Jean Ridler writes: <This thread has taken a couple of interesting turns. When to intervene when a healthy newborn is not nursing? One study that I found interesting by Yamauchi and Yamanouchi (1990) showed that healthy, full-term breastfeeding babies fed: 4.3 times in the first 24 hours (range 0 - 11) 7.4 times in the next 24 hours (range 1 - 22) (Sorry, I can't find the full reference at the moment - the above I got from an OH transparency I made a while back.) Riodan and Auerbach (p283-284) refers to the first day sleep patterns of neonates born in hospital and this seem to correlate well with the above study. Especially if the baby has fed at least once, preferably in the hour or so after birth, I don't see any reason to panic until the second day.> In retrospect, maybe some things weren't as bad after all back in the 1940's and '50's - the baby boom days of babies being NPO for 12 hours, given 5% GW every four hours for the second 12 hours to stimulate passage of meconium, and then started at breast (or on formula if not breastfeeding) at 24 hours. Although I was not one of them with my first 3 children, there were some women who made a go of breastfeeding, despite twilight sleep, general anesthetics and 3-5 minute feedings on one side every four hours, moving up to 10 minutes every four hours by day 4! But the large number of baby boomers still around indicates that delayed feeding may not have been quite so harmful as the swinging pendulum of clinical practice might lead us to believe! Jean ******************************************* K. Jean Cotterman RNC, IBCLC Dayton, Ohio USA ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html