The highlight of a new baby’s daily life is sleeping, eating, urinating. And if you’re a new parent, the root of many of your questions and worries might be the eating part. How many ounces does your baby have to take? Do you wake up and feed a sleeping baby? Why do they seem, all the time, hungry? When can your child get started with baby feeding?
Every day, young kids need enough nutritious food to grow healthy, strong, and smart. Your baby is developing rapidly at about 6 months old and needs more energy and nutrients than at any other point in her life.
Newborn Baby Feeding at 0-5 Month
Breast milk is the ideal food for newborn babies. Until 6 months of age, breast milk needs to continue as an important source of nutrition for newborns.
Feeding your Baby at 6–12 Months
Breast milk appears to be a critical source of nutrition at 6 months of age, but it is not enough on its own. In addition to breast milk, you now need to introduce your baby to solid food to keep up with her increasing needs. Make sure that you give your baby the first food after breastfeeding, or between nursing sessions so that your baby continues to breastfeed as long as possible.
While you start feeding solid food to your infant, be extra careful not to make her sick. Germs will spread from her hands to her mouth as she crawls around and explores. Before cooking food and before any meal, prevent your baby from getting sick by washing your and her hands with soap.
How Often Should Your Baby Eat?
Each baby is distinctive, but one thing that is reasonably common is that breastfed babies feed more often than bottle-fed babies. That’s because breast milk is quickly digested and empties much faster than formula from the stomach.
Breastfed Babies
In the first few weeks of life, the baby should begin breastfeeding the baby within 1 hour of birth and provide about 8 to 12 feedings daily. Initially, it is important not to let your baby go without feeding for more than 4 hours. If possible, you would possibly need to wake them up at least before breastfeeding is well known and they are gaining weight properly.
Your baby will be able to take in more milk in less time at one feeding as your child develops and your milk supply amps up. That’s when you could start to see a pattern that is more predictable.
- 1 to 3 months: Your baby feeds seven to nine times in 24 hours.
- 3 months: feeding takes place six to eight times within 24 hours.
- 6 months: Your baby will have about six meals a day.
Breastfeeding can drop to 4 times a day or so. At around 6 months, the introduction of solids helps to fuel the additional nutritional needs of your infant.
Bottle-fed Baby
Bottle-fed newborns should eat on demand, as breastfed babies do. That is around every 2 to 3 hours, on average. A standard schedule for feeding may look like this:
- Newborn: every two or three hours,
- Two months: every three or four hours.
- 4 to 6 months: 4 to 5 hours a day.
- At 6+ months: every four or five hours
For Infants That are Both Breastfed and Bottle-fed
You may have heard the term, feeding the combined. Usually, this applies to mothers that are breastfeeding for some feed and from another feed bottle. But it can refer to by certain mothers as bottle feeding and alternating between breast milk and powdered milk. However, it’s less widely used.
Advantages to Baby Bottle Feeding
Whichever of the above choices you select, there are several advantages to using a bottle to deliver breast milk. You know exactly how much milk your baby really has.
You do not need to be present each time the baby has to be fed. Bottle feeding allows others to share the feeding, allowing you to take a break or go back to work at the appropriate time. Bottle feeding also encourages dads to become active and also to bond with their infants. Even though there are several other ways in which Dad can get involved.
Foods to Avoid
Stop fast food and soft drinks. Factory-made foods are unhealthy, such as crisps, cookies, cakes, soda, and candy. They have huge quantities of sugar, salt, fat, and chemicals, and they take up room in the stomach of your child that should be filled with healthy foods.
Although breastfeeding, of course, is a rare experience. So basically, if you want to feed on the breast, the choice is yours to make from a bottle or hybrid feed. Only make sure to know what’s best for your family and you.
