The Baby Sleep Practitioner - Blog

​Answer:

Many highly influential 'baby sleep advisers' promote spacing breast or bottle feeds in the hope that doing this will reduce the risk of things like chapped nipples, allow more sleep for mother and baby and aide baby's digestion and appetite. 

Unfortunately this is not true. 

Spaced feeds can make life harder for many women, putting us at risk of developing mastitis and breast abbesses. It can also suppress our milk supply - which leads to a hungry baby that cries even more. Not to mention the stress that it can cause baby when their hunger cues are being ignored - a baby experiences a delay in getting nourishment as a life or death situation. So as you can imagine consistently withholding milk when your baby is genuinely hungry can cause a lot of stress for both baby and you and will not help your baby sleep for longer periods over night.

But as with all aspects of baby care - this is not black and white. 

In the early days it can be difficult to know if your babies frequent feeding is normal or if it is a sign of an underlying feeding problem.  Bear in mind that it is normal in the new born period for babies to feed twelve times a day or so and want to feed within an hour or less of the last feed.

If your baby has a pattern of consistently returning to the breast within an hour or less - during the day and night - your baby is doing what is refereed to as 'marathon feeding'. This is a reason for your baby to be reviewed by a health professional who has the skills to assess your baby's feeding. 

A baby with poor milk transfer can still have good urine and stool output as mother and baby battle bravely on together. If your baby is showing any of the following signs it is important to get a feeding assessment.

1. Consistently feeds for more than 30-40 minutes
2. Does not have frequent and audible swallows (which shows baby is actively transferring milk)
3. Rarely falls off the breast drowsy and satisfied after a feed
4. Is not gaining weight very well
5. Fusses and cries a lot 
6. Sleeps for short periods at night as frequently waking due to hunger

In the absence of these feeding issues and once your baby is past the new born period, you may notice that your baby does naturally start to 'space' their feeds at their own pace - there is no need to do this for them.

It can be helpful at this stage to make sure that when your baby starts to show cues that they require something to try offering them other comforts such as a change in scenery (they may just be bored), a cuddle and a chat, check their nappy etc, as it could be this your baby requires, not a feed. 

Gently experiment if you are not sure what baby is trying to communicate to you and over time you will develop good  two way communication and interpreting their individual cues and patterns of behavior will get much easier.

​​Fathers can have a really positive impact on the the development of healthy infant sleep, but most infant sleep research is focused on the mother's behaviour. The small amount of research that has looked at fathers in their assessment attests to this and agrees that more research is required - finally researchers are starting to look more in to the important role fathers can play with infants sleep!

We all know that fathers input in childcare has a very positive influence on their brain, social and emotional development, but did you know that this starts in infancy? 

One of the great things about fathers is how differently they interact with their children in comparison to mothers and this variation in interactions between mother and baby and father and baby is very healthy. Fathers interactions are often more physical and stimulating which can have direct effects on the child's development, but there are also more indirect effects fathers can have - like influencing mother and child interactions by supporting mothers decision making or parenting behaviours.

So how have 'the researchers' found fathers parenting to be different to mothers around infant sleep? 

Most of us would agree that fathers interact differently with babies at night. They tend to have shorter and less interactive interventions when baby wakes and are more likely to have a limit setting approach with baby sleep problems. 

Researchers have also found that fathers often find it easier to do less active soothing at night - as opposed to mothers who tend to do more active soothing like feeding or cuddling.

Does this all sound like a father you know? It does to me, and these parenting 'traits' that many fathers have can be very helpful in some situations where parents are facing challenges around their infants sleep. 

There are many ways you can get your child's father more involved in their care during the infancy period. My husband does the bath and bedtime routine for our boys when he gets home, often getting in the shower with them for some play time too - they love it, and it's great use of the short time they get together in the day. 
Especially with younger infants, getting Dad doing more hands on will help baby to become more familiar with him doing baths, bedtime, soothing and settling.

If you are having challenges with your child's night-time sleep you can try things like splitting the night in to 2 shifts so mum does half and dad does the other, having alternating nights when one of you does the 'getting up', mum does the feed and dad settles baby back to sleep, or dad does the re-settling when you know that baby is unlikely to be hungry.

So lets not under estimate all the fathers out there and how much of a positive impact they can have and do have on us, our babies and all of the families sleep. 


Happy fathers day!