How to speed up breastfeeding?

[Newname7]

My DD is about 7 weeks and incredibly slow at breastfeeding! We had a tricky start which meant I pumped and bottle fed for 3 weeks but with the help of a nhs support worker we are now back to mostly breastfeeding (still pump/bottle feed a couple of times a day so DH can get involved and I can get a bit more sleep!).

The problem is she is so slow! Can bottle feed 150ml in about 20mins but BF takes about an hour. Due to the rocky start I have been reluctant to interfere too much with what she is doing but being up twice in the night for over an hour is starting to get quite tedious! Any advice on ways to speed her up please???

Sounds pretty normal tbh, it takes a while for their jaw to get stronger. It's also a completely different thing for them to latch and suckle where they have to move their mouth and jaw. With bottle feeding it drips into their mouth without much work on her part.

Ways to speed up a breastfeed (increase flow rate):

Breast compressions and massaging towards the nipple, while latched on

Quick breast massage before latching on (just a few seconds)

Use gravity in your positioning: feed leaning over the baby, or side-lying.

However if a feed takes a whole hour, it's probably not a flow rate thing, but your baby needing it for comfort too. Still, worth trying these things

Ps also switch feeding ie swapping breasts repeatedly. If you stick to one breast for over ten mins, the flow really reduces and the baby gets drowsy but doesn't fill up. Keep switching

Are you with her all day?

Poor child. You really need to relax and go at her pace man! She’s 7 weeks old. It’s a learned skill

All that work is what makes BF so important for jaw formation !

can you feed laying down? I could never crack it with my first but the rest I had in bed with me & fed them lying down

with the rocky start I would imagine your supply is still establishing - you'll both get more efficient as time goes on.

in the meantime trying to encourage extra day time feeds might work a bit but you're her safe place & this is the 4th trimester

also I think you're/she's doing amazing if you're only having two wake ups at 7weeks!
hang in there

As said above it takes time. As your baby gets older, they will become more efficient when your bottlefeeding is important that you pace feed or your busy may get a preference for the bottle

Unpopular perspective possibly but I was too impatient and sore so switched to bottles. Look after yourself as well as the baby.

She's still teeny!

And if you're only up twice a night with a newborn I suggest you pop on some Netflix and thank your lucky stars!

The only suggestion I can make would be if you think she's getting sleepy and that's making her slow, take her for a nappy change- having a cold bottom for a few minutes will wake her up and might focus her to the job at hand.

Does she take an hour to feed during the day? Or is it just a nighttime thing?

However if a feed takes a whole hour, it's probably not a flow rate thing, but your baby needing it for comfort too. Still, worth trying these things

This. She is unlikely still to be getting much flow at this point, instead it's a comfort thing which is entirely normal. Are you offering both breasts at every feed? If she's more or less sleeping at the breast, then try to unlatch her yourself and see what happens.

Not all of a feed is about providing milk, it’s promoting supply. You aren’t meant to speed it up. Only twice at night is not a lot! Neither is an hour.

That all sounds normal tbh, she's learning how to efficiently remove milk as much as you've been learning to breastfeed a baby. It's new to everyone.

They get much faster with age and pretty quickly too, my 2 year old can be 5 to 10 mins now, but he used to take a similar time to your DD.

Use feeding time to put your feet up and enjoy a hot drink before she starts walking 😊

My baby went from doing really short feeds to really long ones which I worried about because she had a tongue tie and I was very concerned she couldn't transfer milk efficiently. I eventually (working with a lactation consultant) learnt to distinguish between the different parts of the feed - the stimulation at the beginning to promote letdown, the active feeding (where you can see/hear the suck/suck/swallow pattern), then the butterfly sucking where they are still getting milk and swallowing less frequently (getting hind milk and also boosting your supply), but then mine usually went into a phase where she had fallen asleep but not unlatched and was just very gently suckling occasionally. It's sometimes said they are dreaming of breastfeeding! For me it would often still be enough you trigger another letdown say 45 minutes later but sometimes she would be there for hours if I let her. When they are little this comfort feeding is good for all sorts of reasons - it promotes bonding, oxytocin release, she is basically resting in her favourite ever place. It is different to an exhausted newborn falling asleep because she hasn't had enough nutrition so you need to be able to tell the difference. HVs etc would act very concerned when I described how long she was at the breast but I eventually got the hang of when she was hungry and when she wanted a long comfort feed - and the latter I could unlatch and stop if I need to go out, sleep etc, or settle in with Netflix and snacks if I had the time. Her daytime feeds slower got shorter and shorter but she's six months now and would still prefer to be latched all night if she could!

Make sure the latch is very deep - try flipple on YouTube

if you can master side lying feeding and safe bed sharing then you can sleep whilst she feeds