Everyday parenting
Feeding: how to actually help
Whether it is breast, bottle or both, there is a real job here for you. Most men do not know what it is.
Feeding dominates the first weeks, and it is where men most often decide they are useless. You are not. The job is just adjacent to the feeding rather than the feeding itself.
If she is breastfeeding
It is frequently harder than anyone admits, particularly in the first fortnight. Pain, latch problems and worrying about supply are common and they are usually fixable with proper help.
Your job:
- Water, food and a phone charger, every single feed. Every one. She will not ask and she will be pinned to a sofa for forty minutes.
- Get her help fast if it hurts. Persistent pain is a sign something is fixable, not a sign she should endure it. Health visitor, infant feeding team, or in the UK the National Breastfeeding Helpline on 0300 100 0212.
- Take everything else. Nappies, winding, settling afterwards, the house, the visitors.
- Do not suggest formula as a fix mid-crisis unless she raises it. It usually lands as a vote of no confidence, even when it is kindly meant. Ask what she wants instead.
- Defend the decision she makes, to your family and hers.
If there are bottles
This is where you can take entire feeds, which is a genuine gift.
- Make up formula properly: fresh, with water boiled and cooled to no less than 70 degrees, used within two hours. Do not prepare a batch and leave it out.
- Never microwave a bottle. Uneven heat scalds.
- Paced bottle feeding: baby fairly upright, bottle close to horizontal, pauses. Slower, less wind, less vomit.
- Two bottles is plenty until you know what they accept.
Combination feeding
Very common and entirely legitimate. Introducing a bottle can affect supply, so if that matters to her it is worth a conversation with the infant feeding team about timing.
What nobody tells you
Whatever the plan was, it may change. Some women cannot breastfeed. Some choose not to. Some do it for a year. Every one of those is a fed baby.
If it goes differently to what she hoped, that can hit surprisingly hard and it is a common thread in postnatal low mood. The most useful sentence you have is not advice. It is "you are doing a good job and the baby is fine", said repeatedly and meant.