Expert: Sally Wendkos Olds - 6/4/2011

Question
I have a beautiful 7 day old baby girl that I am breastfeeding. Things have been going fairly well since my milk fully came in. I feed her every couple to few hours and sometimes on demand, yet, shortly after feedings she will begin crying and turn her head and mouth looking for something to suck. She tries latching onto my lips frantically or her fingers and when she cant get those into her suction she cries inconsolably. Are pacifiers okay to use of my breastfed baby? Will that help subside her continuous need to suck without interfering with her breastfeeding?

Thank you

Answer
Dear Adrienne,

First, congratulations for giving your daughter the best start in life by breastfeeding her! I'm happy to hear that the nursing is going so well.

As for whether you should give her a pacifier when she cries soon after a feeding, this is a hard question to answer. I'm attaching an excerpt from my book (see below) about this topic, but by and large I would try to avoid giving her a pacifier until breastfeeding is well established -- by about 6 weeks after birth. When she cries soon after a feeding, does she quiet herself in a little while or does she cry for a long time? If it's the latter, you might try using a pacifier and see whether that comforts her. Meanwhile, be sure that the breastfeeding itself is going well, that she is gaining well, and having lots of wet and soiled diapers.

Good luck!

Sally

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Sally Wendkos Olds
Author, THE COMPLETE BOOK OF BREASTFEEDING: Olds & Marks, 4th edition, September 2010, published by Workman Publishing, and available in most public libraries, bookstores & La Leche League chapters.

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The Popular Pacifier

Pacifiers have a long history in baby care: They’re good tools for providing extra sucking time for babies who want it, for soothing a baby at times when you can’t nurse her, for cheering up one twin while you’re nursing the other one, and for comforting a colicky baby. But if you use them to “plug” your baby’s mouth closed every time she opens it or to put her to sleep, you may be covering up other needs and creating a hard-to-break habit.
Pacifier use has been a fairly popular topic for research in recent years. One study found that extensive pacifier use is associated with an increased occurrence of acute otitis media (infection and inflammation of the middle ear). But this same study found that restricting pacifier use to the moments when a child is falling asleep effectively prevents episodes of otitis media. Other research has suggested that pacifiers may be especially helpful when babies go to sleep, for both naps and at night, and may even be helpful in preventing sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), much the way breastfeeding would do. Some speculate that the pacifier helps clear the baby’s airway and prevents the baby from too deep a sleep and from rolling onto the stomach.
But what about pacifier use in relation to breastfeeding? Some research suggests that early use of a pacifier might lead to nipple confusion and interfere with a baby’s ability to latch on to the breast. And pacifier use in the early weeks seems to shorten the length of time a baby breastfeeds. On the other hand, one study of 258 healthy nursing moms and their healthy full-term three-month-old infants found that babies who used pacifiers were not weaned any earlier than those who didn’t. It seemed that babies who were having problems with breastfeeding were more likely to be given pacifiers, so the pacifier was  the consequence, not the cause.
  The prudent course seems to be to wait until breastfeeding is well established before going the pacifier route. But you know your baby best, and you need to trust yourself to know when a pacifier makes sense and when it doesn’t. Different babies prefer different shapes of pacifiers, so see what’s available in your community, try one, and if your baby rejects it, try other kinds.