Caring For Your Baby

Feeding

Choosing how to feed your baby has lifelong effects for your child.

Feeding Your Baby Breastfeeding Support Feeding options Helpful Hints Mothers' Milk Bank

Feeding Your Baby

Choosing how to feed your baby has lifelong effects for your baby and for you.

What you have seen and learned about infant feeding from your family, friends and teachers is likely to influence your attitude and perceptions. Whether you plan to breastfeed or are still unsure, consider the fact that your milk is the best milk for your baby. It is the ideal first food for your baby’s first several months.

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Breastfeeding Support

Feeding Options

Breastfeeding. Nature designed human milk especially for human babies. It has several advantages over any substitute ever developed. Your milk has just the right balance of nutrients, and it has them in a form most easily used by the human immature body systems. Because it was made for your baby, your milk is also the most gentle on your baby’s systems.
Bottle-feeding. If you decide not to breastfeed or are unable to breastfeed, commercial iron-fortified formulas can provide adequate nutrition for your infant. Infant formulas have enough protein, calories, fat, vitamins and minerals for growth. However, formula doesn’t contain the immune factors found in breast milk. The immune factors in breast milk can help prevent infections.

Helpful Hints for Feeding Your Baby

These are some helpful hints for feeding your baby:

Breast milk is best for your baby and is beneficial even if you only breastfeed for a short amount of time or part-time.
Offer cow’s milk-based formula with iron as first choice of formula if you do not breastfeed.
Keep your baby on breast milk or baby formula until he or she is one year old.
Start solid foods when your baby can hold up his or her head, sit up with support, and no longer has tongue thrusting (4 to 6 months).
When starting solids, start with rice cereal mixed with breast milk or formula on a spoon. Do not give solids in the bottle or with an infant feeder.
Once your baby is tolerating cereal, offer vegetables, then add fruits, and then meats.
Ask your child’s healthcare provider about the best way to add new foods to your baby’s diet.
Progress in the texture of foods so that your baby is eating table foods by his or her first birthday.
Do not give honey & foods that can be easily choked on (like hot dogs, peanuts, grapes, raisins, or popcorn) to your child during his or her first year of life.
Unless your child is known to have or has severe allergies (for instance, breaking out in hives, vomiting or having trouble breathing), recent reports and studies have shown that introducing whole eggs and peanut butter at a young age — even at 4 to 6 months — reduces the chance of your child developing allergies to these foods. Talk to your child’s healthcare provider about whether these foods are appropriate for your child.

Mothers' Milk Bank

The oldest operating human milk bank in the United States, ChristianaCare’s Mothers’ Milk Bank stores, tests and distributes donated mothers’ milk to meet the specific needs of infants for whom human milk is prescribed by physicians.

The Milk Bank also stores and dispenses milk that mothers collect for their own hospitalized newborns. Mothers’ milk is often a gift of life. It is a gift generously given by nursing mothers who are willing to share breast milk for which their own infants have no need.

Many babies who receive milk from the Mothers’ Milk Bank would be unable to thrive without it. Babies need donor milk because of:

Allergies and formula intolerances.
Prematurity.
Failure to thrive.
Immunological deficiencies.
Postoperative nutrition.
Inborn errors of metabolism.

At ChristianaCare, neonatologists—doctors who are specially trained to care for premature and sick infants—encourage the use of mothers’ milk. Mothers’ milk is the ideal nourishment for a newborn baby because it is easier for the baby to digest than formula, reducing the risk of stomach and intestinal complications. This is most important for any critically ill infant.