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Mon, 4 Oct 2010 07:35:08 EDT |
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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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