Low breast milk

[A_C_Thomas]

Hi there, We just have a 3 week old baby. It's very difficult for him to latch he just fall asleep everytime goes to breast. So we decided to extract and feed but from last two days She don't have enough milk coming. Anyone else experienced something like this? Please reply .

[MissSaoPaulo]

Hi,

We had a similar situation with my daughter when she was very small. I think you need to get some help from a breastfeeding consultant to see if there's a problem with his latch (we didn't and I really wish we had). In the meantime, you have to be ruthless about waking him up to feed. Taking off clothes so he feels cold and wakes up, dripping water on his head to annoy him... I remember having to do all this, it's really draining, so keep asking for help until he gets the hang of breastfeeding. I'm in Brazil, so not sure where to suggest you get support but hopefully some of the others on here can help. Also, try posting on the NCT forum, there's some ladies on there who give really good advice about breastfeeding issues.

I actually ended up exclusively expressing with my baby and it worked out for us, but it's time consuming and you have to mess about sterilizing bottles and stuff, breastfeeding is much easier if you can get it to work. Some tips for pumping - look up power pumping, it can help boost supply if that's the problem. Also, at the end of the session when the milk flow seems to have stopped, gently but firmly cup and squeeze all around the breast (hands on pumping) and usually there's a bit more milk comes out.

I really hope you can sort this out, I remember how stressful it was when my little one wouldn't feed properly and wasn't gaining weight. One way or another, everything's going to be fine, you will work this out and there's always formula, your baby won't go hungry so please don't stress about this too much and enjoy your time with your new baby xxx

[Shelleybean]

I agree with the comment above- definitely get some help from a breastfeeding consultant. There’s lots of advice about stimulating and maintaining a good milk supply to be able to express enough milk for baby and to also provide support around getting them latched on and feeding directly from the breast if this is what you’d like to do. Just one tip is that you have more milk in the morning so it’s important to pump then, but also regularly throughout the day (and some during the night too I’m afraid) to stimulate the milk supply. The more you pump, put baby to the breast to try to latch and do skin to skin time the more the milk supply should increase. Different pumps also give very different results.. I got just drops of milk from a manual hand pump, but lots from a hospital grade pump I hired from Medela for a month.

We had similar problems to you and we’re also told to change/ strip baby off down to the nappy/ wet wipe him down/ switch breasts to try to keep him awake. It feels cruel, but it can become a vicious circle if they’re not feeding they get sleepy and then feed less etc and our baby had a tongue tie too so couldn’t latch and was losing weight.

Speak to your midwife and/ or Health Visitor about breastfeeding support and someone checking baby for a tongue tie as there may be someone who can do this for you. If not then you’d have to do what we did and seek this support privately, but it was very worth it as baby did manage to return to being exclusively breast fed.

Good luck! xx

[Bluelady-sing]

Is a baby satisfied how do you top up