Blakely, an IBCLC, shares how to recognize when your baby is actually hungry and how to tell when a feeding is complete. She emphasizes full feedings over frequent snacking and explains how to keep babies awake during feeds.
Confession time. When I was a new mom, I thought feed on demand meant that every time Ella whimpered, I was supposed to feed her. And so I ended up with a baby who was snacking instead of getting full feedings. So today I want to talk to you about why full feedings are so important. Okay. Please hear me when I'm talking about full feedings and the benefits of full feedings. I don't want you to think that I. That this means. Okay, well, then I need to put my baby on a strict schedule, or if it's not this time on the clock, I can't feed my baby.
No.
So how do you do that? Well, I have asked an IBCLC who is on my taking care of babies team to tell you she's going to give you three ways to break the snack. I am a big believer in always being responsive to a baby's hunger cues. If your baby's hungry, you feed. If your baby needs cluster feedings, that's okay. But we do want to break the cycle of snacking versus snacking cycle. So this is Blakely, Take it away.
So now what? Now that we know that full feeds are way better than snacking, how can we break this snacking cycle? I'm going to give you three little tips to help break this cycle. First is you need to know what hunger cues look like. Baby's going to be trying to fit his whole fist in his mouth or smacking lips or rooting around looking for a food source. Sometimes looking for a food source can look like lifting up its head and banging it on your chest. Number two is help babies stay awake during a feeding. This is probably the biggest thing. No one tells you how hard it is to keep babies awake, especially newborns. We're going to want to make sure baby's undressed unswaddled during the day. Lights are on, you're out in the open. Don't worry about cutting back on stimulation. Stimulation is good. We basically want to teach to our babies no sleeping at the dinner table. We want to bother them just enough throughout the feeding to keep them awake and going. Tickling the toes, changing positions, switching breasts. One of my favorite ways to keep babies awake is getting my cold fingers in their armpits. That tends to really help lift and lowering that arm. With my kiddos who were extra stubborn, we would have to sometimes get wet wipes and even wipe it on their back or their arm just to help them stay awake. One thing you have to remember is us mamas are their happy place. That's where they just were the past 10 months. So basically 10 months. So they smell you, they hear your heartbeat, your warmth. You're so familiar. It is going to be very tempting for a baby not to fall asleep. Third is how to tell that your baby took a full feeding. How we tell this is a kind of tricky thing to do if you don't know what to look for, because it's not something you can measure, like if you are bottle feeding or something like that. So if you notice your baby starting off in a feeding will have really tight fist, they tend to keep their arms right up close to their chest. As they get more satiated with a feeding, you go from this closed fist to a nice, open, relaxed hand. They tend to relax their whole body to the point to where if they fall asleep and you're like, did my baby fall asleep hungry or are they content? You can kind of lift up their arm. And if you have this limp arm and baby's most likely done. If baby is sleeping and pulls that arm back in like a little chicken wing, baby's probably not done. Baby just fell asleep. So it's time to wake that baby back up and really try to get in a few more minutes of full feeding. During that feeding, you'll hear audible swallows. You may even see milk on the corner of baby's mouth. Jaw movement is another thing to look for because this can be a tricky one. With jaw movement, you really want that jaw movement all the way back up to the ear. You want those long jaw movements. That's what it takes to pull that milk out. When you see a baby on there and doing what we call little butterfly sucks, where the chin is just quivering, baby's kind of using you as a pacifier. So that's another cue to go in and say, okay, I need to really bother and kind of disturb this baby to get them up. Whenever we start seeing babies pause too long in between sucks, that's another good time to go in and stimulate them to keep them awake and going. Babies need constant reminders that it's eating time. No sleeping at the dinner table. Keep going. If you are having pain with breastfeeding, it should not be painful. If you have an inconsolable baby who is on and off the breast and is completely frustrated. If you're having babies having poor weight gain, any of these issues, you really need to go and have someone lay eyes on you and your baby and make sure that that latch is okay. They can check supply and they can check out baby and your anatomy to make sure that everything is going smoothly for breastfeeding.
