How important is "at night time" as part of a newborn's feeding schedule?
Now that we have conquered jaundice, our doctor has shifted our breast-fed two-week-old daughter's feeding schedule from "every two hours; wake her; no exceptions" to "every two hours; wake her; you can go up to four hours at night time."
I am not questioning the validity of our doctor's orders. I am confident that there are good reasons to stick with this schedule and wake our daughter accordingly. What I do question is the importance of the 4 hour period specifically occurring at night.
As often as not, our daughter's only session of staying asleep for more than a couple hours is in the afternoon. At night time, she tends toward two hours on the high end, and sometimes wants to cluster-feed (last night, for instance, there was only one between-feedings period over an hour).
The shift towards longer breaks sounds great as it will help my wife to get actual sleep, if-and-when we can take advantage. But those opportunities may be few and far between if they are only allowed at night time.
One option we've considered is to allow up to two anytime 4-hour breaks if our daughter and my wife are both sleeping soundly. Is there a strong reason that these 4-hour breaks should only be at night? What could go wrong from us allowing them during the day?
It seems worth it to let our girl have her days and nights stay mixed up a bit longer if that is what it takes to provide her with a well-rested mother.
Edit: After a day or two, we were lucky enough to see her long sessions of sleep shift to the 8pm to midnight timeframe. That has largely made this a non-issue. In retrospect, I still think that 4 hours during the day would have been fine if that was the only way to provide sleep to my wife
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I like your reasoning, @JeffreyBlake . You explained it very well, and I won't try to go through it again.
I'd suggest one small change to the scheme you proposed: at two weeks, I would aim for only one four-hour gap.
Is there a lactation consultant or La Leche League leader in your area?
There's one other trick you can use -- as long as you don't overuse it. During the dark hours, when your daughter is nursing so often, you can pick one request to nurse to try to talk her out of. Well, not by talking, of course, but perhaps by taking her out for a walk. So many one-hour gaps can be rough.
I'm all in favor of cooperating with a baby's urge to cluster-feed, but like you say, a mother needs to get some sleep!
(Basis for my answer: personal experience, lots of reading about breastfeeding, and some years of participation in La Leche League meetings.)
I personally would not recommend waking your baby up for any reason. When your baby is ready to eat he will let you know. There is no reason to wake him and and force him to eat. The only exception I would say would be a newborn who hasn't eaten yet. Since your baby is two weeks old, I would let him rest as long as he needs to and feed him when he wakes up. I have three children currently and every one of them were sleeping 6+ hours through the night by 4 weeks.
Also congratulations on getting through the jaundice phase. We only had 1 kid that had it but it wasn't fun.
Recent research discourages utilizing a feeding schedule and instead allowing the baby to dictate when he/she is fed. A very thorough analysis of this can be found here. Don't wake your child to feed them!
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