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
the meantime plenty of skin-to-skin contact can be encouraged.  *Sometimes*
the mom feels better if we express (by hand) a couple of mls of colostrum
and give it
to baby.  This sometimes has the affect of waking  up the baby.  What often
happens here is that the staff insist that baby must be fed every 4 hours
and this results in lots of heel flicking and shoving and pushing  at the
breast  which distresses the mother greatly and is not appreciated by the
baby!   I find no increase in engorgement provided mother feeds baby
frequently on cue from the second day (and night) onwards. In fact they seem
to do much better than the moms on the hospital's  preferred 4 hourly
routine

Jean Ridler  RN  RM  IBCLC
Cape Town, South Africa
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