Baby slow weight gain

[PfizerFan]

Hi, I'm a first time mum and my four month old baby has been hovering around 30th percentile in terms of weight since week two, but I've just weighed her and she's fallen to the 25th percentile :( is this a worrying drop?

I wouldn't be worried at all! Follow your instincts, if she starts doing things out of character or seems unwell and is also visibly losing weight then yes I'd be concerned asides from that don't worry, that isn't a big drop at all and their weight gain ebbs and flows.

My LO is teeny on the 2nd percentile when born, he's perfectly fine. All babies are different and those charts are mostly nonsense tbh! Adults don't all follow the 50th percentile, why would babies...

Honestly I just wouldn’t weigh unless you are worried. I never weighed mine except for the initial checks. I could see she was growing and was happy and that’s all that matters. Nothing about babies is linear, weight, growth, sleep or developmental.

Thanks for the messages. I just worry she looks smaller than the other babies in my NCT group, despite being one of the first babies born.

Absolutely nothing to worry about – the difference between 25th and 30th centile is basically the difference between whether she's just had a feed or is just due one, just had a wee or has a full bladder, etc. If you'd weighed her a different time the same day, you might have found she was still on the 30th.

In general, a worrying drop is when they drop two centile lines on the growth charts. So if your wee one is tracking just above the 25th centile line, they wouldn't start to worry unless she drops to just above the 2nd centile line. Smaller variations are overwhelmingly likely just to be natural variations in growth pattern. Most children will move up and down a bit as they go through different growth spurts.