The Key to Teaching My NICU Baby to Breastfeed

Transitioning my NICU baby from bottle feeding to breastfeeding was difficult. Without the support of my husband, mother, and mother-in-law, I would have undoubtedly formula fed my son.

However, with their support and a lot of perseverance, we successfully transitioned from bottle to breast. He transitioned so well that it has proven challenging to get him to wean.

Fears about breastfeeding after the NICU

I was extremely afraid that my baby would never breastfeed. Every post I read in preparation for breastfeeding said not to introduce a bottle for several weeks, as there was a chance a baby would prefer the bottle and refuse the breast.

And we were not following that guidance at all. Not only did he have a bottle before that supposedly magic six week mark, but he had the bottle right from the start. The moment the doctors told us we could try to feed him, he had a bottle. He continued to have bottles for his entire stay in the NICU.

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It’s not that I didn’t try to breastfeed him in the NICU. I did. I had hospital lactation consultants over to the room several times. I cried with a nurse. I was mourning the relationship my son and I would never have, because my son struggled to latch. When he did latch, he wouldn’t eat very long.

The length of time he spent attached mattered. At least in our NICU, they would estimate how much a baby ate while breastfeeding as one milliliter per minute. To get his full meal from me, then, he would have had to eat for an hour straight. 

There was just no way!

And he had to eat most of his food by mouth (no NG tube) to go home.

Defeated, I stopped trying. More important to me than breastfeeding was getting my baby home. If he could never hit their standards by breastfeeding, I didn’t want to confuse him and make it harder for him to eat. 

The first attempts to feed my NICU baby at home

When we finally got the baby home, I was still scared to try. I still wanted him to eat as much as he could, and I didn’t know how to know if he got enough from me.

So I kept pumping. We kept giving him the bottle. 

It made for very long nights of sleeping for 40 minutes, baby waking up, warming up a bottle, feeding him a bottle (about a 30 minute endeavor), waking my husband up to hold him (he wouldn’t sleep alone), and pumping for another 20 minutes. Repeat.

So what changed? How did we cut the middle man (the pump)?

What did it take for the baby to breastfeed?

I had read blog posts about what it would take to get a baby to breastfeed after they were bottle fed. There was a lot about taking baths with the baby, doing skin to skin, etc. It sounded tedious. And I don’t know about you, but my bathtub isn’t big enough for me, let alone me and a baby.

It was much more simple, and difficult, than that. 

I say it was simple because the key to my success was consistently trying over and over again. It was difficult because every failed attempt led to an upset and hungry baby, and a frustrated momma.

Getting it right: Breastfeeding, FINALLY!

The first time I tried to feed him after he got home was due to my mother-in-law. She came over to watch him for a bit so I could do something else, and after she gave him a bottle, she thought he was still hungry.

As a mother to eight, she knew how breastfeeding worked. As a first time mom of a NICU baby, I had no clue. She helped me latch him on, and he ate. It was magical.

I kept trying to feed him. When he got hungry, before I would warm up a bottle, I would put him to my breast. He would struggle to latch for a bit, maybe latch for a second and then not know what to do, and ultimately I ended up with a screaming baby.

Especially at night, that was difficult. I already got so little sleep from being up for the pumping sessions.

My husband would warm up the bottle. Sometimes he’d feed the baby, sometimes I would. Then he’d hold the baby so I could pump. If he wasn’t up with me every feeding, there is no way I would have persevered.

Because it wasn’t working unless I did it every time he was hungry. I tried to just do it during the day to start. We made very little progress.

But the key was consistency. 

I kept trying. Every single feeding. Eventually, he stopped needing the bottle during the day. The night time bottles slowly decreased, until we didn’t need them anymore either. 

He finally breastfed. 

It wasn’t always easy after that. I was in tremendous pain. After several lactation consultants, we discovered the baby had not only a tongue tie, but lip and cheek ties too. How we eliminated pain while breastfeeding with ties is a story for another time.

In Summary

My NICU baby was set up for failure when it came to breastfeeding. He had the bottle from the first time he was allowed to eat. But through trying the breast before every bottle, over the course of a few weeks, we were able to make the switch. I have been breastfeeding him now for six months, and it’s still going strong.