Night Feeding Guide for New Parents

Whether you are a brand new first-time parent who is at a loss when it comes to newborn care, or you are already an experienced parent who is expecting a baby and needs a refresher in baby care, we are here to help you get more sleep! 

Here are some tips that might get you prepared on what to do and what not while adapting to your new role and responsibilities. 

Dos:

1. Interact and respond to your baby

Babies will reach out to you in different ways for different needs. Usually, they will need your attention when they are hungry, tired or just want a hug from you. These are the reactions that you will need to recognise and give them a response to make them feel protected. If you can respond and interact with them consistently and lovingly, they know they can rely on you.

Babies require a healthy space for them to learn and grow. You can interact with them by singing, reading, talking or having some fun games with them. You can interact with babies throughout daily routines, like showing them interesting things and helping to develop their senses. 

2. Seek advice and accept help from others

Seeking and accepting support from friends and family is important in your parenting journey to reduce trial and error. Don’t think that it is shameful to ask for help. Baby care and development are so important thus, accepting advice from experienced parents and experts is necessary.

As a first-time parent, you might need to become more familiar with what to buy, how to train your baby to sleep and so on. In fact, there are online mummy groups that you can seek support for. Not only ask questions when you have them, but you can also learn along the way when other parents share their problems and solutions. Buying baby products online is also easier when you can refer to others’ opinions, as platforms like MumChecked encourage moms to leave genuine reviews of the products. 

3. Be ready to adapt

Since babies grow and change very quickly, you need to have a flexible parenting style. It is because babies are mentally and physically developing as they change from month to month and from week to week. Just keep in mind that things don’t always go as planned, and don’t feel desperate when you keep facing challenges while growing your baby. But do have confidence in yourself – you are learning together with your little one!

Don’ts

1. Ignore your baby

Babies are born to be connected with their caregivers. Imagine if you are left alone when you don’t understand what happened, plus you are unable to take care of yourself. This might lead to negative outcomes where they become whiney or torn up inside. Also, don’t ignore when a baby cries for pain or asks for help. Babies are unlikely to have tantrums, so crying is the only way to communicate their needs. If they are regularly distressed, they will easily get anxious later when they grow up. 

2. Punish baby

It’s very important not to slap, hit, or spank your baby, even if you just want him to remember the lesson. However, babies cannot connect punishment and their behaviours, so they will only feel pain at that moment. Punishment would negatively influence babies as they are learning by watching the behaviour of the parents.

3. Compare yourself to others

Just stop comparing yourself with other moms who think they did a good job of successfully training their babies on sleeping or eating. By always comparing yourself with others, you will lose confidence as a mother and easily feel frustrated. But how can we replace it with something else? Show more understanding and love on how other moms do that – but not compare. Remember that you shouldn’t worry too much as long as your little one is developing well. 

4. Overstimulate baby

As mentioned above, a newborn needs your response and entertainment. However, don’t overstimulate. Sensory overload in babies will result in unsettled behaviour like turning away from you, kicking, waving, or just shutting down because of being too overwhelmed. So if that happens, you need to calm the baby down to return their stress hormone to a normal level.

Is there any way for parents to get more sleep with a newborn in the house?

Although there is no guaranteed way – nor is it normal – to make a newborn baby sleep for a full 8 hours, you can encourage healthy sleep practices to get more rest at night. One of the ways to ensure you get a longer and better night’s sleep is to ensure that your baby is fed until it is full. This is believed to help reduce the number of times they’d wake up through the night. Regardless, there is no one solution that can put them to sleep for hours long – at least not right away.

You still have to feed them when and as needed, change their diapers, and try replicating a womb-like environment to make them sleep more effectively and faster. Unfortunately, the best way to get your baby to sleep is to feed them at night frequently.   

Ways to Handle Night Feedings More Efficiently

Newborn babies normally feed every 2-3 hours, which could mean many nights of disturbed sleep for parents. As new parents, you’d already know that frequent feedings, changing nappies, having to burp your little one and dealing with their fussiness can make it almost impossible to get a decent amount of sleep at night. Let’s learn more about what you can do in this situation.

Use Bottle & Alternate Feeding Duties With Your Spouse

Recent research indicates that within a baby’s first year, a new parent gets, on average, less than 5 hours of sleep a night, so there is no shame in using any possible item to help you get more rest if you can. This includes involving your spouse and delegating the nighttime feedings among you two. As soon as your baby can take a bottle, let your partner take over some of the night feeds so you can get a longer sleep period. 

Keep Your Newborn Close to You

…such as by placing their crib in a room right next to yours. This way, you can ‘reach’ them faster when they cry and it can help prolong your breastfeeding experience, thus resulting in your baby getting full faster and you yourself getting more sleep. Not to mention, night feeds become so much easier when you don’t have to trudge around the house to get to your crying baby. 

Turn off Baby Monitors

Following the previous tip, if you keep them near, you should be able to hear them cry when they are hungry. Thus, it is a good idea to turn off any baby monitor devices as they tend to be active sleepers, and you, the parent, do not need your sleep disrupted by the slightest movements. Give yourself some peace. When they need to be fed, you’ll know because they should be close enough for you to hear their cries.

Form Sleep Associations

To further ensure your baby will sleep well, especially in the first two months after birth, try a few different methods to make your baby associate that particular method with sleep. It could be anything as simple as dimming the light, playing light music, using a white noise machine, or using a weighted swaddle/sleeping bag to get your baby in a comfortable position.

To bring your baby’s body back into a ‘sleeping’ mode, bring them back to their crib or the changing station for a change after each feeding. This gives them time to calm down until they can fall asleep independently and establish good sleeping habits, which helps spare you the efforts to coax them to sleep.

Get a Confinement Nanny

This is perhaps the best way out of all because you get to rest much longer all night long without disturbance! If you express sufficient milk or your baby can take formula, you can let your local SG confinement nanny fully take over the night feedings while you and your spouse catch up on sleep.

If you are uncomfortable with a stranger living 24 hours in your house, you could opt for part-time helpers or nannies. However, they usually only serve during the day and not at night. Hence, rather than getting a helper or part time confinement nanny, it is more feasible to get a full-time nanny who can help anytime throughout the day.

At PEM, all our nannies are experienced and professionally trained to take care of newborn matters, including handling night feeds and burping them. Feel free to browse through some confinement nanny review to see how our nannies have made many new parents’ lives much easier!

One of the biggest mistakes new parents make is not feeding their baby enough during the day. At this age, it is normal to feed your baby a few times a night, no matter what your friends tell you. Newborn babies are awake all the time, so there is often day-night confusion, but one way to help sort out the day and night is to keep your newborn awake during the day while feeding. 

Understandably, sitting with the baby in the dark and taking time to feed them can be challenging and exhausting, especially when you haven’t had a full 8-hour night’s sleep for so long. We hope the tips above can help you in one way or another. The key you’d want to remember is that we want our infants to learn that nighttime is a boring period, a.k.a time to sleep, and that being fed earlier is better. So, while trying different methods with your little one, always keep this in mind. You’ve got this, moms & dads!