Connected Feeding with nfant®: Let’s get started
Last updated on September 26, 2022
Believe it or not, your newborn will use facial expression and movements to not only get your attention, but to tell you what they need and when. By learning to identify and respond to your baby’s cues, you can learn a wide array of important and amazing things about your newborn, such as whether they are happy, uncomfortable, tired or even ready to start or stop feeding.
Reading your baby’s hunger cues
Our team at nfant® developed a feeding approach that coaches new and even experienced parents to tune into their baby’s unique needs. We believe that parents can achieve the most feeding success when they learn to decode their baby’s language, spoken through a series of hunger, stress and sleep cues that any caregiver can learn to spot.
You may have heard the terms cue-based, infant-led or demand feeding. These terms all describe a type of feeding approach that lets a baby’s needs and cues determine things such as when feedings happen, how long they last or how much milk to consume.
Learn about Hunger Cues and the 5 Signs Your Baby is Hungry.
What is Connected Feeding?
At nfant® we coined the term Connected Feeding to describe our innovative Thrive Feeding System that takes this same cue-based approach to the next level.
We do more than teach parents and caregivers how to identify, recognize and respond to their baby’s feeding cues – although coaching parents on this important skill is a big part of our mission! Our Connected Feeding curriculum coaches parents on how to read their baby’s cues. But when you need a data-based gut check, our Tracker App removes any guesswork from feeding.
The Thrive Feeding System amplifies and enhances a parent’s observations with real-time biofeedback data. This information, stored and analyzed in our nfant® Tracker App, helps parents determine if feeding is going well and see how their baby responds to changes during each feed.
How our Tracker App enhances Connected Feeding
The nfant® Thrive Feeding System leverages the same technology we’ve been using in top-ranking pediatric hospitals and NICUs across the U.S. for years. (Read more about our clinical outcomes). We’ve analyzed biofeedback data from thousands of infants to learn what works and developed a system to guide you through feeding, with tips for positioning, nipple flow rate and more delivered right to an app on your phone and customized to how your baby is actually feeding.
We carefully developed our nfant® Tracker App to train parents how to read feeding cues, assess their baby’s needs, determine nipple flow rate, choose the right feeding position and time daily feedings. Combining the biofeedback data collected by our Thrive Smart Bottle with the step-by-step guidance in our nfant® Tracker App is the most complete way to adopt a Connected Feeding routine for your baby.
Reviewed by Dr. Gilson Capilouto & Dr. Jessie Zak
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