How to breastfeed your baby properly and its benefits
Breastfeeding a baby has been the easiest and most natural way of feeding your baby since time immemorial.
While most mothers understand the need and importance of giving colostrum to babies and breastfeeding babies in their early life, the question is how long to breastfeed to get benefits.
How long does the average woman breastfeed?
Most women breastfeed female babies for 1 year while male babies are breastfed for 1 year and 3 months.
It is possible to exclusively breastfeed your child for the first 6 months of life.
Having said that, the benefits of breastfeeding your baby for the first 2 weeks, 2 months, or 3 months outweigh other months.
How often should a 3-month-old eat when breastfed?
While there are guides for breastfeeding frequency by age, how often and long you should breastfeed your baby each time greatly depends on the baby and the volume of milk in your breast.
There are other factors such as your health, your baby’s health, nature, work, lifestyle, and others.
Having said that, you should breastfeed your baby for at least 10 minutes long in every session, and you should give breast your baby when he/she demands it or every four hours.
How long should you breastfeed on each side?
For most women, one breast always has more milk than the other. If you want to feed your baby for 10 minutes in one session, you can make it a ratio 7:3. Spend more time on the breast with a higher volume of milk.
Will my baby gets full?
At some point, many women think that their baby is no longer full but this thought is wrong.
If you breastfeed your baby regularly, you’d also increase the amount of milk at the same time.
It is possible to exclusively breastfeed your child for the entire first year of life.
This is shown by people in other countries where processed baby foods are not very popular.
How long should I breastfeed my baby?
Many mothers wonder how often newborns feed and how long it is best to breastfeed their babies.
There is only one suitable answer for breastfeeding frequency – As long as both the mother and the baby want it.
The recommendation of the World Health Organization is 6 months of breastfeeding without additional foods.
Tea is also not necessary in most cases. From the age of 7 months, you can start introducing other foods to your baby slowly.
It is worthwhile to understand how to position the baby correctly as well as several breastfeeding positions in the hospital.
In this way, you can also prevent the dreaded breast infection. If breastfeeding problems still occur, you can contact a midwife or a gynecologist.
Benefits of long-period breastfeeding
Long breastfeeding has many benefits for both mother and the baby. Let me sound this note of warning, you should not try stopping breastfeeding at 3 months.
While there are pros and cons of extended breastfeeding, babies need to feed on breast milk in their first 6 months of life.
Especially the milk from the breast in the first 3 weeks ( colostrum), contains important nutrients and antibodies that you may not get for your babies in the foods.
Breastfeeding is easy, free, and healthy for your babies.
Breastfeeding also gives babies a lot of physical affection and closeness to their mothers.
Breastfeeding babies can help to reduce the risks of breast cancer.
Another important reason, however, is that anyone who exclusively breastfeeds their child for at least six months has been shown to reduce the risk of allergies.
It is reassuring to know that breastfeeding does not cause sagging breasts in the mother, the breast changes during pregnancy.
