- Growth Spurts
Sometimes babies can seem to spend hours feeding, during which time you may begin to doubt yourself and your ability to feed your baby, or think there's something wrong. Typically these sessions seem to be in the evenings, and they usually occur at AROUND 10 days, 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 9 weeks, 13 weeks, 18 weeks and 26 weeks, though of course they may not be exactly at these points, as the babies haven't read this page so don't know, and again typically they will last for a day or two but perhaps up to a week.
Often called 'growth spurts', in fact they are developmental phases which typically cause your baby to turn, for a short time, into insatiable milk-guzzling machines, who seem intent on turning you inside out and wearing you down with their need to nurse constantly!
While many women report afterwards that they just wish they'd known that there ARE growth spurts - often knowing nothing about them until they speak to other mothers, and having sometimes faced comments along the lines that as the baby was feeding a lot they probably weren't making enough milk - we at Infant Feeding Information believe that it's important to know what happens physically with supply and demand during 'growth spurts'.
Because the constant feeding in these short periods of time helps to boost supply so that your now-bigger baby gets more milk, it is simply a part of the natural demand and supply nature of breastfeeding, perfectly normal, to be expected, and means things are working as they should.
Sometimes Mums report that well-intentioned family and friends and even health care professionals, can see these huge seemingly never-ending feeding frenzies as a sign that something is wrong with the mother's milk, or that the mother is 'giving in' to the baby's need for attention - or even 'using you as a dummy' (which tickles me actually as surely dummies are synthetic nipples, not the other way around...?), so for many it's great to find out that it IS normal!
Good advice would be, trust your body's ability to feed your baby, don't listen to other people's opinions about you not having enough milk nor their "advice" to top-up with formula - see the other articles down the roght hand side of this page for more info on this.
Many women report that the 6 week spurt is the worst one, and it seems a lot of women give up breastfeeding at 6 weeks because they "couldn't satisfy their baby".
The thing is that these bumper feeding times can be more easily understood if you think about them as being periods of regression which will be followed by developmental jumps - so would mean that baby would revert to feeding and sleeping very little else for a short period, while the body stocks up ahead of a growth of some sort - physical, mental, milestone, whatever. This can be good to explain to Mums as it seems to make a lot more sense than just "growth spurt".
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