Nurse Your Baby Until He Is Full

Mother! Your child tells you when he is hungry

So feed him and fill him... and thus you will avoid nearly all feeding problems

You will be surprised how many of the things that trouble infants come from their not being filled during feeding — how many mothers commit such an error without meaning to. Here is the doctor's explanation for making sure your baby has had his fill.

One morning we went to the newborn clinic at one of Beirut's hospitals and saw five infants whose mothers had brought them in, anxious about them. One infant had diarrhea while another was vomiting; the third suffered from colic while the fourth was losing weight despite an increase in the number of his feedings; and the last was not getting enough sleep.

Although the condition of each of these five infants differed from that of the others, the treatment prescribed for them all came down to the necessity of feeding them enough.

We do not mean by this that every mother who finds her child suffering from one of the conditions mentioned should diagnose his illness herself, decide that he is not getting enough nourishment, and neglect to call the doctor. There is the possibility of an important cause behind each of these symptoms.

As for our saying that the child needs to eat more, it does not mean stuffing him more and more. There are reasons for his not eating the quantity he ought to take while remaining comfortable. The child should sit during his feeding in a nearly upright position that allows the milk to drive the air out of his stomach and take its place.

The bottle should be held in such a way that the nipple stays filled with milk, leaving no empty space for air to fill. And when the baby's feeding time comes, we must not let him wait long, so that he does not cry long — for crying fills his stomach with air, and it also exhausts him to the point where he can no longer eat as he should.

In addition, the holes of the bottle's nipple must not be so small that the child is forced to draw the milk with difficulty, so that he tires and falls asleep before he is completely full. If the baby takes twenty or thirty minutes to drink his bottle, there must be a cause to be sought out and remedied — and often the nipple of the bottle must be widened.

These are some of the things to watch, instead of deciding to cut down the food when the signs suggest that the baby has had enough — when that is not true. Let us return to one of the infants we mentioned at the beginning of the article. When his mother was asked about him, she answered that his stool was loose, frequent, and green in color. So she thought the baby's feedings must be reduced, on the pretext that "his bowels must be rested."

We do not deny that reducing the food and feeding the child special kinds of food is a suitable treatment for many cases of diarrhea. But our study of such cases refuted this conclusion. The child's case can be summed up as follows:

A child's digestive organs ordinarily do extra work after a meal. If the meals are small and frequent — as is the case here, where the child does not eat his fill — the movement of the bowels is also frequent. The hungry child's bowel activity increases, and this increases their emptying. As for the green stool, it results from the food not remaining in the intestines long enough for their walls to absorb the green particles naturally present in the stool.

The second child we examined had frightened his parents with his frequent vomiting. The mother explained that her child takes his milk from the bottle while lying on his back; and since he kept spitting up, the mother supposed the cause was that he was eating too much — and so she reduced the quantity.

Vomiting in infants is sometimes the result of too much fat in the food; in this case the protein should be increased and the fats reduced. As for the vomiting that happens to children when they reach six months of age, it happens mostly as a result of increased movement; a child also sometimes vomits if his food is more solid than it should be.

But ninety percent of the time the cause of a child's vomiting goes back to his not having been filled: a space is left in his stomach that fills with air, causing him to burp forcefully, which affects the stomach, and so he vomits

Mother! Your child tells you when he is hungry, so feed him and fill him, and thus you will avoid nearly all feeding problems.

his food. This condition occurs when the child does not go to sleep after eating; with his movement the milk is churned in his only half-filled stomach, and he vomits as a result.

As for the treatment of the colic felt by the third child, it is to increase the quantities of food and to feed the child fewer times — unless the cause of the colic is a particular illness; for mostly it goes back to the presence of air in the child's intestines, passing there from his stomach because he was not filled and room was left in it for air.

Giving the child the chance to burp during and after eating is a customary practice. But it is also necessary that the child burp before eating, to expel the air he swallowed while crying.

Waiting for the child until he is hungry is very different from leaving the hungry child to wait for his food. The child should not be bound to a strict feeding schedule, but should be fed whenever he is hungry.

How, then, Madam, can you know that your child is hungry? A child's crying in a particular way almost always means that he is hungry. When he is full he sleeps, and he usually sleeps until his next feeding time comes. If he wakes and does not cry, you should know then that he is not hungry to the point of demanding his usual meal.

As for the fifth child, he was not sleeping well; and after going into the matter with the mother, we found that the child was not being filled — the blood therefore was not descending from the head to the stomach, and so the child stayed awake. By increasing the quantity of milk, the sleep problem found its solution.