Feeding Patterns for Older Babies

A Short History

Have you ever wondered why it seems like breastfeeding was more successful and came more naturally to women hundreds of years ago compared to our current generation? The answer may boil down to feeding patterns. Historian Jacqueline H. Wolf studied the history of breastfeeding in the US to learn about when breastfeeding stopped being the norm and successful breastfeeding became the exception. She says,

"This goes back to how I ended up looking at the 1880s and the 1890s as a turning point. The U.S. was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing, and that changed everything for American culture. People were starting to work in factories and they had to pay more attention to time. We see the introduction in infant-care manuals of very detailed feeding schedules. The theory was that adults were having a hard time with scheduling, but if you can adapt a baby to scheduling, they wouldn’t have that tough time. The reason that’s really interesting is that anyone who knows anything about breastfeeding works knows that the more a baby sucks, that’s what stimulates milk production. If you put a baby on a strict schedule, mothers’ milk supplies go down. So you see mothers beginning to complain that they didn’t have enough milk and it was then that the medicalization began, because doctors became involved in what seemed to be a very serious problem of lactation failure. No one connected it to the change in culture and the change in infant feeding habits."

Many of our assumptions about feeding patterns for babies originates from 150 years of living clock-bound lives and several decades of bottle-feeding as the norm. What we have come to assume is "normal" for an older baby is not necessarily normal from an evolutionary or biological perspective. Most infant schedules developed in the past 150 years were designed to get babies to accept bigger, less frequent feedings. Prior to this time most people did not even have access to clocks and followed a very flexible rhythm to their day. Not only have our cultural practices led to wide scale lactation failure, but studies have also found the obesity epidemic has roots in a child's first year of life.1 While office buildings may have replaced factories, many of the effects of the industrial revolution are here to stay. None of us are prepared to toss our clocks out the window and live bohemian freestyle lives (though its tempting!). With that in mind, let's take a look at normal feeding patterns from a biological perspective and then consider how we might incorporate this knowledge into our busy lifestyles.

If your baby is bottle-fed, you can use the schedule above or you can build your own schedule using one of the two sample feeding patterns below. You'll notice that the quantity of breastmilk decreases with age as solid foods play an increasing role in baby's diet. Keep in mind if you are breastfeeding its not possible to nurse "too often" or "too much." Babies won't overfeed at the breast. All you are doing is offering and responding, not forcing. So don't be afraid to nurse often. For more tips on healthy bottlefeeding, see Bottlefeeding the Breastfed Baby.

References

1 Does Obesity Begin in the First Year of Life?, Clinical Pediatrics 2013

2 Maternal versus infant factors related to breast milk intake, Pediatrics, 1991

3 Breast milk volume and composition during late lactation, J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr., 1984

4 Volume and frequency of breastfeeds and fat content of breastmilk throughout the day, Pediatrics 2006

5 Bottle Size and Weight Gain in Formula-Fed Infants, Pediatrics 2016

6 Risk of bottle-feeding for rapid weight gain during the first year of life, Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2012

7 Bottle-feeding practices during early infancy, Pediatrics 2014

8 Why African Babies Don't Cry, accessed 08/2018

9 Nursing frequency, gonadal function, and birth spacing among !Kung hunter-gatherers, Science 1980