Episode 189: A Breastfeeding & Pumping Schedule, Plus How to Incorporate Formula {Should You Need} with Golden on Tap’s IBCLC Tara Golden

This week, I welcome the founder of Golden on Tap, Tara Golden to the Kids Sleep Show.

Tara Golden has been an IBCLC for over six years, working in both outpatient and inpatient settings before launching my own virtual lactation consulting practice. Through her business, she offers prenatal breastfeeding basics classes, virtual consultations, and ongoing support via text messaging services. Her approach is centered on meeting families where they are in their feeding journey, without judgment and always prioritizing mental health alongside infant nutrition. I’m passionate about creating a safe, supportive space where parents feel seen, heard, and empowered.

Resources:

•  Follow Tara @Golden_onTap on Instagram 

Episode Highlights:

• Virtual lactation consults and text support for immediate help

• Prenatal breastfeeding classes and ongoing guidance

• Compassionate, judgment-free care that supports mental health

Sleep Struggles Solved + Results Guaranteed

As an award-winning speaker, author, and pediatric sleep expert, myself and my team of consultants work intimately with families around the world to teach healthy sleep habits to children and adults. I believe wholeheartedly that sleep is the foundation for which a happy home is built. So let’s sleep together.

Welcome to this week’s episode. I am joined by Miss Tara Golden, an IBCLC and the founder of Golden On Tap. She is amazing.

We hit it off this summer. We met at an event here in Philadelphia. So I want to give Tara a minute to just introduce herself.

Say welcome to the Kid Sleep Show podcast, and we’re going to talk all things breastfeeding babies and making those boobs work in a way that works for you. So welcome to the show, Tara. Thanks for joining.

Hi, Courtney. Thanks for having me. So tell us about yourself.

Yeah, so my name’s Tara. I’ve been a lactation consultant for about a little over six years now. I started out in a hospital.

I still do work in a hospital per diem, and then I just opened Golden On Tap about a year and a half ago. My reasoning between opening Golden On Tap is it is a virtual-based lactation business. So a lot of my patients in the hospital always struggle with, I can’t get an appointment for another two weeks, or the IBCLC I called isn’t taking new patients, or they’re not answering at all.

And with breastfeeding, it’s kind of a now basis, right? If you have a problem, you kind of need an answer right now versus in two weeks, who knows what could have happened in that time. So I kind of opened this to give moms a chance to reach out to someone and connect with somebody right away, which I feel like is really nice to have that knowledge or to have just somebody there who you can send a quick text, give a quick call to, and get at least an answer before you do see someone in person if that is needed. Yeah, absolutely.

And I have to agree with you. I was in the hospital both before I became a CLC and with my son Max, and then after I became a CLC with my daughter Savella. And I have to tell you in the hospital, I felt very much like, okay, my boobs are pliable.

I can do this. The baby is eating well. They’re sleeping okay, because they just came out.

And then I got home and I was like, oh my gosh, I remember very clearly it was two o’clock in the morning. I was walking my son Max around our split level in Conchahokan and I was sobbing. My husband was sound asleep upstairs and I just nursed him for like, I don’t know, 20 or 30 minutes.

Like, okay, makes sense. He’s hungry. Like, let me give you some, some milk.

And then he was just screaming and screaming. And I was crying with him. Like, what do you want? What do you want, man? And it was night three, you know, two nights in the hospital, first night home.

And he was hungry. And I had no idea that my milk didn’t come in. And then my girlfriend came over the next morning and she’s like, dude, he’s hungry.

Like, and she like grabbed a formula bottle and like threw it in his mouth. He slammed it and passed out. And then later that day, my boobs went from soft and pliable to like hard, like footballs.

Right. So I want to talk about that. Cause I think to your point, like the transition home from the hospital for me was very, like for every parent, probably pretty jarring.

You know, I was like, what is like, what are we doing? I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m ill prepared. I have no village.

My mom is dead. This sucks. And my husband’s back at work cause it was month end, you know, and he had to close the books at eBay, you know? So I just felt like so overwhelmed, lost, and frankly, ill prepared despite everything I did as like a type A to try to plan for this.

So I want to talk a little bit about, I know some of that for you, went into your journey and coming into private practice, but your point, the immediacy, like I didn’t know what I was doing. Hell, I didn’t even know I could call an IBCLC. I didn’t know what a lactation counselor was.

I met, you know, one at the hospital who’s still there today and she’s lovely. But like, that was like, what do I do? Oh, I can come in in two weeks or wait till my well check appointment, you know, like it was just so overwhelming to me. And I think that’s the part where, to your point, a lot of parents kind of get lost in that first week or two of trying to figure it out.

And then it seems like they get frustrated, they get depressed, they feel discouraged, and then they quit. Right? And I think the thing that struck me most about you, which I want to talk about is the fact that you have to do it in a way that works for you. That night, my baby didn’t sleep.

My girlfriend came over, slammed formula in his mouth, and I was fine with that. Like, I don’t know what I’m doing. Right? And then, you know, it seems like in this space, there’s a lot of different perspectives on that, which we’ll certainly dive into.

But I want to give a pause and see, you know, just in your experience in the hospital setting, right, you’ve got parents that are feeling like pretty decent, right? And then I imagine what happens is they come home and they feel, meh, what am I doing? All of a sudden, you know, the pipes aren’t working right. Yeah, exactly. Because, and when you have, when you’re in the hospital, you have that care all around the clock, right? If you need to see a lactation consultant or even a nurse or something, something isn’t working, or you have questions, someone can come in right then and there.

So a lot of times moms feel confident. They’re like, this is going great. I latched the baby.

They took a peek. They said everything was going great. Beautiful.

And then you get home, and things may still be going great, but sometimes it’s just that confidence boost. You don’t have somebody at your shoulder being like, you’re doing great. The latch looks great.

Baby’s getting milk. And you’re kind of just in this, like you said, like it’s 2 a.m., baby’s crying, I’m crying. I don’t know what the heck is happening.

So a lot of times parents do go, well, if they’re starving, clearly what I’m doing isn’t working. Let me give them a bottle of formula. And sometimes that works because whatever was happening at that moment wasn’t working.

Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s a black and white just because it wasn’t working at 2 a.m. doesn’t mean your breastfeeding journey is over, but a lot of parents don’t know that. They don’t know that, oh, if I reach out to somebody, figure out what’s going on, I can move forward and work with my baby and see what works for us to get over this hump. I always say breastfeeding is going to ebb and flow.

It’s not baby comes out, latches on, and everything’s great from there on out. I joke with my patients all the time. If breastfeeding was as easy as people made it seem, I wouldn’t have a job.

Yeah, well, exactly. And I think you made a point very, you know, kind of accidentally already, and I touched on it a bit, right, in the space of sleep consulting, which I’ve had the practice of tiny transitions for over 10 years, I have seen very much this divide. And I think some of it’s fear mongering on social media, which I don’t like.

I think there’s a lack of integrity and honesty around the whole picture, right, because you’re either team A or team B, and that’s it. And if you’re on this team, you’re not on that team. And if you’re on that team, you’re not on that team.

And I like throw all that stuff in the garbage. And I think that’s why you and I seem to get along so well is because it’s a journey. It is a journey, and it can be sleep and breastfeeding.

They’re not mutually exclusive. You can have a breastfeeding journey that includes formula. You can have a breastfeeding journey that doesn’t.

You can have a breastfeeding journey that’s exclusively on the breast. You can have one that is exclusively pumping. You can have a mixture of all of them based on the day, the time, and, you know, the hour that it is.

And I think it’s something that people don’t seem to say it’s okay, and every journey looks different. So I love your perspective on, hey, like, coming home from the hospital, like, this is going to ebb and flow. There may be a bottle of formula or a bag of pumped milk or a few minutes where you’re sobbing going, my boobs are broken.

And I think the type of support you provide is so cool in that there is the immediacy to your point, because in the moment, you’re like, what is happening? You know what I mean? Like, why does something seem off, right? So when a client reaches out and they want to schedule a consultation, I want to make sure people understand here, like, virtual breastfeeding consultations, how do they work? Yeah. So if someone wants to set up a consult with me, they just send me an email. And then normally I’m free within, if not that day, within the next 24 hours.

If they want to set up a Zoom sort of meeting, they can also do texting so that I’m right away, like, if you came to me and said, hey, I would like to start texting, we can start right then and there. I can answer any questions you have. I try to be pretty immediate with my response, because like I said, breastfeeding is one of those things where you kind of need something right now.

You don’t need something two weeks down the road, because we can be in a totally different spot at that point. So I think just having that immediate response and the fact that I can see them right away via Zoom, a lot of people do worry that I can’t do the same thing through a screen that I could in person. But for the most part, I can check a latch.

I can see how things are going. Asking a lot of questions really helps figure out what’s going on. The only thing I can’t do is just weigh a baby to see how much they’re getting with a feed.

But I can take all the other components and really see what’s going on to help and to give some sort of answer at that moment to at least move forward. Which you brought up another good point. You can do what you need to do virtually, and there is the immediacy of it, because I think there’s anxiety that builds when you have to leave the house for the first time with a baby.

You don’t want the baby to be sick. You don’t want the baby to get germs. You don’t want the baby to be out of the house.

You don’t want to take the baby out of the house for a variety of reasons, right? So the virtual is good flexibility. Now, you mentioned something that I think is super important, which is you didn’t have a scale. One of the things I recommend that every new parent put on their baby registry if they’re planning to breastfeed is a scale.

And I know at the doctor’s office, they have like the $4,000 one that would weigh a grain of sand. I always tell parents, you can get a really great one on Amazon for maybe 80 bucks. So can you talk a second, and I’m going to grab mine quick while you’re chatting, and explain what a weighted transfer is or why you would need a scale from a breastfeeding standpoint? Because then I’ll dovetail in and talk about why it’s important to look at the framework for healthy sleep and to make sure baby’s growing optimally.

Yeah. So the reason scales are nice is because you can kind of see the baby’s intake, right? Like you said, it’s not one of the very expensive scales that we would have at a hospital or something like that. But it still gives, I think, some sort of peace that, okay, the baby is getting something.

Now that scale may not say, okay, the baby got three ounces exactly, but you can kind of give or take around what the baby is getting. So essentially, you weigh the baby before the feed, we do a feed, we weigh the baby after, just to show the amount of intake the baby is getting. Perfect.

So I have a scale here that I got on Amazon that I use with a lot of our clients. And exactly, you can put the scale, you turn it on, and I’m going to flip it around here for those of you that are watching on those channels. But if you’re not, you’ll understand how it works.

You basically turn it on and you can set this particular one to kilograms or to pound. I’m a pound person. I’m sure Tara is probably a kilogram person being in the hospital.

And you weigh the baby before you feed them. And then it says, oh, this baby is 1.5 pounds, right? And a half. So then I, you know, burp feed, and then maybe you give them three ounces from the breast.

Maybe you did a full feeding. You put them back on, still the same diaper. You don’t change anything after you’re done nursing.

And now it’ll say like, oh, 1.8, you know? And it’s like, oh, okay. Baby gained like three ounces. Again, rough estimate, but it helps you to understand that babies need 24 to 32 ounces of milk, breast milk or formula in a 24 hour period for optimal growth, right? So one of the things I say is like, it takes the variability out of it of like, is lefty a dud? Right one’s inverted.

What’s going on? My boobs felt full, but did they get the full feeding? You know, and I want to talk about foremilk and hindmilk, because there’s a lot of misconceptions about that too. But you know, weighted transfers are a really good way for you to come home with something that’s like 60, 70 bucks on Amazon and have it be something that does provide a level of, I would say certainty that you’re transferring enough that, you know, okay, well, if baby’s getting what they need to eat every two to three hours and they’re still totally losing their mind and they’re sleeping okay, maybe is there a lip or tongue tie, right? We can talk about that because those are more common than I think people realize. Maybe there’s some reflux that’s taking place and the baby’s spitting up and you smell, you know, smells kind of funny.

Like you can start to isolate variables based on that scale, which I think is important, especially when you’re nursing to know, hey, these, these guys are working the way they’re supposed to, right? Yeah, I do think that does take some of the, the stress away from it. My biggest thing with the scales though, is just not to go overboard. To get the extra anxiety, absolutely.

I’m glad you mentioned that because you can be like hyper-focused on that and I think it can be obsessive. Yeah, I definitely think they’re nice to have, like you said, for just the peace of mind. Like, okay, this is working.

Baby is getting what they need to get. I just say, just try to, just like everything else in life, take it with a grain of salt and use it periodically. You don’t have to use it with every feed because then you’re kind of just drive yourself nuts with numbers.

Yeah, no, exactly. I feel the same way about the wearables with babies. Like I understand the purpose of having one, I’m all for them for peace of mind and knowing that baby is breathing overnight and all of the things that help ensure your child is safe and protected on that hard flat surface where they’re sleeping.

But I have clients that, you know, their baby is four months old and they’re like, they were up 57 times last night according to XYZ’s device. And I was like, did you hear them? Because babies in active sleep move a lot. They also are pretty noisy even when they’re sleeping.

So if they’re not waking you, but the little device is saying they were up 74 times. Like I stopped wearing my aura ring to bed. Most people buy it to wear it to bed, but I was getting pissed off because I’m like, I sleep nine to five every night, like a rockstar every night.

So I would get mad when the app would be like 74% efficiency. I’m like, screw you. I slept awesome.

Nine to five didn’t move and woke up feeling rested and refreshed without my alarm. So I was actually getting like mad at the data because I was like, it’s not right. And I stopped wearing it.

You know? So I think to your point, like people can hyper focus on the data and the numbers to the point where it drives them crazy, where it’s like, just take a step back and be in the moment. Know that your boobs are doing what they’re supposed to. Maybe you weigh one feed in the morning today.

And then tomorrow you do the 10 o’clock feed. And then maybe the 3 PM feed, just to know that like, Hey, you know, maybe across the day there, you know, there’s some milk coming out that as it should be, you know, um, but to your point, like not to, not to hyper focus now question on lip and tongue ties, like, what are they? Can you explain to a new parent who just had a baby or is expecting and is listening to this episode? Um, what are they and how do you typically as an IBCLC, uh, diagnose that someone might potentially have a lip or tongue time? Yeah. So full disclosure, we’re not actually allowed to diagnose them, but I can tell what yes, sorry.

Um, so essentially all that is, is we all have a lip and tongue tie. It just depends how thick, how long and stuff like that. So the lip tie is right under your lip, that piece of skin that connects your gum gums to your lip.

And then same thing with the tongue tie it’s under the tongue, that piece of skin that connects the bottom of your mouth to your tongue. So some babies, um, like you said, it’s actually more common than not that babies have lip or tongue ties and sometimes it interferes with feeding. Sometimes it does absolutely nothing with feeding, but if a baby has like a super tight tongue tie where they can’t get their tongue, what we look for is if they can get their tongue out past their gums.

The reason being if they have a tongue tie and they can move out past their gums, they can still do that motion that needs to get the milk in. If their tongue is restricted and tight, a lot of times they can’t scoop that breast. So instead of scooping the milk out, they’re kind of just hitting the breast and not getting any milk out.

So sometimes, um, parents will get their baby’s tongue ties clipped or lasered and that essentially just gives them more room to work with and more ability to move their tongue. With the lip ties, now this is for them to flange it up. So we know that when babies breastfeed, they need a nice big wide flange lips.

So if the baby can’t get their lip flanged, a lot of times instead of flanging it will tuck under their lips and that will make for not an effective latch and also pain for mom. Same with the tongue tie. So sometimes same thing.

Babies can get that lasered, clipped, just to see how things go. Some babies don’t need it at all. My daughter has a lip tie.

It doesn’t affect breastfeeding at all. The only thing it may affect later down the road is sometimes it causes a gap tooth. The dentist doesn’t seem concerned.

So I always say just reach out and see. A lot of people are like, oh, my baby has a tongue tie. Is this why they’re not feeding? And it might not be the reason.

It may be something else. The tongue tie might be perfectly fine. Baby might be able to nurse great with it.

Um, so I always say, ask, ask more people if you think the baby has a tongue tie, if you feel like you’re not being advocated for, because it can go either way. Sometimes people jump right to a tongue tie and they’re like, we need to, we need to cut it. We need to do a laser when it may not necessarily be that.

And sometimes it’s the opposite. They’re like, oh, baby doesn’t have a tongue tie. It’s fine.

Cause there also are posterior tongue ties that you can’t see, right? So those, you kind of have to go digging a little bit more and do a little bit more oral exam to see those posterior tongue ties. So a lot of times, whether it be a pediatrician and IBCLC, a nurse will say, oh, baby’s fine. There’s no tongue tie.

I don’t see one when really it’s posterior. So you have to do a little bit more digging to see that, that it is there. So I always tell parents to advocate.

If you feel like there’s something wrong or something, it seems off advocate for yourself and make sure to ask a couple of people to check it out. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s like a big thing is the advocacy around also trusting your gut as a parent, right? Like, because sometimes no offense, it’s really hard to get your fingers and eyes into a newborn’s mouth and where they are at two days old or two weeks old or two months old, right? If you’re feeling like, Hey, something is still just a miss, right? Sometimes there can be excess air that they’re getting in, even on a bottle, right? If they have a tongue tie in their bottle feeding, it’s not the right nipple shape.

That’s based on, you know, how they can, how they can drink. Like sometimes they can just be in extra air. Then it causes discomfort.

Then you’re like, why is baby scream every time they eat? You know, if even they’re burping, like, there’s just, there’s so many connected parts to all of this. I know with the lip and tongue ties, my daughter had a lip and tongue tie that they did release. And Dr. Bond here in Philadelphia, who’s like the bomb of you know, pediatric dentists to do it.

There’s probably more now, but 10 years ago, he was like the guy you went to him. And it was a very quick procedure. So if you’re listening to this and you’re like, I have to get this released and I’m really nervous.

I had a client with a newborn that is now four months old and they were kind of waiting, kind of waiting, kind of waiting, kind of waiting. And I’m like, there’s just something that is not right with the way the numbers are kind of moving as far as how old the baby is and where you should be with the amount of intake baby can have off the breast. And they did get a scale and they were weighing it.

And so they did actually just go to a pediatric dentist and they, they lasered it. And she was so scared that it was going to just be this awful experience. And it really is pretty quick.

If you are in a situation to do it we did the laser. My client just did the laser and you know, they take baby and they literally go, it was like a 10 second appointment. And you know, my daughter cried for like a few seconds and then she was good.

And we did the exercises as we should and everything was good. And I think it’s just to your point, trusting your gut on like, Hey, this is something that, you know, we should just be empowered to like learn more about. We talk a lot about in the lactation world and the sleep world, it doesn’t have to be all team lactation, all team sleep.

So I want to get your perspective on you know, how you see, and even in your own life with your little one-year-old, like how your perceptives as an IBCLC for six years, then having a child, like just some of your experience. Cause I think parents listen to this one, that real world, I don’t know, truth sometimes, you know, that like, just because, you know, I was a CLC, I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t do certain things the right way I felt like in my mind. And, you know, I think always there’s helpful with that perspective.

Yeah, definitely. And like we’ve talked about, it’s not breastfeeding is not black and white. It’s not a one size fits all.

I did get into this space. I feel like I’m one of the few people who have become a lactation consultant before having children. And the reason being was one of the reasons was I had a lot of friends at the time that were telling me about their feeding journeys and pretty much telling me how terrible their lactation consultants were.

And my one friend even said her lactation consultant was the reason she had postpartum depression and all these things. And I was just like, I feel like postpartum is hard enough that you, you want help. You don’t want someone to make you feel guilty.

Now, whether that was the, the lactation consultants, what they were trying to do or not is, is how my friends felt. So I kind of went into this space in my mind saying, I want to be someone in the parents corner. I don’t want to be opposite of them telling them this is what you should be doing.

You’re doing this wrong. I want to meet a parent where they’re at and go from there. I am okay with formula.

I am okay with breastfeeding and formula feeding, pumping, whatever it looks like for that parent. I’m here to help. I’m not here to tell you what to do.

And even from, like you said, my own experience with my daughter, who is, is about to be a year, when we were leaving the hospital, everything was going great. We got home. She was tiny.

She was only 5’15”. We went to her first pediatrician’s appointment. They’re like, oh, she’s a little yellow.

She’s a little, losing a little bit too much weight. You’re going to have to supplement with formula. And I was like distraught.

It’s like, I’m an IBCLC, like me, why do I have to supplement? And actually my husband calmed me down. He was like, what would you tell your client? What would you tell your patient? I would say, it’s fine. It’s a bump in the road.

Formula is not the devil. She’s eating. She’s healthy.

It’s fine. And he was like, well, there you go. So even sometimes as I’m in this profession, I needed to take a step back and have somebody else remind me like, it’s okay.

She got formula for about a week. Her weight went up. Her jaundice levels were great.

We went back to breastfeeding and we’re still breastfeeding to this day. So it’s not a one size fits all. And if you have to give formula, or if you want, not even have to, if you want to give formula, that’s okay.

You can make your feeding journey, whatever works for you and your baby. Now, during that week when you couldn’t breastfeed, you have to pump. Do you help with pumping too? Like teaching parents how to use the let down button and the flange size and making sure it’s all working properly? Yep.

Yep. A hundred percent. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t love pumping.

It’s just not my favorite thing in the world. But yeah, while I was supplementing, I did have to pump and I always help, especially patients in the hospital if they have to pump there, but it also is good to get knowledge as easy as pumping seams. Like you just throw them on and hit a button.

There are things that can help milk supply be more efficient, right? So making sure you have the correct flange sizes, making sure you’re doing the correct things with the buttons, how long you’re leaving the pump on there for. And that’s kind of another thing that’s cool with breastfeeding is same thing at ebbs and flows, but especially with pumping or with breastfeeding in general, say you’re at week three and you’re not making as much as you would like to be. That doesn’t mean you’re never making more milk.

There are ways that I can work with patients and clients to get their supply up. A lot of that is adding in extra pumping sessions or making some sort of a schedule with the pump. But I think that’s the cool thing about breastfeeding is just because it’s not going great at this moment doesn’t mean it’s done and you’re done forever.

There are ways to bring your milk supply back up. There are ways to get the baby on the breast. I’ve had people who didn’t latch for the first month and then decided they wanted to latch.

There’s just, I really want people to understand that it’s, there’s so much more to it than you breastfeed or you don’t. Yeah. Like you’re, I think people have this perspective that you’re going to come out, you’re like Betsy the cow, milk is flowing and everybody’s good, you know? And it’s just not like for some people, that’s great.

If that’s your experience, like congratulations for many, it’s not, you know? And I think there’s a lot of different variables in every single situation that can, you know, can change. I see a lot of advice that I think as a CLC, I don’t agree with. I also get in pissing matches sometimes with IBCLCs on Instagram.

Cause they’re like, I can’t believe you’re telling a, you know, a new parent to give the baby a bottle for a dream feed. I’m like, well, if it means that the partner can one, feel connected to the baby, two, they can be giving the baby breast milk or formula based on their own unique journey. And three, it means that they get a chunk of sleep from about 7.00 PM to about one or two in the morning.

So they’re not a total dumpster fire the whole next day when they’re managing their child, then yeah, absolutely. I guess that, you know, shame on me, you know? And, okay. And I just don’t, I don’t love that, like, um, that approach of making people feel bad that worked for my husband and I worked for many of my sleep clients.

It worked for many of my friends and still does for many people. But to your point, like it is a journey. I also see information where it’s like, oh, well, the baby’s still not sleeping through the night because they’re getting too much for milk.

They need more hind milk. They’re not getting enough. And that drives me bananas because it’s not accurate.

So can you take a minute and explain, yes, there is such a thing as for milk and hind milk, but the fact of it is dispersed across the feeding and no kidding, your boobs are really smart and they know what they’re doing. Yeah. So I have come across a lot of things more so online than talking to people about the four milk, high milk thing.

Yes, there are a thing. One of them is extra fatty. One of them has this in it.

But like you said, your, your body knows what it’s doing. Same thing with when you’re pregnant, it knows what it’s doing. It’s growing the baby, all the things when you’re breastfeeding, just feed your baby.

I always tell my patients, take this, anything you can take out stress wise, just don’t add it in. Don’t worry about how much for milk they’re getting. Don’t worry about how much high milk they’re getting.

Your body will give them what you, they need to give them. I’ve seen people on the internet pump for five minutes and then label that as this milk and then pump for another.

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