12/12/2025
✨“Is your baby feeding every 3 hours?” This is not guidance. It is clinician short hand. ✨
This is asked to quickly make sure that newborns are getting at least 8 feeds in 24 hours. To meet this lower end of expected they actually mean, “are they feeding at least 3 hours from the start of one feed to the start of the next?”
Unfortunately, against UNICEF and NHS guidance, there is a resurgence in promoting scheduling feeds. Routine questioning at newborn checks “is baby feeding every three hours?” Can, on the surface, seem to support this, making parents vulnerable to misinformation.
In the recent past, scheduling and stretching time between feeds was made popular in a book written by a nanny who shall not be named. Now there are apps, social media, sleep “experts” and notably, nanny's who have been trained by an organisation “used by royalty”, advising parents to feed their baby 3 hourly for the first 2 weeks and then moving onto 4 hourly in preparation to sleep train. Increasing in popularity are "feed, play, sleep" type schedules. All with the aim of getting baby into a routine.
⚠️These approaches are just not supportive of breastfeeding/ chest feeding or infant brain development however baby is fed.
⚠️Scheduling feeds (including sleep training) risks
◦ Under feeding baby- weight gain issues
◦ Not establishing full milk production
◦ Mastitis spectrum conditions- blocked ducts/ mastitis/ abscess
◦ Reduced or suppressed attunement to baby including dismissing instincts and baby cues.
You and your baby are a dyad. Your anatomy and physiology are unique to you. Babies are usually very good at establishing feeding if we let them.
Babies need to feed a minimum of 8-12 times in 24 hours. Nursing is not just for nutrition it is comfort and connection. We don’t count how many times we kiss our little ones on the head after all.
I highly recommend reading Emma Pickett’s article “The dangerous obsession with the infant feeding interval” which explains how focusing on spacing feeds impacts the nursing dyad.
⚡As always, there will be some situations where the frequency of feeding is genuinely part of a feeding issue, again trust your instincts⚡