else. By six months, feeding will be only a small part of your daily life together – and by the time she’s a toddler, you may find you have one of those children who is too busy with life to bother with such mundane things as meals!
Your baby will communicate her hunger by bringing her hands to her mouth and rooting – turning her head from side to side with her mouth open. It makes feeding easier if you can feed her before she cries – a crying baby is using up energy and does not always feed efficiently.
• Try feeding first at this stage – baby-led feeding means letting her decide at this stage – which will establish your milk supply.
Step Two: Comfort
In the early weeks your baby has an enormous amount of information to process; everything is new to her right now! Crying is her most effective communication tool at this stage, and she may fuss and cry far more at this age than at any other. As her world has changed so immensely, from being in the womb to being out in the world, perhaps this is to be expected. Your baby is often soothed by reminders of the womb: the sounds, regular movement, and by the sense of being held.
It’s good to hold and soothe your baby a lot at this stage; she may be comforted by being firmly wrapped in a cot blanket (swaddled), or by rocking or being carried, and by contact with other people. She might also enjoy background noise – her Mum’s voice, of course, but also ‘white noise’ like the washing machine, vacuum cleaner or car engine! There are lots of practical suggestions about this in the section on Step Two.
Some babies cry a huge amount, and may be labelled as having ‘colic’ – and we will look at this in more detail in Step Two.
• Don’t worry that your baby seems to need a lot of soothing at this stage. She will cry and fuss more now than at any other time. It will pass; in the meantime she will be comforted by contact – holding, rocking – do whatever you feel is right!
Step Three: Sleep
She will sleep far more, too, at this early age than at any other, but her sleep will be erratic, as she has not yet grasped the difference between day and night, and may still find it difficult to soothe herself back to sleep when she wakes.
In the first six weeks her patterns will develop; she will start to learn about day and night, and you can help her by emphasizing this difference. At night, for instance, you can keep the lights low when you feed, and keep noise and interaction to a minimum. You probably won’t change her nappy unless it is dirty.
As you get on top of things, you can start to introduce a bedtime routine – another part of helping her to sleep. The section on Step Three explains how sleep works, and looks at all the options for helping your baby to sleep. In the first six weeks, though, it is recommended that you share your room with your baby, and as she wakes several times in the night to feed, you may find it easiest to bedshare too.
• Sleep comes in short bursts; room-sharing is best, bed-sharing is easier, especially for night feeds. Emphasize the difference between day and night, and start to introduce a bedtime routine as soon as you can.
All this adds up to a lot of time spent just attending to your baby! But like every stage of parenting, it doesn’t last long, and it is vital that you do spend time just concentrating on your baby in these early weeks.
My daughter Charlotte had bad colic, or at least was very windy, and we found that the best method for getting the wind up was to pat her back in three stages. First patting the bottom, then the middle, then the top of her back, as if to help the wind come up.
– Elizabeth, mother to Charlotte
~ Times Change ~ Answer – 1999 ~
From Three in a Bed by Deborah Jackson (Bloomsbury, 1999)
3 Learning about Routines: Six Weeks to Six Months
~ Times change – does the advice stay the same? ~
The cry of an infant should never be disregarded. It is Nature’s Voice.
For many parents, this stage is when they feel that they fall in love with their babies for the first time – and no wonder! The first smile, the first laugh, the coos and babbles – babies of this age can be adorable.
You are beginning to recover from the birth, you are feeling perhaps that you have your head above water – now is the time you can start to think about getting your life into a routine.
Sociable Babies
From birth, your baby can make facial movements, and if these are treated as smiles, then smiles they become. Babies of all cultures start smiling, even if they are blind, so this is truly something we are pre-programmed to do.
Babies can also vocalize from birth, but ‘proto-conversation’ or ‘early conversation’ also gets going around now, and continues until about six months. It may just look as if your baby is cooing and waving his hands around, but researchers have found that babies are mimicking the intonation of what will be their native tongue, and their hand movements keep time with the conversations around them. If you talk to your baby, he will listen, and when you pause, he will respond – he is making conversation!1
You may notice that your baby often stares at you now – this prolonged eye contact is what helps mums fall in love with their babies; in fact, psychologists have called this ‘obligatory looking’, as babies can get ‘stuck’ staring at something, unable to look away!
Step One: Feeding
If you are breastfeeding, your milk supply should be well established by six weeks, and so now it is far easier to mould and adapt a feeding pattern to suit you and your family’s needs. If you are thinking about giving your baby bottles at some stage, perhaps because you will be returning to work soon, then six weeks is a great age to introduce these – your baby should be able to adapt to the new sucking technique without it interfering with his ability to breastfeed.
By now you may see some sort of pattern to your baby’s feeding, and you can perhaps start to negotiate a routine that would suit you better. Perhaps you would like him to feed a little longer in the afternoon and early evening so he may go longer between feeds at night. If he is a very ‘suckly’ baby, let him suck his fingers or thumbs, or you might want to introduce a dummy – have a look at the chapter called Your Baby’s Need to Suckle (page 59) for more on this.
He will still rely just on breastmilk or formula for nutrition at this stage; the latest research suggests that there is no benefit, and perhaps some disadvantage, in introducing solids before six months.2 If your baby suddenly seems very hungry, it may well be that he is going through an ‘appetite spurt’ – this is where your baby feeds a lot for a short space of time to increase the milk supply – it’s a bit like changing gear in a car!
Sometimes a period of intense feeding happens just before your baby falls ill, and research now suggests that babies can alert their mothers’ immune system to any germs they have picked up, by leaving these on the breast skin. The breastmilk will then convey the appropriate antibodies in the next feed. Amazing!
• Feeding at this stage should begin to fall into a pattern; it will be easier to space feeds out and predict things now. There will still be times when your baby feeds a lot – usually due to illness or a growth spurt. Solids are not recommended at this stage, but if you’d like your baby to learn how to feed