Priority One.

When it comes to your newborn, there is nothing more important in your lactation journey than making sure your baby is fed. I love to talk about sleep and help families understand newborn sleep. However, how your baby is sleeping is significantly less important in the early days and weeks as we work to establish an abundant milk supply for mom, and make sure the baby gets back to birth weight in the first two weeks.

What is important? Making sure moms are getting sleep. So many things affect the amount of sleep a mom can get every 24 hours. Perhaps the most common advice we give is to “sleep when your baby sleeps”. Having help in the early newborn days and weeks is a huge blessing to families. Sometimes fathers and other family members wonder how they can help, especially when breastfeeding can be done only by the mother? Support people are always eager to help by giving the baby a bottle to “let mom get a break”. This makes sense, except that mom will need to stimulate her breasts in another way if the baby is not at breast. This can lead to sometimes even more work and exhaustion for a new mom. In addition, our counsel is to wait until age 3-4 weeks before introducing a bottle. At that time, someone else feeding the baby is amazing! In fact, I highly recommend this and have tips and tricks to making this a seamless process allowing mom the least amount of work and stress. Some babies will easily go back and forth between bottle and breast from very early on. However, we are introducing possible unneeded challenges with bottles prior to 3 weeks if breastfeeding at the breast is the feeding goal.

There are a few ways to support mom during the strenuous first few weeks. Understanding how to build and maintain milk supply is the key as well as naming what the breastfeeding goal is of the family. If we understand this–together with your care providers, lactation consultants and others looking for ways to help support mom and baby, we can easily come up with a plan that will accomplish the desired outcome; which is ultimately a healthy mom and a healthy baby.

I am fascinated by the role of a Newborn Sleep Support Specialist and love to help families understand and find breakthroughs during the first few weeks at home with their baby. But, if you are a breastfeeding family, my mission will be prioritizing my role as a lactation consultant FIRST. And once we are well on our way with successful breastfeeding? THEN, we will bring in a combined feeding and sleeping plan that will help lay the foundation for healthy growth and sleep of your newborn.