Reply to Could you nurse your special needs child?

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Could you nurse your special needs child?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]My SN child had trouble nursing.  I think it was a coordination issue and maybe oral tone.  We used the Supplemental Nursing System (SNS) which is kind of like syringe feeding but you attach a spaghetti-like tube to your breast so the baby is nursing but the source of milk is the bottle attached to the tube (and increasingly the source is also your breast).  Sucking on the tube produced the correct tongue movements required for nursing. It took from week 1 to 6 to have him nursing on his own, and even then it was pretty slow.  By 2-3 months he was nursing normally.  This was a pretty stressful period and I do sort of regret the interventive stress that this whole process caused us (I was constantly weighing my son, dealing with cleaning the bottles and tubes, worrying, etc.).  If I were to do it again I might just pump and bottle feed.  I know people who pumped for 2 years even...it's doable.  Then my husband could have had more of a role with feeding.  But then again, I did enjoy nursing for a good long time and was happy we made it to that point.  Do be careful about subjecting your baby to too many tests and interventions....cranial sacral?  Is that necessary?  The less other people are acting upon your baby the better for his own sense of wellbeing and peace.  My son is super oral defensive and highly anxious.  I sometimes wonder if it is due to all the feeding strategies being directed at him and stress surrounding his early weeks.  But perhaps he was oral defensive and anxious to begin with.  Who knows.  In our case, my son was separated from me for the first 2 hours instead of getting a chance to nurse, then had trouble nursing, then gto dehydrated, then got jaundice and hence more trouble nursing and falling asleep at the breast, and wound up too weak and perhaps uncoordinated to nurse.  It was a stressful beginning but we got through it.  Good luck and take it easy.  I was militantly focused on breastfeeding but looking back it would have been OK if we hadn't gotten it going--again pumping would have been fine.  We did supplement with formula for those first 6 weeks...but with food allergy risks (and you mention reflux) pumping may prevent issues that could arrive with longer term formula use...but formula is not the end of the world either.  I have many friends who used it and their kid were fine.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics