Denise & Clare
Infant Feeding Specialists – Nutrition4Nippers
With over 50 years of combined experience supporting thousands of families, Denise and Clare share why antenatal breastfeeding education is the single most impactful thing families can do, bust common feeding myths, and explain their passionate mission to reach families before it all goes wrong.
What do you really wish more parents knew about your area of expertise?
Where do we even start? There is so much we wish families knew before their baby arrives. The biggest one for us is this: think about feeding your baby antenatally. Don't wait until the baby is here and you're in the thick of it.
Beyond that, we wish more parents understood:
- How to know breastfeeding is working
- How to know when to get help with feeding
- What is normal baby behaviour and how to care for a new baby
- How to establish good sleep habits
- How to manage colic, reflux, and unsettled babies
- How to introduce solids
- How to feed a baby with complex or additional needs, such as cleft palate, oral motor skill dysfunction, or allergy
Feeding is more important than most parents understand. It's connected to everything—caring for your baby, sleep, development, and your own wellbeing as a parent.
What topic or question do you get asked the most from your clients?
The three things we hear most often are:
“Why did no one explain breastfeeding to us?”
“Why didn't anyone say it was going to be hard?”
“Do I have enough milk?”
These questions break our hearts because the answer is almost always the same: with the right information and support beforehand, families wouldn't need to feel this way. We mostly see families after it has all gone wrong, and they are then upset that they didn't have the information beforehand.
It is the biggest challenge we face—how do we get people to realise they need to do an antenatal breastfeeding class? If we can find a way to reach families antenatally, we genuinely believe we could make a transformative difference.
Are there any common myths or misconceptions you'd love to bust?
Two Myths That Need to Go
“Breastfeeding is painful”
It isn't. If breastfeeding is painful, something is wrong and you need skilled help. Pain is a signal—not an inevitable part of the process.
“Breastfeeding is natural, therefore it's easy”
It isn't easy. Breastfeeding is a skill—and like any skill, it takes learning, practice, and support. The good news? Skilled support is available to help you get there.
What's a simple tip, trick, or mindset shift that often helps your clients the most?
Understanding How New Babies Feed
The single biggest mindset shift we help families with is understanding that new babies feed frequently—and that this is completely normal.
Your baby is weaning from being fed in utero 24 hours a day. So it is perfectly normal for them to wake and feed 10–12 times at least in any one 24-hour period. This is through the night too!
When you understand this, everything changes. You stop worrying about whether something is wrong. You stop clock-watching. You start trusting the process.
10–12+
Feeds per 24 hours is normal for a newborn
24/7
How your baby was fed in utero—day and night
And remember: breastfeeding is a skill. Both the mother or feeding parent and the baby are learning. Give yourselves grace. It gets easier.
Why is your work so important to you and how do you see it making a difference in families' lives?
50 Years of Supporting Families
Our collective experience of more than 50 years working to support thousands of families with feeding and caring for their babies has taught us something important: every family's journey is unique, and so are their needs.
We are driven to provide individual, evidence-based, gentle support that helps people achieve the feeding journey that they want and enables families to understand and respond to their baby so they grow as nature intended: happy, healthy, and well.
We have tried really hard with our practice to think about what families actually need from our experience of support. And the most important thing, without question, is an antenatal breastfeeding session—time to think about how feeding would look for your family, how it connects to caring for your baby, sleep, and everything else.
50+
Years combined experience
1000s
Families supported
1001
Days support package
Antenatal Breastfeeding Sessions
Denise and Clare offer antenatal breastfeeding sessions to help you prepare before your baby arrives—covering everything from how breastfeeding works to what to expect in the early days.
They also offer a 1001 Days support package covering all the major development stages, available face-to-face locally or online. Sessions can be run individually or as group workshops.
