How can you help your baby to get more milk out of your breast? With breast compressions. When a baby doesn’t drink enough milk and doesn’t gain enough weight or has difficulties making efficient sucking motions, this forces them to feed constantly to get the amount of milk they need. Here is how you can help your baby with this simple technique.

This method is very simple and allows you, as a breastfeeding mother, to optimize feeds and shorten the time your baby is at your breast while your baby can receive more milk faster. By performing this method, we get your baby to drink more milk and shorten their feeding times.

How to do this?

Here, we are going to explain how to do these breast compressions step by step (you can enlarge the images to see better how it works):

– Place the baby to breastfeed as normal and let your little one continue until they stop. Once she stops or starts to drink more slowly, you can start with the breast compressions.

– Place your hand in a C* shape and squeeze your breast. This action should make your baby reactivate sucking or suck more actively. When your baby stops again, perform compression again until your baby stops reacting to the compression.

– Once you have finished with one breast, observe your baby. If she is asleep and has fed effectively, you can consider the feed to be finished. If your baby is still awake and restless, you can offer your other breast and repeat the same.

– Look for another compression point on your breast and repeat the three previous steps.

* The simplest way to do this is to imagine holding a four-tier sandwich between your two hands, and you squeeze it to eat. The movement you make with the sandwich is the gesture you need to apply to your breast.

Who is this method for?

Breast compressions are recommended for babies with little weight, who get easily tired when feeding, babies with sucking motion difficulties, or in case of the mother experiencing pain and wanting to speed up the feeding process in order to shorten the time of pain, to ensure that the baby drinks enough milk. This simple method will also benefit mothers who have or think they have a low milk supply.

For how long do I need to do breast compressions?

If it is necessary to perform breast compressions, it is usually temporary and helps to overcome a phase, either because the mother may feel pain or because the baby has difficulty gaining weight.