Nursing strike? Withdraw bottles?

[Gennz]

Hi all,

I think 10 week old DS is on a nursing strike. For the past 24 hours he's been screaming blue murder when I put him to the breast, I can sometimes get him to latch on for the first let down but there's no chance of getting him on for any more than that, and now this moning it seems he's boycotting even that. He's screaming and bellowing & arching his back. Now he's losing it if I even put him in a nursing position I'm feeding only off my left breast & I think I have a couple of blocked ducts as it's a bit lumpy & painful - possibly this has affected milk flow/taste.

Up til now he's always been happy to take a bottle of EBM but if he has too many bottles (more than one a day) I've noticed he fusses at the breast a bit (nothing like this though). My question is - do I withdraw bottles and just put him to the breast for each feed & assue that once he's hungry enough he'll feed, or should I keep putting him to the breast but pump/feed with bottles & hope he'll snap out of it?

I'm not keen on starving a small baby to get him to(and all the negative associations that it will surely entail!) but I'm owrried that if we start relying on bottles he'll become a confirmed boob refuser.

Have read Kellymom etc on this but wasn't quite sure what the best strategy is. Any ideas? I have a hospital grade pump here so will def be able to keep my supply going no problem - I'd rather just BF though!

Hmm ... just talking to myself here - maybe it's not a nursing strike as I picked him up from his nap & put him to the boob while he was sleepy and he latched on straight away and fed for 10 minutes pretty much continuously. He still won't latch on a second time though (had the dramatics when I attempted it) - could it be that he's just feeding more efficiently now and doesn't need several goes like he used to? It's been a couple of weeks since he was weighed so I'm mot sure how much he weighs now but he'd be probably about 6.5kgs.

We had a similar issue at 8 weeks, we saw a lactation consultant and it turned out my little one had a tongue tie and had just got fed up with how hard breast feeding was! She did have quite poor growth aswell though so if you're LO is putting weight on well it's probably not this. I highly recommend calling milkmatters (the numbers on their website and the lactation consultant there was great - got lots of advice over phone). We also saw a consultant through them. The national breast feeding helpline (nhs) was good for strategies too. Good luck I hope you get sorted!

So I had something very similar when DS1 was 12 wks, it got a bit better, then at 16 weeks a full on nursing strike and now he's ff (5 months old). He would only feed in his sleep and if I tried any other time we had screaming, arching back etc. I think it was because he preferred the faster flow of the bottle. I was advised to stop the bottle completely if I wanted things to improve but....I didn't want to as it was important to me to have that bit of freedom now and again. We mix fed for a few weeks but eventually he just wanted the bottle and that was that. I didn't plan to stop bf before 6 months initially but did 4.5 months. So....I would recommend stopping the bottles if that's teh route you want to go down as some babies, like mine, just end up preferring them.

Thanks everyone for yor comments. I thought I'd update in case anyone is interested. After a few days of tantrums re the breast we seem to be back on track. I've stopped giving him bottles completely so he'sonly getting one a day, a bedtime one from DH. I was concerned that he was only feeding for the first let down but I think he's just getting more efficient at feeding.