Breastfeeding and traveling

tcdalton · November 2014

I feel like this is a silly question, but I hope this is a good place to ask it because I have no idea.

My husband and I travel a lot by car to see family and are planning to breastfeed. I know this is a ways out, but any advice for breastfeeding and driving (obviously not actually driving the car and breastfeeding)? Do you stop every time baby needs fed or do you feed while you drive? Or do you pump and feed from a bottle when baby gets hungry? If you do that, do you need a bottle warmer or what is the best way to keep the breast milk good for long drives (10+ hours).

Feeding in the car seems unsafe, stopping every time baby needs fed seems unrealistic (as I understand newborn feeding schedules), and pumping seems like it requires a lot of logistics.

We will be traveling from when baby is about 2 months old and onward.

Aeml1985 · November 2014

Newborn babies need to be removed from their carriers every 2 hours (this is what we told parents when leaving hospital when I worked NICU) so you might as well stop and breast feed every time baby needs to. If it's 100% unsafe and illegal to take baby out of the car seat while the car is in motion and a bad idea to bottle feed while baby is in the car seat; what if they choke and need burping and you have to unstrap them?

JennyP0222 · November 2014

When my son was 3 months old we had to take an 8 hour road trip. We did end up having to stop about 5 times to nurse/comfort him and it took closer to 10 hours. But that comes with the territory of traveling with a newborn. As they get older, even by a few months, they will feed less and will probably sleep quite a bit of the trip.

RMama2012 · November 2014

10+ hrs of driving with a baby sounds brutal. Feeding aside, you will probably need to stop to give the baby some time to move around and out of the seat for a bit.

JCWhitey · November 2014

We did a road trip from MN to CA when DS was 5 weeks old and EBF. What I would do is pump in the car (get a car adapter, most brands/models have them) and then when DS was hungry we'd pull over either at a gas station or a rest area and take a stretch break and feed him. It did extend our road trip time quite a bit, but it was kind of nice to stop along the way, too. Usually we do the drive straight through (about 36 hours) and instead broke it into 3x 14 hour days.

Whether you feed in the car or not really depends on the child and their age. DS has a digestive disorder similar to reflux so he vomited a lot when he was littler so I didn't feel safe feeding him in the car at 5 weeks at all. We usually spent 20 minutes at the rest area when we stopped to feed- first he'd get the bottle, then a diaper change, then we'd putz around and wait for him to puke before leaving. Now he's mostly passed that so he gets sippy cups in the car when we are on longer road trips.

ETA: We regularly did/do 3-6 hours drives with our son from the time he wasten days old on. Usually on the three hour drives he just slept the whole time so I didn't bother pulling over to feed, just fed when we arrived. But for the longer 6 hours drives we'd stop once. It really wasn't a big deal at all. Again, it's nice to stop and stretch. Usually on the shorter drives we'd stop somewhere and get dinner and I'd feed while we waited on our food. Now that he's older we still stop halfway because he gets squirmy and wants to run around a bit.

Mic512 · November 2014

If you can it's way easier to fly with a newborn than drive. That being said, we regularly drove 4-6 hrs with DS when he was small. We found it easiest, since he slept well in the car, to let him sleep as long as possible & nurse when he woke up (as long as you can get to a rest area or service station). I had DS sleeping through the night by 12 weeks, so we would leave on trips around his bedtime & then I would nurse if he woke up when we arrived.

Shebamommy · November 2014

One of the great things about breastfeeding is that it's so easy to do on the road (no bottles, no warming, no mess). There's no way a newborn is just going to sit in the car for a long drive without getting fussy and needing to get out for a break anyhow. So I'd just stop when it's time to feed baby to give him/her a break from the carseat and to eat. Plus you'll need to stop for diaper changes anyway. I personally would not pump and then stop anyway to feed baby a bottle; seems like unnecessary extra work to me (but then again I hate pumping and only do it when absolutely necessary; someone who's a pumping wiz might not mind at all).

dinaandryan · November 2014

Breast feeding while traveling is so much easier but you are going to need to stop. We travel a lot and never did I breast feed while my husband drove. It may take longer to get there but it's safer. I was never worried about my husbands driving... It's everyone else. You never know if a drunk driver will swerve into your lane or a deer jump out infront of the car. Also remember your baby may not do so well in a car seat. My dd is two and still hates her car seat. We usually spend all trips with her crying since day one. You may be rethinking a lot of your 10hr drives... Listening to your baby cry constantly can get very stressful.

JCWhitey · November 2014

Shebamommy said:

One of the great things about breastfeeding is that it's so easy to do on the road (no bottles, no warming, no mess). There's no way a newborn is just going to sit in the car for a long drive without getting fussy and needing to get out for a break anyhow. So I'd just stop when it's time to feed baby to give him/her a break from the carseat and to eat. Plus you'll need to stop for diaper changes anyway. I personally would not pump and then stop anyway to feed baby a bottle; seems like unnecessary extra work to me (but then again I hate pumping and only do it when absolutely necessary; someone who's a pumping wiz might not mind at all).

For some, like me, bottle feeding goes twice as fast as breast. My son was a "lazy eater" when on the breast and would take 20 minutes per breast plus he'd take forever to burp, so a nursing session lasted almost an hour in the beginning. But he could down a bottle in about 10 minutes so then we'd only be stopped 20-30 to feed and do a diaper change. I prefer to breastfeed over pump, but when you consider a 30 minute stop over a 60 minute stop it was a no-brainer to pump. Around 4 months he got faster and I just stuck with breastfeeding at stops.

JCWhitey · November 2014

Oh, OP, one piece of advice we discovered on our first car ride to the doctor (when DS was born we lived an hour and a half from his doctor so he was in the car a lot from the get-go)... get the Baby White Noise app on your phone! It was the only thing I could use to get him to stop crying and it worked about 90% of the time. I'd just hook my phone into the car system and turn it on and usually within a minute or two he'd stop crying and fall asleep. It was annoying, but less stressful to hear than a crying baby. And I tried just using a dead radio station, but if you are traveling any amount of distance a dead station might suddenly come to life and scare the bejesus out of both of you. I speak from experience.

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