Latch issues

[ThatGentleScroller]

Hi all - baby is 6 days old. So far BF has been going well and have supplemented with one small bottle of formula and two bottles of breast milk when needed with paced feeding and very slow flow teets. Baby was latching well but since yesterday has become fussy sometimes when I put him on the boob and the latch has been really shallow. Even if I detach and put him back on, it’s still shallow. Sometimes he will suck twice and spit my nipple out but he is definitely hungry as showing signs. This happened last night and we were both getting stressed so I ended up asking my husband to give him a bottle. It really broke my heart that he is being so fussy and I feel like I’m failing.

I’m not sure where to go from here. I want to persevere but if he won’t latch properly or detaches, my main priority is getting him food….

I’m so exhausted so that doesn’t help and I know it’s baby blues time so everything seems worse than it is but would love some advice from people who have been through similar.

Note it was always intention to combi feed. Ideally with expressed milk but if none available, formula as I do not want to breast feed in public as I have pretty big boobs, it’s difficult!

Thank you.

Just keep going and correcting him. You can gentle pull his chin down when he's latched to widen it. If you've got big nipples, it will get waaier as his mouth grows. Mine seemed to forget how to latch about once a week until he was 4 or 5 weeks old, so we kept having to go back to basics. He's 3 months now and mostly does it right, apart from when he's playing silly buggers.

Maybe experiment with different brands and shapes of bottle teets, to try and get one that’s as similar as possible to your breast and avoid confusion? You no doubt know this as you said you’re using slow flow, but if the teet is easier to latch to and baby doesn’t need to develop the same degree of muscle coordination to get milk, I understand they can develop a preference for it over the breast.
I had this situation but the opposite way around: my DS’s first feed was by bottle (I was incapacitated) but as soon as I got him on the breast he went right off the bottle, which I was hoping to use sometimes with expressed milk. He’s never really accepted one again, which breastfeeding was always my goal but having a “never bottler” (lol) comes with its own downsides.
Just remember you’re not doing anything wrong or failing your baby — you’re clearly
really loving and responsive or you wouldn’t be posting this here to try and get help. You’re both learning this and it’s such early days. It DOES take time! Especially for baby learning to latch well. My 5 month old is a pro but it took him time too, and he went backwards at one point — started latching shallow and at weird angles… just experimenting, I suppose, or he forgot his technique, or my nipple shape changed, or who knows, but he then went back to the deeper latch. It’s not a linear process and even if baby struggles now it doesn’t mean they’ll always struggle 🩷

Hi OP, 8 months into BF and giving bottles of expressed here. It’s quite common for them to be fussy whether exclusively BF or exclusively bottle fed or both, I expect when we are doing both it’s easy to jump to conclusions where we think the fussiness is refusing bottles or refusing breast. What I have found is, however we are planning to feed DD we persevere. You don’t want to loose your supply by giving a bottle when they get fussy as they get fussy intermittently with various leaps etc. Even a few days ago my DD refused a bottle for my DP after 8 months, but another day she might mess around with BF. For some context, she has had 48 hours completely bottle fed when I was away and has only BF for 2 weeks while we were moving house and gone back to both fine. It’s completely possible to do and maintain both, but at this stage if you want to continue with BF, really prioritise your milk supply which won’t be fully established until 6m.

Ask your midwife or health visitor where you can get in person support to help with your latch. Eg in my area there are daily breastfeeding drop ins