There are many women who decide to breastfeed their newborn children and there are many who rethink it after a few days because they realize that "breastfeeding on demand" is different from what they imagined.
As I said on more than one occasion, there are parents who believe that the baby to be born will eat and sleep and let them continue making their lives, with the proviso that every 3 to 5 hours they will suck a little to go back to sleep alone in his crib.
It is true that some of these children are born from time to time, but they are a minority, since most babies who breastfeed on demand do so every hour, every hour and a half, sometimes less and sometimes more.
In the face of the despair of the mother, who considers it a problem and begins to find a solution, many people end up verbalizing a Myth about breastfeeding: “Babies make fewer shots as the months go by”.
Why they suck so often
Before going into the subject I think it is necessary to explain a little why babies breastfeed so often making some mothers, with other expectations, end up quite exhausted.
Breast milk is digested very quickly, so much so that when a baby makes a complete intake, filling with breast milk, at ninety minutes he has an empty stomach again.
At that time (or even before), you can calmly ask for your chest because you are hungry again, or you can decide to wait a bit because you prefer to sleep or do something else.
When a mother tells me surprised that her son sucks every 2-3 hours I usually say that "you still have to give thanks, because he is giving you up to an hour and a half of time."
Let's say babies have to, in addition to living, gain weight and grow. In the first year triple their weight and increase half their height at birth, so much growth cannot be achieved without eating too much. Since they have a very small stomach that does not allow as much food as ours, it is logical that they have to eat often, very often.
How many shots babies make
It is difficult to say how many shots babies make because each baby does it in their own way and each mother does it in their own way.
People say that in the West it is normal for them to take between eight and twelve shots a day (that is, they suck on average every 2-3 hours).
In other cultures, however, by having other customs, things work differently. There are cultures where babies are hung from their mothers practically all day. Having the chest there nearby they usually take advantage of breastfeeding many more times than our babies, with the exception that they are less time taken to the breast. They are children who also gain weight and grow up, so you cannot say that what they do is abnormal, but that their "breastfeeding on demand" works differently because Babies demand different and mothers offer otherwise.
"After three months they start to space the shots"
Children are growing and increasingly are experts in breastfeeding. What they ate as babies in 15 or 20 minutes (sometimes more between falling asleep and waking up again) now they do it in less time. They have more strength, are more experts and in five minutes they are able to eat more than babies in triple the time.
This is a logical reality, however it is often said that in addition to better breastfeeding, they take longer to be hungry, make fewer shots, and this is not real. This is a myth.
It is a myth because breastfeeding on demand is difficult to quantify, as we have said. As Carlos González explains in his book “A gift for a lifetime”, based on a study carried out in 1999 to find out who controlled the frequency of the shots, whether the mother or the son, the average number of shots per day in a city German is 5.7 shots, being 8.5 in Porto, 6.5 in Madrid and 7.2 in Barcelona.
As we see, they are all western cities, with similar cultures and identical babies. How is it possible that breastfeeding on demand to the same babies some breast more often than others? Well, easy because there are many ways to ask for food and there are many ways to interpret the demands.
Some time ago we explained that for a baby to demand food is not to cry, but to move, wake up, put his hand in his mouth, open and close his lips rhythmically, sticking out his tongue, and that at the moment they cry, they already have a lot hunger (something like the one who waits in a restaurant for food to arrive and angrily gets up: "Do they bring me food now? Or do I have to go somewhere else to eat!").
If a mother sees that her child wakes up and starts to move and thinks that it is because she is hungry she will always feed her before one who sees that she has woken up but is not hungry because she does not cry.
If a baby cries because he is hungry and his mother immediately breastfeeds him, this baby will suck more times than another mother who sees her son cry and thinks that "he can't be hungry because he has eaten anything," he gives the pacifier and walks him or entertains him with something else.
It's not that when they grow they make fewer shots a day, it's that mothers believe it
If a mother believes that her child is already three or four months old and that now she takes less than a day she will do exactly what she believes, give it less times a day. When your child opens his mouth or puts his hands to his mouth because of hunger, he will believe that he is playing or that his teeth bother him. When he cries and has recently eaten he will think he needs some stimulation, or a walk in the street because they have not yet left home.
That way, certainly, that baby will make fewer shots a day, but not because he doesn't ask for them, but because the mother will give him fewer times.
Mothers who are unaware of this myth or who do not directly believe in it and continue to breastfeed when the child is asking for it, or when it seems they may be asking for it, they watch (In my children it happened like this) who continue to breastfeed with the same frequency even with 5 or 6 months. Yes it is true that at night they start to forgive a shot and that during the day they lengthen more in some, but it is also true that they seem to recover them while awake, seeing that in the end, the total number of shots is very similar.
And then they will never space the shots?
If we let our children breastfeed on demand and we understand as demand the first signs of hunger discussed, the shots will always be very similar. This does not mean that they will always breastfeed 8 to 12 times a day, basically because at six months they start eating and some children do breastfeed a little less. Others still suck when they have eaten, so it is often said that they "do not forgive one."
It is clear that at some point they take more space because they eat more food, they entertain themselves more with other things and, even when they are hungry or wanting to be with mom, they can accept something to replace that moment.
If all this I have said today is a problem for some mother, who has just seen the sky blacken before the expectation of continuing to give her child for months to breastfeed every 2-3 hours, I can only tell her that You can always pretend that you haven't read anything and keep thinking that babies are really spacing the shots.
Now, if you see that with that of allowing more time to pass the child is hungry, I recommend not to be tempted to buy artificial milk to supplement breast milk. Simply return to the initial frequency and everything will return to normal.
Photos | Coatl28, viralbus, Raphael Goetter on Flickr
In Babies and more | Why it is said that breastfeeding is on demand (I), (II) and (III), Keys to successful breastfeeding, Myths about breastfeeding
