Breastfeeding Problems from Lip Tie in Infant
- April 2, 2019
- by Melissa Lawrence
Hi there, mamas and papas. A mom of a four month old baby wrote in with questions about the frequency of her baby’s feedings. At one month, her baby received a frenotomy, a procedure in which the lingual frenulum below the tongue is cut. Doctors perform this procedure when the frenulum (a small membrane extending from the floor of the mouth to the underside of the tongue) proves to be unusually short or tight, a condition known as “tongue-tie” or “posterior tongue tie. Mom explains that this tongue-tie treatment was performed when her baby was one month old, but that problems persist.
Breastfeeding after Frenetomy
Tongue-tied babies’ tongues don’t move as far up or out as they need to. Thus, they don’t suck efficiently and oftentimes are not properly breastfeeding or bottle feeding. Although the tongue-tie can be fixed quite easily, a mother’s milk supply can have suffered in the meantime, which is what this mom is concerned about.
She writes that her four month old needs to eat every two hours and never seems full. Her breasts, meanwhile, appear to get full with milk every four hours.
In today’s video I offer some tips, including that this mother empty each breast before moving onto the next, making sure that her baby is awake and full. I also recommend that the mom have her baby examined again by a doctor to make sure that the tongue tie in fact was properly fixed. Watch my video for more and thanks for reading.
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