Take with a grain of salt...

Feeding your baby can be intimidating but hopefully it will be exciting and intimate. There are probably hundreds of theories and methods on feeding babies.

The first and most important thing I want to say is that if a theory says that if you don't follow their method your baby will turn out to be something less than desirable, it is a load of crap! Now I don't usually like to say negative things but I have a few issues with this theory, On Becoming Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam. (I don't have specific examples because I ended up throwing the book away. I am just going off what I remember so it could be inaccurate in parts.)

As soon as I started reading this book I was very excited because it talked a lot about being Christian and the mother-baby relationship. But it went into telling mothers that "mother's intuition" is in essence illogical and unreliable. In part that ca

n be true but countless little lives have been saved by "illogical" mother's intuition, and I will take illogical and unreliable "mother's intuition" over a theory any day of the week.

The book pushes hard on following a 3 hour schedule of feeding; Feed, wake time, and then sleep time. I actually do like that sequence but I did some research on the book and found that Baby Wise has been linked to failure-to-thrive (failure-to-thrive is baby not getting enough to eat and not growing at a normal or consistent rate.) So it is important to pay attention to YOUR baby. They said that if you feed your baby "on demand" (meaning fe

eding your baby every time they cry) he or she would grow up to be a needy and spoiled brat! That is a bunch of crap! However I feel that if for their entire lives the parents give their child everything they want when they want it, there is a good chance that the child might be a spoiled brat. But that is just nonsense that if a baby is feed on demand for the first year of their life, that they will turn into a spoiled brat.

Also with this theory, I wanted to be a well informed and educated mother so I tried to follow their schedule closely. With my first baby I would feed him for at least half a hour and then I would keep him awake for at least an hour (he was a chunk)

and then put him to bed for an hour to an hour and a half. Now that sounds great but have you really tried to keep a 2 week old infant awake for an hour? It is nearly impossible! Well at least for all 3 of my boys. I would do anything and everything to keep my first baby awake. I was literally working, bouncing, singing, whatever for the entire hour every three hours, so that's about 5 times a day. IT WAS EXHAUSTING!!! And more importantly

it was no fun! I was wearing myself out and I was not enjoying my baby!

In retrospect I was obviously following the theory too closely but it was just not working for me, so as I said before I ended up throwing the book out.

One other thing of note was that in this theory, part of helping your baby to sleep was letting your baby cry. Now I do think at some point (by individual basis) if a baby isn't sleeping through the night he or she needs to be allowed get out of the habit of waking up at night, and in some cases that means letting the baby cry. But in the Baby Wise book, they reference a study on letting babies cry. Now this book is mainly geared towards babies 6 months and younger, but I read from a guy who found the study they reference in the book and the study done about letting kids cry that were 4 year olds! It was totally taken out of context and honestly makes me pretty upset!

Now there are some parts of Baby Wise that I like and still use, and I will sum up the whole book in the next few lines. Babies need to get a full feeding every time they eat to keep them on schedule. Schedules for babies (and mommies) are very helpful. The schedule sequence that worked for me was feed, wake time, sleep time. Lastly, babies don't cry only when they are hungry. So, if I don't think it's time for him to eat, I try other things first; sleep, change the diaper, holding, and then if none of those work then I know he IS hungry.

That's it!!! That's pretty much everything I have taken from the book.

Because I am a number person, I always tried to stay close to the 3 hour schedule, and luckily for me, that has worked so far with my babies. I am no expert on babies but I feel that keeping my babies awake after they eat allows their tummies to settle and digest. But some moms really like to nurse their babies to sleep, I would only suggest one thing... Make sure your baby gets a full feeding before they fall asleep. I love nursing but it is hard on my body, so if my baby wasn't getting enough to eat and in turn had to eat more often, I think it would be even more hard on my body.

I think that for the most part people who share theories about babies and children, have good intentions, but NOTHING is fail safe for every child. And if someone tries to tell you their theory is a fail safe... WALK AWAY!!! There have been parents raising babies for thousands of years and I'm pretty sure that most wouldn't fit into any one "theory." And there have been okay parents raising okay babies who turn into okay people for thousands of years. I hope no one in their right mind thinks their way is the only "right way." In the case of Baby Wise, I doubted myself and my mother's instincts, so that's why I walked away.

Take everything in stride, take everything with a grain of salt, and use what works for you and your baby.