Cluster feeding
Also called cluster feeds, cluster-feeding
Cluster feeding is when a baby wants to feed very often for a few hours, sometimes every hour, usually in the evening. It's most common in the first three or four months.
How it's said
He's cluster fed like this every afternoon and evening for the last 5 weeks and I'm finding it a lot.
Yeah those evening cluster feeds are brutal! It's pure survival.
It is common for babies to "cluster feed", where they will feed nearly constantly, with small breaks.
...I am starting to think she is a cluster feeder, from what I have read.
DD clusters from 5 or 6 till 9.30 or so, and then I leave her with DH for a few hours when she conks (she's only 8 weeks).
Who says it
Not to be confused with
- The witching hour is the evening fussing and crying. Cluster feeding is the run of close-together feeds, and the two often land in the same evening.
- A growth spurt is a few days when a baby seems to grow fast and wants to feed almost constantly. Cluster feeding is feeds bunched into a few hours, most often in the evening.
Where it came from
Lactation consultants also call it bunch feeding: a baby spaces feeds close together at one time of day and goes longer between them at others, most often in the evening.
Writing in 2023, a former midwife said the phrase was coined about 20 years earlier, spread mostly by the National Childbirth Trust, the UK parents' charity, to reassure mothers that evening suckling is normal. She would rather call it cluster soothing.
By 2014 the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine listed the normality of evening cluster feedings among the things to go over with parents before a newborn goes home. NHS maternity pages use the word in their own explanations, and many parents tie it to growth spurts.
Cutiko's feeding log puts every feed on one timeline, so an evening of cluster feeds is easy to see. See the baby tracker