Genuinely can't understand why people say this...

[Writerwannabe83]

"You should give a bottle of expressed milk at night, it will help him sleep better."

I don't understand.....people say this to me all the time, but why would giving expressed milk in a bottle make them more tired than feeding from the breast??

I really do want it explained to me

Or is it just one of those weird things that people say for no known reason?

[MrsCakesPremonition]

I was told that supply in the evening was lower, which is why early evenings (just as DP walks into the house) are often the time when baby us grouchiest and least settled.

[tiktok]

:( :( all these myths make bf more complicated and more difficult than it should be :( :(

Milk does not vary in quality ie it is not 'better' or 'worse' at different times of the day or night. The main difference between 'samples' of milk is in its levels of fat, which vary according to the volume of milk in the breast at any one time. This is ok - milk with proportionately less fat in it is just fine, and milk with proporitonately more fat in it is fine, too.

At the start of breastfeeding (ie in the early weeks) prolactin levels are higher at night, and as prolactin is the milk-making hormone, production is raised. But this is not really an issue beyond these very early stages as prolactin levels fall to normal levels, and are raised only a small amount - production is driven not so much by hormones (endocrine) but by the removal of milk from the breasts (autocrine).

Engineering any of this - trying to guage volume or fat content and trying to time feeds or anything - is unnecessary and pointless (unless the baby is suffering because of over-supply, or if the baby needs a higher intake because feeding is not very effective).

The person who wrote That Book who suggests (more than suggests, orders) mothers to express in order to cope better with a drop in supply later on can be ignored. She does not understand breastfeeding. If expressing and then feeding it later on appears helpful to individuals, then fair enough - but it is not normally necessary, and can be a hassle for some, and difficult for others :)

[iK8]

Hear Hear tiktok

[tiktok]

Young babies do tend to be grouchy in the evenings and to need more close attention and more feeding. There's no evidence this means drop in production - babies feed often to satisfy these needs for close attention and more feeding, and the body supplies what they need :)

[minipie]

We gave DD a bottle of expressed BM every evening for three reasons:

1. so I could go to bed early and DH could do it
   
   
2. to get her used to a bottle for when I wanted to stop BF. I wasn't sure how long I'd want to BF for and so wanted to avoid bottle refusal later - though I suspect she would have been ok with a bottle even if we hadn't done this.
   
   
3. because I'd built up a masasive supply of frozen BM while she was in SCBU for 3 weeks and I wanted to use it this won't apply to most however.
   
   The "lower supply in the evening" idea is a self fulfilling prophecy IMO. If you regularly express in the morning, and give that instead of BF in the evening, then you are teaching your body to make more milk in the mornings and less in the evenings. Then you will be tied to giving EBM or formula in the evenings as your supply will always be too low in the eves. Whereas if you can keep BFing through the cluster feed stage, your body will learn that more milk is required in the evenings and will adapt to fit. (This is all based on absolutely no research BTW, just seems like common sense!)

[tiktok]

You're sort of right, minipie, but the body is not quite as refined and specific in its timings as you suggest.

It doesn't 'know' when it's morning and evening, really (the prolactin thing is diurnal/nocturnal, but not for long).

What happens with 'express extra in the morning to save as a stash for the evening' probably does not have much impact on most mother's production - it sorts itself out.

But for a mother whose supply is not great, to express earlier in the day will stim. the milk production just fine....but this would be countered by the greater effect of giving that expressed in the evening instead of breastfeeding....which would mean a gap between direct breastfeeds. Lets say a baby cluster feeds 7 - 9 pm and then the mother despairs and gives the ebm (or the dad does) and she doesn't bf again until 3 am....that would be a long gap between direct breastfeeds, and sufficient to impact on her supply.

So if a mother or a baby showed signs of milk production being insufficient, then the first thing to go would be that long gap at night.

As I say, for most mothers, that convenience bottle of ebm does not bring any problems - there is nothing wrong with it. The baby probably would not go hours and hours afterwards and she'd be bf direct pretty soon.

But it's not a logical response to 'oops, I haven't enough milk in the evenings'....at least not for most.

[ouryve]

I always found that night time feeds, whatever the time, were impossible to carry off without some disruption to sleep, anyhow, since what goes in one end inevitably goes out of the other, somewhere along the line.

[fledermaus]

I think the idea with giving a bottle is just that the baby will take more milk from a bottle than they would naturally, because of the way milk flows from a bottle.

For example my DC2 feeds often throughout the day, every 1-3 hours, so each feed is probably only 2 or 3oz of milk (breastfed babies tend to need 1-1.5oz per hour) - however if she has a bottle she can drink 5 or 6oz in half the time.

So, you give them a big bottle, you can see they have taken twice as much as usual, and then hopefully they'll sleep twice as long.

[Cariad007]

It's a nice idea but I've tried this a couple of times before bed with DS and he still gets up every 2 hours for a feed! As for taking a bottle from DP at night, forget it. He will take a bottle from him during the day but not at night unless I give it to him. Which defeats the purpose!

[steppemum]

well, all I can say is, that I tried it with ds because he fed constantly from 7-9, and was simply not getting enough. the bottle of expressed milk topped him up, so he calmed down, stopped crying and cluster feeding, and basically had a full stomach.
In his case the cluster feeding was definitely hunger, not for cuddles or closeness etc, because as soon as he had a full stomach he was fine.
I didn't have to do it very often, it may be that it was at times of growth spurt that it helped (can't remember).

I don't think the quality of your milk is lower, but my experience with ds, who was a huge hungry baby, was that the quantity of my milk decreased in the evening. In the morning, I had loads.

As I said before, it didn't work (and in fact i didn't bother to try) with dd1 and dd2, as they never did that manic cluster feeding and they were neither so large nor so hungry, so I never felt as if my milk supply was low in the evening.

I would never say that anyone should or shouldn't do something, but if someone was in the same position as I was with ds in the evenings, it is worth a try.

[steppemum]

not convinced by the way that they get more from a bottle, with ds, my let down was so strong that as he fed from one side, the other side 'leaked' - it poured out - faster and stronger than most bottles. Not sure why bf is seen as delivering less milk.

[fledermaus]

Generally breastfed babies take about 25oz a day (I think the range in this study was 20-30oz) which doesn't increase with age, and feed more frequently than a formula fed baby. So for example my bf 4 month old feeds about 8 times a day so each feed is probably somewhere around 3oz, whereas a formula fed 4 month old is likely to be having 5 7oz feeds. For many babies a bottle can be drunk much quicker than a breastfeed would take.

[Writerwannabe83]

I think the easiest thing for me to do is just accept I will never understand it

The more posts I read the more confused I get

[justwondering72]

What tiktok said. I always understood the bottle at bedtime was intended to deliver a considerably larger amount of milk in a shorter time, thus tanking them up and zonking them out for longer.. Whatever amount of milk comes out of your boobs in the evening is exactly the amount if milk that is meant to come out.

Cluster feeding and waking every few hours is normal, not a sign of any lack of milk. When bf evolved as a means of feeding baby humans, mums and babies were together 24/7 and babies basically lived at the boob. So the whole morning milk/ evening milk quality is a red herring. The clash is not biological, it's cultural. These days, we expect to be able to separate from out babies, to put them to bed on their own. So we do things that enable that - bedtime bottle to zonk them out is one of them.

Not judging here btw, everyone needs to do what they need to do to get through. But I agree with tiktok that the perpetuation of all these myths about milk quality etc undermines attempts to exclusively bf.

[Writerwannabe83]

When you say the bottle is intended to give a considerably larger amount of milk do you mean you purposefully put a large volume in the bottle and the baby just drinks it because it's there, as opposed to them self regulating at the breast and perhaps having a lesser volume?

[justwondering72]

Babies drink more and faster, from bottles. They can't regulate the flow as easily, especially when they are small, and tend to glut down a lot faster to avoid being swamped! They don't have to work at it, it flows at a steady rate rather than varying inspeed and flow depending how much baby nurses, there are no let downs from a bottle. That's why you can't over feed a bf baby, even if they are comfort nursing a lot. But with bottles, not so easy to regulate.

As for people deliberately over feeding babies so that they will sleep for longer? I'm sure some people do. But I think it happens a lot more due to lack of knowledge about what's normal (fussy evenings, endless nursing) and believing some common myths (like milk quality being lower in the evenings, like breasts and bottles being the same, like babies needing a big bedtime feed - they don't, what they need us regular access to a boob). But everyone has their own way of managing sleeping and feeding.