Do I need to burp my baby?

Hi, I’m Alissa Pemberton. I’m a lactation consultant and holistic sleep coach. I’m going to share with you some of the common issues that I come across around breastfeeding and my top tips to help.

A lot of parents asked me particularly when they’re breastfeeding whether they need to burp their baby and the answer to that is not necessarily. All babies will create some wind while they’re digesting. And so you may find that if your baby is showing some signs of discomfort, that you need to burp them after a feed.

If your baby is latching deeply to the breast and feeding well, and they probably won’t have too much trouble with trapped wind.

When you’re burping your baby, my top tip would be to do something called wonky windowing. Now, if we think about the anatomy of your baby’s tummy, your baby’s stomach isn’t just a circular shape. We have a little pipe that goes down where the milk goes down into a baby’s tummy. And then the stomach has a bit of a bulge at the top and this becomes a really easy spot for air bubbles to get trapped.

So when you’re burping your baby rather than putting them directly up over your shoulder or setting them in front of you, we can actually put your baby at an angle. So if you angle your baby over your right shoulder, what this does is means that that little pocket in their stomach is lower than where the esophagus is that pipe that comes out of their stomach that allows the wind to come out for them to burp, so we’re allowing those air bubbles to come around that corner and out. So that’s the first thing is to position them on a diagonal across your right shoulder.

You can also achieve the same thing if you’ve got babysitting down by having them sitting, but leaning towards their right hand side so we’ve got that nice angle there. When you’re burping your baby, the best thing to do is give them a really firm pat on the back and you will need to be quite firm with this. We are trying to disrupt those air bubbles and get them to pop and move up through the esophagus so that your baby can burp.

If you’ve got a particularly windy baby, the other suggestion I would make is that you use a baby wrap or sling and wear your baby. The more time that your baby can spend upright and moving the more it allows all of those air bubbles to move and come out. And so if a windy, fussy babies, having them upright in a wrapper rustling works fantastically for helping keep that, that wind at bay.