Funny how you get so much professional help in the first days/weeks of your parenthood but despite all that attention a major error goes by unnoticed. My wife breastfeeds our baby. We both read that when you breast feed a child, the child will hardly have to burp. That's because it can drink without swallowing air at the same time. Babies who get milk with a bottle have to burp more.

So a baby is a efficient drinker when breast fed. But what we didn't know is that a baby has to learn how to drink without swallowing air. So it will always take a few weeks before it knows how to drink efficient. You'll notice when the baby reached that stage, because it will drink without making any sound.

Being unaware of that learning stage we could experience why we have to help babies to burp: they'll throw up milk all the time. It happened more than once that we laid our baby down and that it suddenly threw up an impressive amount of milk. On top of that: our baby got very stressed when it had to do a big burp.

So, I guess that if they have a bubble in their stomach, it will come up sooner or later. It's best to let that air go away in a controlled fashion. That is: keeping the baby erect for 10 minutes while patting on the back. Or any alternative tactic you know to let the air in the stomach bubble up without any milk traveling with the bubbles. But I must say: you never know for sure if you have all the air out of the stomach...

I learnt one powerful method to let the baby burp: have one hand on the baby's belly and one on her forehead, have her in a vertical position and tilt her slowly until the baby is in a horizontal position with the nose pointing to the floor. Our baby doesn't always like that, but I like to give it a try when I have to.

Labels: babies, breast feeding, burp