To think there is no way my baby will ever manage a Gina Ford routine?

[Aliveinwanderland]

Someone recommended the Gina Ford book to me. Read it through and just laughed! There is no chance my 9 week old DS would manage that routine!

I am wanting to get him a little more structure after Christmas but according to Gina Ford he should be sleeping through from 10:30-7am by now. DS goes no longer than 3 hours between feeds and only feeds for 5-10 mins at a time. Gina says I should be doing 20 minutes on one breast and then 10 minutes on another- how on earth is someone suppose to force a baby take this much?

Gina Ford has gone back on the bookshelf never to be read again. But if anyone has any sensible advice about how to promote longer sleeping at night, or a good day time routine then please share!

I was self employed when I had my children and didn't have the luxury of maternity leave - GF was an absolute godsend. DD1 slept through from 11-6 at 2 weeks and DD2 at 6. DD1 was fed EBM from a bottle DD2 was formula fed as my milk dried up at 2 weeks.

TBH without Gina I don't think I could have managed. If you don't need to use it great for you but don't knock it for those of us who found it worked.

G1raffe I agree totally about those timings- I could express 10oz in 10mins. No way my poor DD could have coped with that much milk, so she had short frequent feeds in the day. I now realise that her frequent feeds and very frequent dirty nappies were probably related to oversupply.

I'd agree "every 4 hours" wasn't enough to keep supply going for many mothers but why stay with that model and change to an arbitrary every 3 hours? It seems so bizarre. Why not feed when baby is hungry. Sometimes it might be 3 hours, sometimes 2, sometimes more often on a hot day or cluster feeding before a growth spurt. Sometimes less.

G1raffePicnic

Good points. I think I skipped the middle part. :)

Rince - I was similar with oversupply, so short feeds but often wasn't a problem for me. It just goes to show breasts and babies all differ doesn't it.

Do parents with babies on a 3 hour schedule just leave a baby hungry and crying then? Ignore the rooting and sacking and then murmuring and then crying that mine would do if not fed as a small baby? I feel lucky I was able to read the cues and feed. So many parents must have been trying to "obey gina" and struggle eith it, as this thread shows, if you baby wasn't happy to be left 3 hours each time.

I didn't realise she was actualky that bizarre or arbitrary prior to this thread!!

I never the managed GF either. DCs are now in their 30s and somehow survived.....

Of course you don't leave your baby hungry and crying. That's just ridiculous.

So you don't feed a baby that wants to feed every 2 hours, 3 hourly then?

Gina Ford says that you should always feed a genuinely hungry baby, IIRC. But she also says that all babies over a certain size at birth 'should' be able to go three hours between feeds, and will do that if you follow her routine correctly. Which is just bollocks, particularly for breastfed babies.

That's one of the reasons she winds people up so much. She doesn't say "this might work for your baby but hey, all of them are different, this is just one approach among many." She says "all babies are different but this works on all of them, and you should do it."

Her article listed above says not to feed on demand, but 3 hourly. So not to feed them when theyre hungry but make them wait? What about cluster feeding in the evening when they might want to feed more.

53Rd. That's the bullocks I'm trying to understand/get at. So I'd you have a slow let down and a baby happy to feed 3 hourly, her amazing advice to feed 3 hourly works!!

If not, it doesn't but everyone else is at fault other than her as it "should" work for all babies.

That's the problem really isn't it. Why not find your baby's natural rhythm and work with it. With baby no 2 he would fall asleep in the buggy on the school run so that became his routine.

GF and the rest I am convinced contributed to my pnd with my first child. She is a nanny. She doesn't have the hormonal response a new mother would have to her crying child, so it's much easier for her to let a baby cry it out. I agree that what I hated was the 'your baby should do this. If it doesn't, you are doing it wrong'approach. Way to make a new mother feel as crap as possible and make a shedload of money off it.

Bin the book and enjoy caring for your baby your way. Babies are all so different in their sleeping you just need to go with whatever works for your family. X

The idea is that if the baby has had a big enough feed then he/she won't need another for three hours. If they do then you feed them. The routine is more about feeding them when they are not crying with hunger, so you get enough food down them during the day. As I said, mine never cried because it was "time for a feed" and they got fed before they got to the point of crying for a feed.
I remember before doing GF, when u was demand feeding, Ds1 would wake in the night and I would feed him for 5 minutes until he went back to sleep, then I would put him down hopefully and pray that I would get some sleep myself. But of course 5 minutes of feed wasn't enough to fill him up for long* so 20 minutes later he was awake again and off we went again. On the GF routine I would try to keep him awake to keep him feeding, wiggling his hands and feet, calling his name etc and then when this stopped working j would change his nappy which would wake him up completely and start again with the other boon. By doing this I filled him up enough do he would sleep for the rest of the night. This is probably just common sense to most of you but I didn't know to do this until j had read Gina.
I think there has been a misunderstanding about the "feed for 15 mins" comment. I don't think she means "feed for 15 minutes and no more " I think she means "feed for at least* 15 minutes." In my book she blames only letting a baby feed for 15 mins for breastfeeding failing.

I remember a midwife swanning into my house telling me "feed on demand, it worked for me". And swanning out again. She missed how ill I was becoming (ms relapse) she didn't check my latch. So unhelpful "one size fits all" bollocks can get you from the so called specialists.

Exactly what Pumpkinose said - GF saved my sanity with two BF babies. One slept through at 8.5 weeks, one not until age corrected 12.5 weeks. For me, I felt I needed instructions and it gave me something to aim for - if it didn't work one day, I would just aim to try again tomorrow. The Baby Whisperer on the other hand reduced me to PND related floods of tears - those parts about knowing what different cries meant. I couldn't tell and felt such a terrible mother. GF let me look at my watch and think, well, you're probably tired. I was on auto-pilot but it made me feel I must be doing something right at a time my own instincts were either non-existent or untrustworthy, until I was myself again.

My sister would breast feed every hour during the day whether baby was hungry or not, to encourage her to sleep through the night, and kept this going for 7 months. It worked from a sleep perspective. But she was exhausted and never got to do any of the other things you do with a baby like classes etc. This time round she breast fed to demand until 2 months then formula fed with Gina Ford's routine and everybody's a lot happier for it. I think GF def works easier if you formula feed.

I don't think she means "feed for 15 minutes and no more " I think she means "feed for at least 15 minutes."

But for plenty of breastfed babies (and breastfeeding mothers), that just won't work. I had oversupply, and my baby fed frequently for short feeds - 5-10 minutes. I got really stressed about this due to HV/midwives/family telling me that this wasn't enough, I needed to get her to go longer between feeds and so on. But there was just no way to get her to feed for longer than that no matter what tricks I tried. And once I gave up stressing about it and just fed on demand without guilt, she was totally fine, and so was I.

Gina Ford knows very, very little about breastfeeding.

I haven't read this thread as I saw 'Gina Ford' and thought 'I don't have the time in my life'. We have six children. Six beautiful, wonderful, irritating, driven us to the brink of insanity at times children and they are ALL different. Our first son slept through the night from day one-day one! Can you imagine how smug I was?! Son number two didn't sleep through until he was three. We have had variations on a theme with all the others even though everything else is the same-all EBF (not a stealth boast, I'm just tight fisted), all same parents, all same house, all totally different. Burn the book and get to know your child....and cross your fingers they're a sleeper!

The experiences recounted on this thread show GF works for some but not others. If it works for you, that doesn't make you a childbeating Stepford Mum. If it doesn't work for you, that doesn't make you an abject failure.
You find a way that works and evolves and don't waste your time indulging your inner "mean girl".

You might find googling '4th trimester' helpful? It's all to do with the transition babies go through from womb to world and it can take 3 months for them adapt to their new surroundings. Good luck!

But for plenty of breastfed babies (and breastfeeding mothers), that just won't work. I had oversupply, and my baby fed frequently for short feeds - 5-10 minutes.

Me too. DD was a very efficient feeder and I was a very efficient producer. I thought about helping out the milk bank I had so much. No way in the world DD would have fed for 15 minutes. She would have exploded.

I would have more respect for GF if she acknowledged what the research shows which is

• that there is a wide range of normal sleep patterns in babies, with some babies sleeping nearly twice as much in terms of total number of hours as other babies, and that this is ok, not dysfunctional, and only to expected sometimes because babies aren't machines all plopping off the same production line.

• that there are a huge number of things which impact on a baby's ability to sleep in a way which is convenient for adults, such as their genes, unknown developmental problems, allergies, reflux, etc. Much of the time these things won't be obvious to parents, so encouraging a responsive and flexible attitude towards sleep is the responsible place to start.

• that breastfeeding is absolutely unique to each mother and baby pair, and that some (many) babies need to feed far more often than every three hours so that the principle of 'feed on demand' is therefore usually a sound one. That's why HV, midwives and properly trained and qualified breastfeeding counsellors and midwives start with that piece of advice as a basic principle. Telling people to ignore it in favour of the non-evidenced based recommendation to feed all babies three hourly as an aim is simply WRONG. Unethical. Yes - some, perhaps even many babies will naturally only want to feed every three hours, but many won't, and to suggest that these babies should be encouraged to refrain from feeding for comfort or thirst or hunger (the only reasons why a baby will want to feed) - well, that doesn't sit comfortably with me.

At no point are mums told to ignore a hungry baby in GF stuff. Just wrong.

"http://www.analyticalarmadillo.co.uk/2012/05/claire-byam-cook-in-times-say-what.html?m=1 here"

A commentary on the advice of the SO called 'breastfeeding expert' Clare Byam Cook, who is Gina Ford's go to person for breastfeeding advice.

The writer of the article, who's an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, describes Clare Byam Cook as being a 'breastfeeding expert' in the same way as Dr Gillian McKeith is an expert in nutrition.

Both Dr McKeith and Clare Buy My Book are 'self certified' experts in their field, have absolutely excellent publicists, and have a populist message which makes them easy to sell (in McKeith's case 'eat broccoli three times a day and you won't get cancer', in Clare Buy My Book's case, that many women can't make enough milk for their babies and it doesn't really matter as breastfeeding isn't important anyway).

The fact that Clare Buy My Book is constantly referred to as a 'breastfeeding expert' on TV and in print media is evidence of a massive lack of respect and understanding of breastfeeding in public life. After all, they wouldn't invite a retired and un-registered GP on to a programme and describe her as 'an expert in cardiac problems' so why invite a retired, unregistered midwife with no nationally or internationally recognised training or qualification in breastfeeding counselling, and describe her as a 'breastfeeding expert'? Especially when 99.9% of the rest of the breastfeeding support establishment aren't in agreement with her approach or methods.