Frequency and Duration of Feedings
How Often? How Much?
Some important things to remember:
When to Feed / How Often?
Feed on
Demand: We strongly recommend feeding your
baby on demand, anytime he is hungry. If you nurse at the early cues, baby is
patient and cooperative as you work on proper positioning. Also, baby’s stomach
is as small as his fist, and breastmilk digests easily, so newborns need
to eat frequently.
Hunger
Cues: How do you know if your baby is
hungry? A common saying is “watch the baby, not the clock.” Feed him when he
begins to show any of these signs or symptoms of hunger.
· Rooting: If you stroke his cheek, he turns toward your
finger, and opens his mouth.
· Turning his head side to side, or bobbing his head up and
down against your chest.
· Bringing hands to mouth. Sucking his fingers or anything he
can reach.
· Lip smacking, thrusting his tongue out.
· Fluttering eyelids, becoming more active after a quiet time,
waving hands about, making noise.
Babies show all of these cues for
about 15 minutes before they begin to cry. Crying is a late hunger cue! And it
can be hard to feed a crying baby, so if you wait till he’s this hungry, then
you may need to work to calm him down enough to feed.
Frequency
of Feeding: Feed your baby whenever he is
hungry. This should be a minimum of 8 – 12 times in a 24 hour period.
Some newborns will eat 15 or more times a day.
Typically, a baby will have parts of
the day where he nurses every 90 minutes, and other parts of the day when his
feedings are more spread out. The longest a newborn should go without feeding
is three hours in the daytime, or four hours overnight. All newborns will to be
fed at some point during the night.
If you have an unusually sleepy baby
who does not ask to be fed this often, keep him near you. Whenever he stirs at
all or you see fluttering eyelids, unswaddle him, change his diaper, and nurse
him. For more ideas on sleepy babies, see
www.familyresource.com/pregnancy/16/287/
As baby gets older, feeding times
become less frequent and more predictable. Most three month old babies go
approximately 3 hours between feedings.
How much to feed:
On the first breast, feed the baby
until he acts full: he may fall asleep, or he may let go of the breast. Or, his
sucking pattern will slow down until he is pausing more often than sucking. At
first, expect it to take 20 – 45 minutes per feeding. This time will get
shorter as you and baby both get more experienced.
After he seems finished on one side,
give him a chance to burp, then switch to the other side to nurse for as long
as he wants.
You should always nurse a newborn for
10 minutes or more on the first side. He may or may not take the second side.
On the next feeding, start on the
breast you finished this feeding on.
Again, as baby gets older, he will
become more efficient at feeding, and it will take less time.
c. 2004, Janelle Durham