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• It is a power of the bottle that you can look at the bottle and say the baby got x amount of milk. But how do you know that a baby is getting milk from the breast? You cannot know in millilitres or ounces, but you can tell if the baby is drinking well. You can see the “pause in the baby’s chin” in our videos both on our website and on youtube. The pause as the baby opens his/her mouth to the maximum tells the mother and anyone watching that the baby just got a mouthful of milk. The longer the pause, the more milk the baby got. When the baby is “nibbling”, the baby is not getting substantial amounts of milk at that time. So, a baby is not getting milk just because s/he is latched on and making sucking movements. Once a mother/father/health professional knows this, they know that:

  1.”Feeding the baby 20 minutes (or any number) on each side” makes no sense. Why would you switch sides if the baby is still drinking?

  2. “Keeping the baby on just one side so that the baby gets the hindmilk” also makes no sense. If the baby is not actually drinking milk, s/he is not getting hindmilk because s/he is not getting any milk at all. Or almost none. We recommend “finishing” one side and offering the other. If the baby’s had enough, he won’t take the other side and that’s fine. If he takes the other side, that’s fine too.

  3. “Feeding the baby every 2 to 3 hours (or any number)” makes no sense. This is commonly recommended until the milk “comes in”. A baby who feeds well and is in close contact with the mother will let the mother know when the baby is ready to feed again. A baby who feeds so poorly that s/he doesn’t wake up on his/her own needs help in getting breastfeeding well. Waking up a baby so that the baby gets nothing 8 times a day is not better than the baby getting nothing 5 times a day.

  4. % weight loss means nothing either because of the intravenous fluids mothers get during labour and birth “overhydrates the baby” with fluid and the baby pees out this fluid after birth. The fact that most babies are weighed on different scales in hospital is another source of error. The baby is weighed on one scale in delivery and another in postpartum. We have documented differences between scales from 80 to 400 grams (3 to 12 ounces). What matters is whether the baby is drinking well from the breast or not. See the video clips on our website or youtube.

  When we see a baby who seems not to be gaining weight well but feeds very well, we believe the pause in the chin, not the scale. Continuing observation over days and weeks shows that the pause in the chin is more trustworthy than two different scales. Of course, even when it is the same scale can mislead because people can read the scale incorrectly or write down the result incorrectly.

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Lovely …

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Poem about breastfeeding ..