Grandparents guide to BF?

[fiveweeksandcounting]

My mum and my Grandma are starting to really annoy me about BF. They both BF for 6 months but are strongly of the 10 minutes each side every 4 hours brigade. I manage to let most of their comments about the baby feeding too often, making a rod etc etc go over my head as I am on #3 and confident in my own abilities to BF and to do what's best for my baby but my sister has just had #1 4 weeks ago and they're giving her a huge amount of grief saying that she feeds the baby too much and whenever I try and explain about demand feeding they simply respond with "I have breastfed myself you know, you didn't invent it".

Is anyone aware of any succinct publications I could get my hands on to give to them explaining about demand feeding / growth spurts etc because I can't help feeing that they may not remember their BF days quite as clearly as they think that they do.

www.abm.me.uk/congratulations-you%E2%80%99re-going-be-grandparent

This should help

There is another issue here though - the fact your mum and grandma find it acceptable to comment in this critical way to you and your sister.

Not acceptable

There is a leaflet I saw somewhere when googling - will try to find it...

This is the one Tiktok posted in printable form.

www.abm.me.uk/sites/default/files/Grandparent.pdf

I think this is the one I was thinking of..

tinyurl.com/362z5es

I think the point I'd make is that it isn't possible to overfed a BF baby, and whilst some people will be lucky enough to have enough milk with feeding 4 hourly, 10 mins of each side others will not.

I have posted on this previously my mum gave up at 6 weeks as she didn't have enough milk - was told to fed 4 hourly 10 mins on each side... yet I was still hungry. She always thought there was something wrong with her, but now she had seen me feeding my kids and my sister feeding hers, she has concluded that it was the bad advice that was wrong and not her.

You could point out that advice is constantly being updated based on the best evidence at the time, and while they breastfed (for how long btw???) you (and your sister!) have bf more recently and so have been exposed to more up to date advice.

I'm guessing that will be met with but worth a try!

at the idea of breastfeeding every 4 hours for 20 mins. Did they just listen to the babies screaming for the other 3hr 40 mins of that cycle?!

Did they actually purely breastfeed? The reason I say this is that my mother in law said that she breastfed both sons for a couple of months but they were also getting a few spoonfuls of baby rice a day from about Day 1 as well! That would have been in the early 1970s.

Try here

Are they perhaps letting the distant mists of time fool them???

I'm bfing my 17 week old DS and for the first 3 months I fed him morning, noon and night almost constantly!

10 minutes each side? Every 4 hours? I doubt that very much!

Tell your sis to ignore them, she's doing great.