A few days ago I talked to you about complementary feeding through the sheets that pediatricians and nurses give parents with the guidelines to start with it.
There are several pages that I have been able to read to date and there are several misconceptions that I have observed and that may mislead parents or follow recommendations with little common sense. Today we are going to talk about the one in which complementary feeding becomes an enemy of breastfeeding by specify on the sheet how many breastfeeding a six month old baby should make.
How many shots of breast milk a six month old baby should make
It is very likely that in the past, when most babies drank artificial milk, on the supplementary feeding sheets the mothers were told that reduce the number of bottles to two or three a day, to offer other meals in substitution of the other bottles.
As there were more mothers breastfeeding their babies and when they arrived to do so for more than six months the leaves had to be modified for those mothers who did not believe that “at six months your milk becomes water” and to distribute during Milk and food day.
Well, being able to apply the logic they decided not to do so and to the "Three bottles of milk a day" added "or three shots of breast", as if it were the same and as if a child took the same amount sucking than with a bottle.
If we talk about artificial milk, recommending a maximum of three shots a day is pretty good, because considering that after six months a child should drink about 500 ml of milk Well, that is already what it is, about three shots of milk, sometimes more or sometimes less: if for example you put bottles of 240 ml, then with two already fulfilled, practically.
A six-month-old baby cannot take just three shots of breast milk a day
However, if we talk about breast milk, the advice is wrong, very wrong. Complementary feeding has to supplement breast milk, but do not have to replace it until you reduce a frequency of 8 to 12 shots a day to only 3.
If we continue talking about the recommendation to give the child 500 ml of milk a day, it is impossible to reach it with two or three breastfeeding (or very unlikely), because a mother does not have 170 to 240 ml of milk ready in the breast to hit and it is also unfeasible, because if a mother were to produce so much it could not happen I do not know how many hours without breastfeeding for her son to make only 2 or 3 shots.
It is advisable, considering that until the year breast milk is the main food of children, is that a child who already begins to eat other foods keep sucking on demand or at least several times a day.
On demand does not mean exclusively, eye. What I want to say is that if you eat four tablespoons of fruit and you don't want more and it turns out that you feel like your chest, it is given to you. If he eats some meat and then wants his chest, then you will not tell him to wait until he has to eat again, but it is also given. Little by little he will be eating more and sucking less, he is six months old and has just begun.
Let's say it would be like offering the same as to bottle children, but more distributed. The food would be offered on more occasions and milk too, as if every time they are hungry they are given a little of everything when, with artificial milk, it is not done that way because after 250 ml of artificial milk the weird thing is that they have more hungry. With breast milk, as they suck less, there is the possibility of giving other things each time they breastfeed.
