Baby Formula Feeding Schedules: How to Establish a Routine

On the first day of life, your infant’s stomach is so tiny that it can hold around 30 ml of liquid. As your baby grows, its stomach grows, too. It is impossible to figure out how much milk your baby is consuming in case of breastfeeding. If you are bottle-feeding, measuring is more manageable.

Tips for Creating Baby Formula Feeding Schedules:

How Often Should Your Baby Eat?

While every infant is unique, we can still say with confidence that breastfed newborns eat more than bottle-fed babies. This is because breast milk is digested easier and leaves the stomach much faster than baby formula.

Here are some tips for bottle feeding with organic formula in the US and other countries:

• newborns eat around every 2-3 hours;
• a baby at the age of two months eats once per 3-4 hours
• an infant from four to six months eats approximately once per 4 to 5 hours.

How to Adapt to the Feeding Schedule?

Schedules are the true salvation of bottle-feeding moms and dads. Your little one will naturally start getting on a feeding schedule as it grows and can consume more milk at a time. This can happen between two and four months. However, while your little one is a newborn, you should be able to recognize its hunger signals, such as putting its fist in its mouth and smacking its lips. Remember that whining can worsen quickly, so don’t wait until your baby is hungry to feed it.

When your baby is around five months, you can come up with an effective sleep/feeding schedule. Let’s say your baby is used to being fed every five hours. Thus, if you set the time for the last meal before bedtime at 8:00 p.m., the infant wakes up around 1 a.m. However, if you feed your baby while it sleeps at 11:00 p.m., just before going to bed, it may not wake up until 4 a.m., giving you a decent amount of sleep.

Feed your baby before bedtime in calmer circumstances. Ideally, the last feeding should take place in the room where the baby will sleep. Lights should be turned off or dimmed. Such circumstances will be associated with a longer rest and not a day’s nap.

Come Up with a Routine

For the child to start realizing that the night is for sleeping and the day is for being awake, introduce routine activities into their life. The evening routine, which precedes sleep, is especially important. Therefore, the bath should always be more or less at the same time, followed by feeding and putting the baby to sleep.

Here are several most important rules on how to stabilize the feeding rhythm:

• A healthy newborn eats about 8-12 times a day, including at least 1-2 times at night. Night feeding is critical for the baby’s health, so do not neglect its importance.
• Feeding calendar. Consider writing down the feeding hours to check how many times a day the baby eats and come up with a steady feeding pattern. A few weeks after birth, it starts to become more predictable. The baby has a slightly bigger stomach and does not require to be fed as often.
• There is no feeding on demand when bottle feeding. Baby formula is richer, and the immature digestive system does not digest it as quickly as breast milk. The intervals between feedings are longer than in the case of breastfeeding. The feeding rhythm is, therefore, more stable.
• Consider feeding while the baby sleeps. This may not work for every child, but it’s worth a try if it would help your little one sleep longer without waking up at night. The idea is to feed your baby before you go to bed. The sucking reflex in a newborn will make it suck even in sleep. When it is full, the baby is less likely to wake up for the first feed. In this way, you will not have to get up immediately to feed the baby several times at night.

We hope this article will help you establish a convenient feeding routine for your baby. In case of any doubts, do not hesitate to consult with a healthcare specialist.