My newborn wants to feed all the time! Am I making enough milk?
You’ve just finished feeding your newborn, burped them, changed their diaper, and set them down for their nap. Finally, some time for yourself! But then you see your baby start wriggling and grunting. They’re turning their head from side to side, chewing on their fists—how can they possibly be hungry again? And then, a thought comes into your tired, postpartum brain: Am I making enough milk?
We are a generation of new parents who have the least amount of experience with babies, and even less experience with watching body feeding. For most of us, the first time we hold a baby is when it’s our own. Body feeding and lactation are an absolute mystery, and all we hear are that it’s the most natural thing in the world to do, or that it’s painful, hard, and likely to end in failure. So when we experience our babies wanting to feed constantly in the early days, we assume the worst: we’re not making enough milk.
The thing is, it’s completely normal for newborns to feed around the clock. They have incredibly tiny stomachs, are doing a lot of growing, and they have a very important job: helping to establish your milk supply. And how do they do this? By constantly feeding!
For most lactating parents in the first few days post-birth, they produce colostrum, a thick, yellow substance that is full of protective, gut-lining goodness. And for the first few days, that’s all baby needs. It takes around 3-5 days for an average lactating parent’s milk “to come in”—that is, change from colostrum to the typical watery, white human milk we’re used to seeing, and medical interventions or a surgical birth can often delay this by a few days.
Even after your milk comes in, your newborn is doing hard work at telling your body exactly how much milk it needs. Human milk is a living substance, and your body is able to not only change it to be exactly what your baby needs (for instance, when baby is ill, your milk contains antibodies specific to baby’s illness to help them fight it), but also adjust your supply up or down depending on baby’s needs. During growth spurts, baby is going to be eating a lot to fuel their growth, which primes your body to ramp up the milk making. And in those early days, your baby is telling your body that there’s a baby to feed by feeding constantly. The more your baby feeds, the more milk you make. Supply and demand.
The obvious answer here, then, is to allow your baby to feed as often as possible in their first year, but especially in those first few weeks. Unfortunately, a lot of the advice we are given by well-meaning professionals will actually harm your supply, rather than support it. Feeding on a schedule, trying to ensure that baby gets both sides of the chest each feed, twelve hours by twelve weeks—all of these can end up telling your body that you don’t need to make as much milk, and your supply can end up dwindling. Babies are made to snack often. But with fewer people in our village, it can be a lot harder on the lactating parent.
If you find yourself struggling to keep up with your baby’s needs but really want to continue body feeding, there are still a few things your can do to help yourself when you lack a village. Frontloading tasks is one of them. Ruthlessly prioritizing what needs to get done is another. You can set up a feeding starting near your bed or couch with shelf stable snacks, plenty of water, a device and a charger or the TV remote so you can plant yourself in one place. If you have the means to, outsource something like housecleaning or cooking. Or hire an in-person postpartum care professional to help with simple household tasks, meal planning, or just sitting with you to fetch you water and snacks.
Body feeding is hard, especially because you can’t truly see how much milk baby is getting. However, if baby is not having enough wet and dirty diapers every day, is losing weight instead of slowly gaining it, or you just feel in your gut that something is wrong, don’t hesitate to reach out to a lactation consultant. Hopefully you’ve already pulled together some recommendations as part of your postpartum planning, but if not, you can check with a local mother’s group or the La Leche Leage to get recommendations.
