After I gave birth and started breastfeeding, I found that acquiring the skill of expressing milk and knowing the appropriate method and appropriate devices helped me a lot in my breastfeeding journey. I am writing to you today as your complete guide to expressing milk.
What do we mean by expressing milk?
Expressing breast milk is the extraction of breast milk from the breast using breast pumping devices. Why do mothers resort to expressing milk? For several reasons:
- Expressing milk in the appropriate way helps the mother to express milk. Because, as we mentioned previously in the article on the challenges of breastfeeding, the greater the demand, the greater the supply. Expressing milk mimics the baby's breastfeeding, thus increasing the mother's milk supply to meet the increased need and reduce breast fullness.
- Expressing milk and storing it for use when the mother is away from the baby for any reason.
- Expressing milk helps you know how much your body produces and which your baby needs depending on his age.
Basics of expressing milk
When can you express milk?
You can express milk from the age of two weeks for the baby. It is not recommended before this, so that the child does not develop nipple disorder, which causes the child to be unable to latch on to the mother’s nipple well, resulting in poor breastfeeding and more pain for the mother.
Expressing milk has two main goals:
- Creating a stock of breast milk for use during periods when the mother is not present. We will discuss appropriate storage methods later in this article.
- After the reserve is built up and the child is given a full breastfeed of the stored milk, the milk expression here is with the aim of replacing the breastfeed that was not breastfed from the mother’s breast.
Steps to build a reserve of breast milk
- Express milk after your baby finishes the feeding session. You can express immediately after feeding or after a maximum of an hour. It is not recommended to express milk after an hour of breastfeeding. The pumping session lasts between 10 and 15 minutes for both breasts.
- The amount of milk you will get is very small and is between 30 - 60 ml, and that is absolutely fine because the milk expressed after breastfeeding is the excess milk and not the full amount that your child is breastfeeding.
- Store expressed milk in the refrigerator in the appropriate container for you. I recommend using the feeding bottle directly.
- Repeat pumping after each feeding your baby takes until you have one feeding quantity that your baby needs.
- There is no harm in mixing the amounts of expressed milk from different pumping sessions. If you store the first expressed milk in the refrigerator, do not mix the remaining quantities immediately after expressing. Cool all the extracted quantities and then mix them together after cooling.
Example:
Your baby is two months old and needs 90-120 ml of milk. “We will talk about the amounts of milk that a child needs according to his age in a separate article.” If in one pumping session you get 30 ml of milk, then you need 3 pumping sessions until you have a feed of 90 ml. However, if you want to store a 120 ml bottle, you will need 4 pumping sessions until you have a 120 ml bottle supply.
In a separate article, we will talk about how to build up a reserve of breast milk before you return to work after maternity leave.
Suction for compensation
Suppose you have a 90 ml bottle and your husband or your child’s caregiver feeds him from a bottle with previously stored expressed milk. In this case, you must express the milk from your breast as if your child was breastfed directly from you. This is for two reasons: the first is to replace expressed milk, and the second is to ensure continuity of milk supply.
The amount of milk expressed for the purpose of compensation is large and lasts approximately 20 minutes compared to the milk expressed after a breastfeeding session. This means that in one pumping session, you may obtain from 90 to 120 ml in 20 minutes because this simulates a direct breastfeeding session. Because the milk that is in your chest is milk from a breastfeeding session, but instead of breastfeeding the baby, you express it.
Be careful not to postpone expressing milk from your breast for more than an hour from the time the baby feeds the expressed milk. Because this will affect your milk production. They agree that milk production is linked to the amount of need. If you do not express milk and the baby does not breastfeed, your body will act as if the need for milk has decreased and thus the production will decrease.
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