New Podcast: You're Not Doing it Wrong, with Dr. Lauren Hughes

I'm a pediatric sleep doctor, but that didn't mean I knew what I was doing when we brought our first baby home. Breastfeeding was harder than my wife and I expected, and we needed help. That is one reason I was so glad to have Dr. Lauren Hughes join Arielle and me. Lauren is both a pediatrician and a lactation consultant, and she understands how tangled feeding advice and sleep advice can get. We talked about bottles, protecting milk supply, sharing the overnight work, and a distinction I wish more parents heard: sleep training and night weaning are separate decisions. We also talked about what happens when parents are too exhausted, or too worried about being judged, to tell their pediatrician how nights are actually going. Her closing line is the one I keep coming back to: you are not doing it wrong if your kids aren't sleeping through the night, and the only people who get an opinion are the ones waking up with that child overnight.

Key Takeaways

• Sleep training and night weaning are two separate decisions. Lauren sleep trained her twins at eight months and did not night wean them until eighteen — a baby can learn to fall asleep without help and still get every overnight feed they need.
• Six hours counts as sleeping through the night. It may not be the six hours you wanted — 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. qualifies — and reframing the target is sometimes the entire intervention.
• Milk storage capacity runs from roughly two to twelve ounces per breast and has nothing to do with breast size, which is why dropping a night feed is a non-event for one parent and tanks supply for another. How long you can go before engorgement is roughly your own ceiling, since engorgement is what tells the body to make less.
• "Normal" is far wider than parents are told: in the newborn weeks three hours is a maximum, not a minimum — babies can eat sooner, and three hours is when you wake them. Breastfed babies average about 24 ounces in 24 hours, range 19 to 32.
• It isn't nipple confusion, it's flow preference — babies take the path of least resistance, so a fast bottle beats the work of the breast, and paced feeding is the fix. Offering a bottle once a week from about a month old heads off the refusal that surfaces the week daycare starts.
• The research on feeding method and sleep genuinely conflicts, and we don't pick a side. Under six months exclusively breastfed babies wake more often, though most studies find no difference in total sleep; after six months most find breastfed infants sleeping less — and much of the older literature simply asked parents, whereas Rudzik's actigraphy study found no difference in measured sleep even as formula-feeding mothers reported more.

Listen and watch

• The Sleep Edit episode page: https://sleepedit.show/episodes/youre-not-doing-it-wrong-breastfeeding-and-sleep-with-dr-lauren-hughes
• Or find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast — wherever you get your podcasts

Full medical disclaimer: https://sleepedit.show/disclaimer

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Originally published September 2026. Last reviewed/updated by Dr. Craig Canapari, MD in September 2026