If you're breastfeeding your newborn and in a sleep emergency, consider asking another loving adult to do a shift at night

Dr Pamela Douglas22nd of Jul 202317th of May 2024

Upset woman by bed

Is there someone to help you in the night?

These newborn sleep pages are intended to get you started in the first challenging few weeks of life. But this sleep work will be most useful in your family's life if you quickly move on to the comprehensive Possums Baby Sleep Program, starting with The essentials, here!

If you are breastfeeding and you find yourself in a sleep emergency, you might decide to compromise for a short time. Only you can work out what’s right in your unique family.

Your baby's other parent or carer could take the shift between say eight o'clock at night to one o'clock in the morning (set the hours of the shift to suit yourself), after which you might want to be back on duty. When you're not on night duty, I’d suggest sleeping in a quiet place with earplugs in so that you don’t hear if your baby cries.
Or you might decide to ask your support person to take your baby from one o'clock in the morning or thereabouts, if the excessive waking occurs from the hours after midnight.
Your sleep emergency might also be so awful that you decide you need to clock off for an entire night or more.

Regardless, this means asking the other loving adult to use bottles of expressed breast milk. Sometimes, if a breastfeeding woman is in a serious sleep crisis and not able to express enough breast milk, or just too worn out, she might decide to allow her baby to take bottles of formula for a few nights, either for split shifts or for an entire night off.

You can find out doing the nights when there is no-one else to help here.

Things it helps to know as you decide what to do

The latest research clearly tells us breastfeeding women sleep as much as (or even more than) formula-feeding parents
Excessive night waking is usually caused by the baby's circadian clock settings, not the breastfeeding (once you're sure your newborn is getting enough milk
Working through The Possums Sleep Program mostly helps settle excessive night waking within a week or two.
Babies typically do cry for their mother’s breast and body in the night. This is biologically normal behaviour. That's another reason why many breastfeeding women set up shifts like this as last resort. However, time off in the night helps some breastfeeding women in a crisis
If sharing feeds for a night or two doesn't feel right to you, there are many ways a loving adult can help you, and help with your baby's sleep, other than by doing a shift in the night - even when you're in a sleep emergency. You can find out more here.

When you are in a sleep emergency, it's best to focus on workability, not perfection, while things get sorted out. Sometimes though, what feels like an emergency right now becomes much more manageable very quickly once you've had a chance to look at the steps in this program.

Splitting the night into shifts doesn't necessarily help long-term

Many families find that splitting the night into shifts isn’t a helpful ongoing strategy, though it assisted in an emergency. This is because nights with breastfed babies tend to go best when

The frequency of night waking is back to normal (that is, your baby’s body clock has been reset)
The breastfeeding mother and baby go back to sleep easily and quickly after a feed.

Breastfeeding women often find it is more disruptive for a non-breastfeeding parent or carer to make a bottle (even though the intention is to help) than it is to breastfeed the baby back to sleep. That's because the baby dials right up in the time it takes to prepare the bottle, or cries for the mother's body, which wakes everyone.

There are many very important ways in which you can support a severely sleep-deprived breastfeeding mother without taking over in the night, unless she specifically asks you to. It can be frustrating or even hurtful when your intention is to help, yet your partner won't let you take over in the night. However, there will be reasons why she has made this decision.

It's a matter, then, of working together as a team to explore what else your breastfeeding partner needs from you or what else you can do that she would find helpful. Together, you'll experiment and make decisions that are right for your unique family. These decisions are likely to change over time. No-one else knows what is right for your family, other than you.

If there are breastfeeding problems, you might like to work through the gestalt method of fit and hold, starting here.