Night Nurses Damage Your Milk Supply

A night nurse is a nice idea. It leads us to believe that we will be well rested so that we stay healthy, balanced and available for our babies during the day. This is typically a woman who comes to your home at 7pm, stays with the baby through the night, and gives you your baby again around 7am. It can look a few ways but most commonly, you don’t see your baby at all during the evening and it is bottle fed. The other version is that the night nurse stays up watching the baby and wakes you up every time the baby needs to eat (what a waste of money) 😓

There is a rite of passage the mother goes through in the first few weeks where she learns to communicate with her baby. She learns how to respond to it’s needs, memorize it’s cues, and understand how her body responds to the baby’s needs. Maternal confidence is built through our actual birth and cemented through the initial stages of postpartum. Night nurses are akin to our partner taking over “midnight bottle duty”, but thats another post! Apart from the maternal confidence that’s built from personally addressing your baby’s needs, it is the body contact (co-sleeping) in the evening that keeps your body informed that there is a baby to feed thus keeping your milk supply in tact. 💦
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When we bottle feed whether during the day or at night, quite quickly the body will begin to understand that the baby is getting “older” and requiring less milk, or worse, no longer thinks there is a baby to provide for. Although pumping is necessary for many women because of work arrangements, it does not service the biological function that feeding direct-to-breast does. There are receptors on your nipple that absorb baby saliva and send a signal to the body to keep producing milk. The hormones in your body stay stimulated. This is why cattle and other farm animals that provide milk for sale are fed hormones. They are pumped with machines all day, and since there is no baby contact to keep their bodies in the breastfeeding biological cycle then they must be stimulated synthetically with hormones. 🐏
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Women who hire night nurses report that by month 3 their milk supply diminishes to the point of needing a formula supplement