GOLD Learning Speakers

When a baby is born with a cleft lip, cleft palate, or cleft lip and palate, how the infant will be fed is an immediate and compelling issue to resolve. Once the baby is feeding competently at the breast or with a bottle, the family may receive little to no feeding support between the early weeks after birth until the recovery period following lip or palate surgery. While full breastfeeding (directly at the breast, without compensations or devices) is theoretically possible once the lip and palate are repaired, some babies have difficulty returning to direct breastfeeding or chestfeeding, and babies who have never been breastfed or chestfed, lack the oral skills to do so. In this presentation, I will discuss what “scaffolding for success” means in the context of breastfeeding and chestfeeding with an oral cleft. I will cover how to counsel parents at each significant stage of the baby’s cleft care timeline, how to support a parent’s unique feeding goals, how to break down a feeding goal into smaller, achievable steps, techniques for supporting at the breast feeding for babies with unrepaired clefts, best practices for achieving a full milk production, mixed feeding, feeding tools, and how to support developmentally appropriate feeding skills before and after cleft repair surgery.