Many pediatricians recommend feeding your baby every 2-3 hours. When it comes to night feedings, doctors often insist that a young mother wake her baby up when he sleeps for a long time. Although in fact, not everything is so simple.
Instructions
Step 1
A premature or debilitated baby. When a newborn is born prematurely and / or is rather low in weight, he may not wake up to feed due to lack of strength. In this case, it is really necessary to wake up the newborn, perhaps even to do it more often than once every three hours. Otherwise, he will gain weight very slowly.
Step 2
In the case of a healthy strong child, things are different. Here mom is better off guided by her flair and intuition than by the advice of others. Every child is different. Someone regularly wakes up every two hours to eat. And someone from the very birth sleeps at night for 6-8 hours. You should not wake up the baby for feeding if: he is gaining weight well, the mother has enough milk. There is no need to worry if these two conditions are met. Here you can only be glad that the young mother has the opportunity to sleep and recover from childbirth. This is much more important than adhering to a formal rule of feeding the baby every 2-3 hours.
Step 3
The baby's weight gain must be assessed not by his subjective feelings (“he eats little and does not grow at all”), but by objective parameters - how many grams the child has added, how many centimeters he has grown. In this case, you need to evaluate a fairly long period of time - a month or at least a week. If the child really does not change much in weight over time and at the same time practically does not eat at night, you can try to wake him up. However, you should not go to extremes: if you regularly wake up the baby, and he still does not take the breast and falls asleep again, you do not need to forcefully disturb him. A hungry child will definitely eat. Otherwise, you simply run the risk of knocking down the child's natural sleep and wakefulness.
Step 4
When a young mother does not have enough milk, breastfeeding experts recommend increasing the frequency of breastfeeding. It is especially important to latch on to the breast at night It is in the dark, when a baby sucks on the breast, a hormone is produced in the mother's body, which affects the amount of breast milk that is formed the next day. Therefore, if you have difficulties with lactation, and the baby sleeps all night without waking up, it is worth waking him up and applying to the breast as often as possible.
