Home › The Care of Babies › The Care of Babies: Sometimes
The Care of Babies: Sometimes
When to Nurse. - The mother's milk does not always come immediately after the birth of the child. Sometimes it is unusually late in coming. In these cases, the rule should be to wait and be sure before resorting to bottle feeding. Take the advice of the family doctor. This is too serious a matter to be settled offhand and without the best advice.
Sometimes a good flow of milk is not established until the fourth, fifth or sixth day. Some young mothers make the serious mistake of giving other food to their babies during this time. It may be taken for granted that nature's method cannot be improved upon. The baby will not starve. If it is given anything except the mother's milk, it may be seriously injured. Put the child to the breast every six hours the first day, and every four hours the second day after birth, or oftener if it fails to nurse or obtain nourishment. But do not awaken it to nurse. Undisturbed rest is what it needs. In the interval between nursings give it a clean linen rag moistened with pure, boiled water to suck. After the milk comes, usually from the third day on, the frequency of nursing during the first year is shown in the following table from Holt: Period.
Nursings in 24 hours. 1st and 2d day.. 4 3 days to 6 wks...10 6 wks. to 3 mos... 8 3 to 5 months.... 7 5 to 12 months... 6 Night Interval nursings by day. (10 P. M. to6A.M.) 6 hrs. 1 66 21 " After the third day and for the next six weeks, nurse the baby every two hours during the day time, and not more than twice at night, or a total of not more than ten nursings in the twenty-four hours. healthy child will take one or more naps each day. It should not be awakened for feeding, but aside from this should be fed regularly every two hours.
The The interval between nursings may be increased from the sixth week to the third month to two and one-half hours with one nursing at night, or a total of eight nursings in twentyfour hours. The interval may be further increased to three hours during the day time with one nursing at night from the third to the fifth month.
From the fifth to the twelfth month the times of feeding remain the same, but the night feeding should be discontinued. If the child wakes up in the night, give it a drink of cooled boiled water, or thin barley water without milk. It needs nothing more.
After a short time, if it is well, it will sleep through the night.
It is easy to get the baby into good habits, and hard to get it out of bad habits. By adopting regular habits of nursing, the mother is given more freedom and more rest and is in better condition to take good care of her child. Form the habit of nursing your baby by the clock. It will soon learn to expect its nursing at the proper time, and not at any other time. It is a good plan to write on a slip of paper a memorandum of the hours for nursing with the date on which the hours are to be changed to longer intervals, and also which breast is to be used at each nursing.
It is much better to use but one breast at each feeding alternating, than to let the baby nurse at both breasts at each feeding. Such a memorandum during the first six weeks would read: