Balancing Breast and Bottle: Reaching Your Breastfeeding Goals (Hale Publishing, 2010*) was written by a lactation consultant and a speech language pathologist. It focuses on a topic that inspires a lot of confusion: bottle feeding your breastfed baby.
I get a lot of questions about bottle introduction and bottle refusal (see this wonderful video), so I was very interested to read this book.
The book begins with a breastfeeding primer, including an interesting section on 'baby-led' vs. 'mother-led' latching. The authors create a hybrid method they call 'interactive feeding.'
Then the book takes on the choice of bottles for breastfed babies. There is a useful index of flow rates, which the authors tested. I thought it was interesting that they advocate use of a narrow-neck bottle nipple over a wide-neck bottle nipple.
Most useful is a long section on evaluating bottle feeding problems, focusing on bottle placement, "latch," and flow. There are helpful photos of bottle feeding mistakes. There is a good section on paced feeding and how to make the bottle feel more like the breast, as well as a chapter on breast refusal.
There is a section on pump selection and pumping and working, with some sample pumping schedules.
This book presents topics that are covered in most general breastfeeding books (pumping and working, when to introduce a bottle, etc), but the authors present a far more in-depth picture of bottle feeding and bottle feeding problems.
The one piece of advice I didn't see in this book was to freeze and defrost milks in small amounts, so as not to waste any. I asked Amy Arnold, one of the authors, about this, and she sent this response:
Our approach is a bit different. In preparation for writing, our research showed that many babies eat, for example, 6 ounces twice a day in a daycare setting, rather than 2 ounces more often. This surprised us. It made our focus to balance the quantity of feedings with amount of milk offered, rather than the typical suggestion of defrosting several small bottles of milk for each feeding (not likely to happen in a daycare setting). In Chapter 15, this is explored in the section Estimating Quantity.
Appendix E includes the My Baby Ate Journal. This is to provide the mother with how often her baby eats, how much, and if there were any leftovers so she can adjust accordingly. Our goal is equipping mothers to look at their own baby to determine quantity saved, rather than typical guidelines that are possibly too broad (or narrow!).
So, who should buy this book? If you're experiencing bottle feeding problems this book could be quite useful. The authors present information on bottle feeding issues I've never seen anywhere else. I also think that the section on bottle feeding problems makes this book a good addition to a lactation consultant's library.
* The author provided me a review copy of this book.
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