What do you wish someone had told you about feeding a newborn?

[EllieSmumsnet]

Before having a baby, You can read the books, go to the classes and listen to all the advice and still find yourself at 3am thinking, why did nobody mention THIS?

Maybe it was how relentless feeding could feel, the reality of getting a good latch, leaking absolutely everywhere, the faff of bottles and sterilising, expressing, formula, cluster feeding - or simply how much of your day could end up revolving around milk.

What do you wish someone had told you about feeding a baby before you had yours?

Share your experiences below by 30/09 to be in with a chance of winning a £200 VEX voucher.

The excruciating pain of breastfeeding in the early days - and that the baby might feed for hours on end, at any point in 24h.

I’d heard a lot of ‘oh breastfeeding is such a breeze, the most natural thing in the world’ - but not that it would be like razors every time the baby latched, and that they might only go 40mins / cluster feed for hours every evening and overnight.

That EBF can make a baby seriously ill. Know the signs of milk coming in (or not), the signs of dehydration, insist on getting your baby weighed during the first week and don’t be scared of using formula despite what the midwives say.

That you both have to learn what to do.

I breastfed twins, one baby got it right away, the other took about a week to get the hang of it.

If I hadn’t had two babies I would have thought that first week was all my fault.

It’s a new skill, you need to learn.

That you don’t need to wake them every 2 hours! If they’re asleep, let everyone sleep

I was very lucky as I didn't find breastfeeding painful or difficult to latch. I think it would have been nice for advice to mention some of the health benefits, like the decrease in the risk of breast cancer by 4.3% for every 12 months of breastfeeding - that was a pleasant surprise for me as I've done a total of 7 years of breastfeeding!

That just because the process has been very simple and straightforward the first time, that didn't mean it would be so simple the second time around. My first latched just fine and fed just fine. I experienced a little pain, visited a feeding café and learned some different positions and we were grand.

No matter what I did with my second she couldn't co-ordinate the sucking and the latching and even with lots of interventions, didn't put on weight for weeks and weeks.

We got there in the end but not before she'd really humbled me!

Fed is best. If latching is difficult, pump.
Pumped milk is still breast milk.
Formula is still nutritional.
Bonding will still happen.
<3

Wow.

That every baby is different so, even if you’ve breastfed successfully before, you and your baby may still struggle at first.

Consistent advice would probably have helped. Every nurse or midwife seemed to have a different suggestion, nothing was written down or agreed and no one seemed to have oversight when I was in hospital and we were transitioning from SCBU to going home. Contrary to what everyone else seems to have experienced, the hospital expected me to just use formula and forget about breastfeeding.

I had enough capacity to figure out what I needed to do myself to get me and baby home and then to get breastfeeding established. No one else was interested in getting back to breastfeeding after a rocky start with tube feeding, inability to latch and so on.

The relentlessness of it. I was warned about brief periods of cluster feeding, whereas in actual fact it felt like a good month of it almost constantly. I was hallucinating I’d had that little sleep.

I do feel in general there should be honesty upfront in the problems women may encounter (pain, mastitis, latch issues, low supply etc). I was told all these things were ‘rare’ but they affected most mums I know. I think not warning women is counterproductive.

I really wish there was clear advice about combi feeding. Everything seems to be breastfeeding vs bottle and there’s hardly any advice about doing both. My 1st was EBF and I wanted to combi feed my 2nd, but I just couldn’t work out how to do it without risking my supply/causing mastitis/having problems getting her to take a bottle

Breastfeeding isnt always best. My baby couldn't suckle and I was bullied into expressing milk to feed him to the detriment of my own health.

That my DC had tongue ties.

No-one mentioned it with DC1 and it caused various issues until we had it privately revised (along with the lip tie) age 3 years.

The hospital midwife told me DC2 didn't have a tongue tie. I'd done my research and knew better, so I went to a specialist lactation consultant who diagnosed it and it was cut on the NHS. Feeding was still painful until we had his lip tie privately revised age 6 weeks. No-one had told me that lip ties as well as tongue ties could cause feeding problems.

So many things!
How hot it made me, and how it did something weird to my sense of smell. DH figured both of those out. I felt like I was forever saying, "Is it hot in here? I'm so hot! Are you hot?" and, "Can you smell something? There's a funny smell..." and one day he realised it was always/only when I was breastfeeding.
Also how tired it made me. I'd be feeling totally normal, put baby on the boob, and immediately want to fall asleep. Eventually I read something about how cosleeping is the biological norm and dozing off every time you feed is some kind of evolutionary adaptation to help new mums get enough sleep. Not that helpful in Starbucks though 😅

The importance of 1-1 support from experienced mothers through peer support programs and breastfeeding groups. You need someone who's lived it and is there to offer sound, evidence based, up-to-date resources to support you. Anecdotes from your mum are great but can steer you the wrong way as guidance changes and people's own experiences are bound to influence their advice to you

I wish someone had told me to book a lactation consultant. It took me a week or two of struggling before I got some help with my first and it was marvellous when I did. With my second I booked one immediately and she identified tongue tie that had been missed. Having that help and support was fantastic.

That its OK to stick to whichever breastfeeding position works for you and baby! I had midwifes visit me every day to weigh my baby and every one of them told me to position my baby a different way because their way was the best. It was very confusing and we ended up exhausted even more than we should have been!

I wish someone had told me that discomfort is normal and to be expected. The messaging was ‘if it hurts you’re doing it wrong’ which just left me feeling deflated and like I was failing. While that may be technically true (pain due to bad latch etc…), I think a more helpful message would be that it’s a new skill that you and your baby need to learn and discomfort is a normal experience for a lot of breastfeeding mums as they work on perfecting that new skill.

It needs to be viewed like learning to drive. You don’t just jump in a car and drive seamlessly from A to B, that only comes with practice after you’ve fumbled with the gears, stalled the engine, ground the clutch. It takes time and as you perfect the skill, the pain subsides.

The thing that kept me going with breastfeeding was actually something a poster said to me when I posted in despair in the middle of the night. They said ‘Never give up on a bad day’ and I don’t know why, but that stuck with me so much and kept me going, which I’m so glad of.

As a breastfeeding mother. Strongly suggest get breast pumps, stock up on nipple balms, loads of maternity bras and spare clothes for any accidents out and about!

Feeds, get some bottles for your other half/family to help you with feeds. A steriliser is a must! Dummy on hand and Teethers/bonjela too!

Nappies, baby vests, clothes and bum cream! Stock up!

Rather than saying "fed is best", I wish someone had just straight up said to me "there is no good way to feed a baby! They all suck in one way or another!"

I mainly breastfed, but we did a bit of combo feeding and I hand pumped occasionally. All 3 ways to feed a baby have downsides. Breastfeeding keeps you chained to the sofa, is very uncomfortable at the beginning, limits your clothing choices, and means dealing with leaking boobs. Formula requires you to think ahead to make sure formula has been up to a safe temperature to kill bacteria and then had time to safely cool. It's expensive and adds to your washing up burden and can make a small kitchen cramped with extras. Pumping has the worst of both worlds- all the discomfort and limitations on the mum, plus extra storage needed and washing up.

Other than that, I also wish the myth of "you can't overfeed a breastfed baby" would go away too. My son still wanted to feed every 2 hours in the day at 3 months old! He was using it for comfort rather than nutrition.

And one last thing, I never saw mentioned anywhere official (book, antenatal class, midwives), but confirmed through Reddit- breastfeeding can trigger IBS style symptoms in some. Nothing like running to the toilet while holding your infant because the first feed of the day is having the same effect as a jumbo cup of strong coffee 😑

That one bottle of formula a day isn’t going to undo all the breastfeeding.

With my first I was so focussed on breastfeeding but then I could never get any time to myself and it seriously affected my mental health. We tried to introduce a bottle too late and my daughter just never took to a bottle at all.

With my son I then insisted that he had a bottle from DH once a day from early on. I managed to have some time to get a haircut or go for tea with a friend and knew he wasn’t going to go hungry. And he was absolutely fine, still breastfed well the rest of the time and still had all of the benefits of breastfeeding but with a mum who wasn’t completely frazzled by it all.

I wish someone told me to watch out for milk protein allergies. DS was barely gaining any weight. I took him to the doctors so many times and the midwife would come every so often but none of them seemed worried about him. I finally took him to a doctor that took it seriously and said that it looked like he had a milk protein allergy and she prescribed him a specific type of formula. Before this, I was exclusively breastfeeding, but because of the allergy and the fact that I was having dairy in my diet (including milk), I had to give him the formula as apparently it takes several weeks to come out of the mum's blood. I keep thinking about all of the pain he must have been in whenever he would push his knees towards his stomach and how it could have been prevented if only one person took it seriously. I try not to dwell on it as he's now a chunky and healthy baby, but it's still frustrating.

New mums reading this; don't take no for an answer. If anything is truly worrying you, keep trying if you get fobbed off.

I wish someone said how painful breastfeeding was. Don't get me wrong; if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing in terms of the choice to breastfeed. However, I would have definitely prepared for ways to help with the discomfort and at times, literal pain.