energy levels. Doubts creep in.Īs adults, we grab a cup of tea, a glass of water, a sweet, a snack. But when baby shows hunger cues after only 40 minutes instead of the hoped for 1 hr 30 minutes, their heart sinks and they feel a sense something is fundamentally wrong. There’s a disk from a box set in the DVD player, a cup of tea on the go, a recent chat with a friend. There are mums sitting at home, relaxing and nesting with their gorgeous new baby. They see this magic number – 90 minutes, 2 hours, 3 hours – as a measure of something sacred.
It seems to matter beyond all logic and reason. Somehow, somewhere, new mothers got the message that the gap between when a baby stops a breastfeed and the time they start to need another one matters a very very great deal.
This guest blog from breastfeeding counsellor Emma Pickett discusses the dangers of promoting a strict feeding schedule at the expense of responsive, flexible infant feeding.Īdd your voice to Unicef UK’s Change the Conversation campaign, calling on UK governments to take urgent action to protect, promote and support breastfeeding.