How to do evenings with a breastfed baby when the breastfeeding mother is not available?

The younger the breastfed baby, the more challlenging an evening can be when the baby's mother isn't available for frequent and flexible breastfeeds. But families live complicated 21st century lives, managing competing needs including for paid shift work, and there may come a time when she's not available, and you're on your own with your baby (or, even more challenging, your baby and older children).

When a breastfeeding woman is not available in the evenings, you'll find bedtime goes best if you experiment between your baby-sleep superpowers of

• Frequent and flexible milk, using paced bottle feeding, and

• Rich and changing sensory motor nourishment.

Evenings can come unstuck though if you feel you have to put your baby down to bed at a particular time, because that's when she'll know for sure that her mother is gone and vigorously protest (usually with loud and distressing screams). Instead, things go best if you continue to offer rich and changing sensory motor nourishment until her sleep pressure is so very high that she drops off to sleep easily in your arms.

You can find ideas for making the evenings with your baby as easy and as enjoyable as possible using the baby-sleep superpower of rich sensory motor nourishment here. Of course, you may face constraints if you are also caring for an older child or children. Then it's about workability, not perfection!