In many hospitals, moms are told things like, "make sure the baby  nurses 
every three hours," or "wake the baby and feed every three hours."   One 
young mom told her mother she couldn't feed her baby who was showing feeding  
cues because it wasn't time yet.  Why wasn't it time?  Because the  staff had 
told her to feed the baby every 2 to 3 hours and it had only been an  hour 
and a half.  Even if we tell the mom to feed a minimum of 8x/24 hours,  the 
mother (who can do the math) immediately assumes we mean every three  hours.  
I can't imagine what we would all do if the "rule" was 9 feeds/24  hours.  
It doesn't go into 24 nicely.  
 
In a hospital where I used to see moms and babies the nursing  care plans 
read that babies must be fed (breast or bottle) every three  hours.  
 
How does that fall out for mothers?  It means that we must  schedule babies 
every three hours -- no more, no less.  We've come a ways  from when I was 
born in which babies were fed at 10-2-6- & 10.  But not  much.
 
As far as waking babies to eat -- you really CAN'T wake a  sleeping baby 
and make them breastfeed.  I can bottlefeed a newborn rock --  but I can't 
MAKE a baby breastfeed.  What I can do is make sure babies are  kept skin to 
skin with mama until the baby starts rooting around on his own and  begins 
looking for the breast.  And the more we keep babies skin to skin,  the more 
often they will feed.
 
For what it is worth, just remember than most everyone that is on  this 
listserv that is over -- oh -- about 38 or so -- wasn't fed for the first  24 
hours of their lives.  Is that ideal?  No.  Do I think we  should go back to 
that?  Absolutely not.  We were also kept swaddled  in the nursery and away 
from our moms, put on schedules, force fed cereal at  young ages, and most 
of us weren't breastfed (for the above 10-2-6-10  reasons). Yet somehow our 
generation managed to put men on the moon,  invented the internet and the 
computer -- and Lactnet.
 
Gosh, just think what we  could have accomplished if we HAD been breastfed 
on cue!
 
Jan Barger, RN, MA, IBCLC, FILCA
Lactation Education  Consultants
_www.lactationeducation.com_ (http://www.lactationeducation.com/)  

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