Ask the IBCLC

You may be wondering how often you need to breastfeed your new baby, and whether your baby’s feeding frequency or length of feedings indicate an issue where you need some guidance.

In my opinion, the answer is a big fat ‘sometimes.’ Here’s why:

It’s a weird experience living in an age where where are obsessed with quantification—we can measure nearly everything in our lives—and then hearing we should just trust our breasts to produce what our babies need. We don’t come with milliliter markers on our breasts, and that can feel hard. It can make us very uncertain about how we’re doing with feeding.

And in some cases, parents are right to be concerned about the baby’s intake.

To give you an overall sense of how I would help you, when you come in for any kind of initial breastfeeding appointment, we take several thorough steps:

You’re breastfeeding, and it’s your baby’s baptism celebration, or your birthday, or a random Tuesday evening when you’ve managed to meet up with friends. Can you safely have an alcoholic beverage? Do you need to pump and dump?

Ahh, engorgement. It’s an unpleasant but common sign of an important hormonal shift.

Giving birth triggers this hormonal shift in the new mom’s body. Usually, as a result of that shift, two to four days after giving birth, the mom will experience an abrupt increase in her milk supply. This happens around the same time as her baby’s stomach grows in size a bit to readily accommodate feeds that are larger than the previous colostrum (the first milk) that the mom had.