How to support a breastfeeding woman so that baby sleep isn't entirely up to her

Don't underestimate the power of encouragement and help with tasks of daily living when your partner or someone you care about is breastfeeding

Taking over all or most of those domestic chores which ground our lives is perhaps the most effective way a father or non-breastfeeding parent can support a breastfeeding woman. How profoundly this kind of practical support matters, for the wellbeing of your partner, your baby, and your family!

Belief in the importance of breastfeeding for your baby and your family, if your partner has made that choice, direct words of encouragement (without any pressure), and confidence in your partner's capacity to find her own way through despite difficulty, make it much more likely that your partner will continue on with breastfeeding. Once breastfeeding is working well for your partner and your baby, breastfeeding makes sleep easy as possible for the whole family.

When you have a baby, it helps to become a self-compassion ninja yourself, at the same time as you support your breastfeeding partner.

Specialise in having sensory motor adventures with your baby

If you're the partner or support person of a breastfeeding woman, you could become your family's expert in sensory adventures. Sensory motor nourishment is a parent's other baby-sleep superpower (alongside feeds), and an incredibly powerful way to nurture your relationship and bonding with your tiny child, from birth.

• Your sensory motor contributions might include wearing your baby. You can find out more about wearing or carrying your baby here, and about using carriers safely with your newborn or baby here.

• You can find out about the NDC or Possums holistic approach to supporting your baby's motor development here.

• You can find out about responding to your baby here and growing back and forth communication with your baby here.

Your and your baby's sensory motor exploits are likely to be brief at first, without roaming far from your baby's mother, though hopefully these little walks and explorations of the world around your home will be very frequent! But as the weeks and months and years pass, you and your child will be increasingly long-range, until your little one's childhood memories are a richly woven tapestry of your shared adventures.

Does taking over a feed, for example in the evening, actually help?

Are you a father or non-breastfeeding parent who is wondering if feeding the baby with a bottle once a day could both help you bond with your baby and also give your breastfeeding partner a break? Family decisions about this might change with the age of your baby. But here are some thoughts.

If your baby is in the first months of life

Although having the non-breastfeeding parent offer a regular bottle can seem like a good idea on the surface (and does work for some families), if your baby is still in the first months of life I have often seen this backfire and make life harder for everyone, including for that precious breastfeeding woman you were hoping to support!

Here's why.

1. Excessive night waking or waking often in the evening between baby's bed-time and your own, are not caused by the breastfeeding, but by disruption to the settings of your baby's body clock. In this situation, taking over a feed in the evenings or night doesn't deal with the underlying problem. Instead, a body clock reset is urgently required. (Occasionally, a breastfeeding woman decides that having the non-breastfeeding parent offer a bottle has a temporary role in a sleep emergency. You can find out more here.)

2. 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), and

   • Both the mother and baby go back to sleep easily and quickly after a feed.

   Breastfeeding women often find it's more disruptive for a non-breastfeeding parent or carer to get up to make a bottle (even though the intention is to help) than it is to breastfeed the baby back to sleep. This is because the baby dials right up in the time it takes to prepare the bottle, or cries for her mother's body, which means that everyone is wide awake, and takes longer to go back to sleep than you would have if she'd just fed the baby herself.

3. Were you musing on whether you could use expressed breast milk to bottle feed your baby? Unfortunately, pumping causes women high levels of occupational fatigue. By that I mean, pumping is hard work! Unless there are underlying breastfeeding problems which need to be helped, it's much easier for a woman to put her baby to the breast than it is to remove milk with a pump.

4. Were you musing on whether you could use formula to bottle feed your baby?

   • Although some women have resilient breast milk production, for other women, substituting a breastfeed with even one bottle of formula puts them on a trajectory of decreasing supply, which requires more bottles of formula, which decreases her production further. Unfortunately I have seen this happen very commonly in breastfeeding women, and the loss of milk supply quite often causes a lot of stress and sadness.

   • Sometimes it's necessary to use formula. But even one bottle of formula is a concentrated dose of cow's milk protein. When used in the first weeks and months of life, it increases your baby's chances of having a cow's milk allergy later on. This is one reason why many breastfeeding women are careful not to use formula, unless they really need to.

If your baby is in the second half of the first year of life

By this age, your breastfed baby's mother might be longing for more time alone, and ready for your support to extend to feeds. If she is in the house, though, your breastfed baby is not likely to take a bottle or cup of milk, and will cry until his mother appears.

So this might be a time when women start disappearing in the evenings (to go to a yoga class or evening out with friends, for instance), leaving you and your baby alone with bottles of breast milk or perhaps formula, depending on how your family do it, to fend for yourselves. Or perhaps your baby's mother has returned to paid work, and you are in the primary carer role, all or some of the time.

Breastfeeding babies often won't take a bottle when they know their mother is somewhere around. There's usually no benefit in trying to get a baby used to the bottle before the day of separation from the breastfeeding mother arrives. This is because if your little one accidentally starts to feel under pressure to take a bottle, she might even develop a conditioned dialling up with the bottle. But once her breastfeeding mother really has gone away for a time, and your little one becomes hungry and thirsty enough, you can be confident she'll take a bottle or drink milk or water from a cup offered (without any pressure) by yourself or another carer.

If you are caring for your baby in the evenings and you are not a breastfeeding parent, you and your partner may have decided for you to use a bottle feed to tip your older baby over into sleep when her sleep pressure is high. But non-breastfeeding parents also lean on heavily on their other superpower, sensory motor nourishment. Don't look at the clock for a bed-time. Simply focus on rich and changing sensory motor adventures together (like physical play or outdoor walks) until the sleep pressure is so high that your little one drops off to sleep easily, in your arms.

Many or most breastfeeding women won't want help with feeds until the introduction of solids

Respecting a breastfeeding woman's right to autonomy over her breastfeeding relationship with the baby, which she is building up through patterns over time as she experiments her way through, is a profound act of love.

It can be frustrating when your intention is to help, yet your partner won't let you take over a feed every now and then. But there will be reasons why she has made this decision. The worst outcome, I suppose, would be for your breastfeeding partner to feel that because she doesn't want you to take over some feeds, she has forfeited her right to ask for help in other ways!

It's a matter, then, of working together as a team to explore what else she 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, as your baby grows.

• You can find out about introduction of solids here.

• You can find out about weaning here.

• You can find out about doing paid work from home and helping out here.

No-one else knows what is right for your family, other than your family.

Recommended resources

A father tells his baby sleep story.

When you're the father of a baby. Podcast by Dr Pamela Douglas and Bryan Crawford

Selected references

Antonious E, Stamoulou P, Tzanoulinou M-D. Perinatal mental health, the role and the effect of the partner: a systematic review. Healthcare. 2021;9:1572.

Antoniou E, Tzanoulinou M-D, Stmoulou P. The important role of partner support in women's mental disorders during the perinatal period. A literature review. Meaedica a Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2022;17(1):194-200.

Tiraboschi GA, Fitzpatrick C, Bernard JY. Partners with a highly favorable attitude toward breastfeeding contribute to promoting initiation and length of breastfeeding for more than 5 months in a population-based Canadian study. Breastfeeding Medicine. 2024 (in press).