Thinking of using a nursery or a childminder?
A nursery or registered child minder should have experience of using cloth nappies or expressed milk or different bottles and feeding techniques as your require for your little one, and should have guidelines in place. So when looking for a child care setting, it’s good to start much earlier than you would need it so you can ask about this and how they are set up to for example manage the feeding of expressed milk. If they then say that have not handled human milk before or do not have a protocol for using it, you can give them plenty of time to create one – or if they are reluctant then perhaps this is not the best setting to leave your baby.
Is your child over 9 months of age?
If your child is 9 months or over, they may be ok without any milk in the day and just have solid food and water, so it is not essential to send expressed milk with your child. If they are younger than 9 months it is more important to leave some expressed milk as your baby may not be so well established onto solid foods. For shorter periods apart they will be absolutely fine with no milk. However, you may prefer to send some expressed milk with your older baby and that is fine. It is up to you and your child care settling should enable this. They should have a fridge to store the milk and a way of warming it if necessary. And a labelling system so that your milk is not given to another child or vice versa.
If you are being asked by your childcare to stop breastfeeding you can ask them for their policies on breastfed children, and if registered with Ofsted, you can log a complaint with them.
