Taking the Pain Out of Weaning

Once you get through the initial discomfort of breast-feeding, nursing becomes easy and relatively painless until that fateful day when you decide it is time to wean your baby off of the breast. In addition to producing some emotional discomfort, weaning can cause physical pain. As you decrease feedings, it takes a little time for the body to catch on and produce less milk in response, so the engorgement of those early days often returns.

“Every expert is a little different in terms of their advice on how to best wean a baby,” says Harold Zimmer, M. D. “Some advise you to go `cold turkey’ and some advise you to truly wean,” he continues. For Mom, it is a little more comfortable to do it gradually, but some babies will decide to wean themselves and will abruptly reject the breast for good. “Generally, trying to drop one feeding about every two days is what I recommend,” says Zimmer ‘And the last feedings to be dropped should be the first one in the morning and the last one at night because the baby tends to be most attached to breast-feeding at these times,” he explains. It is also important to never drop two feedings in a row. In other words, if you typically breast-feed your baby twice in the morning, twice in the afternoon, and twice in the evening, avoid dropping one morning feeding one day and another morning feeding two days later Instead, try dropping one morning feeding, then an afternoon feeding, then an evening feeding.

As far as the pain of engorgement that can result, there are a few things you can do. “Tying a towel or Ace bandage around your breasts can help decrease your milk supply, because the extra pressure collapses the glands so that they can’t hold as much milk,” says Zimmer ‘Applying ice packs to the breasts decreases circulation and further reduces the degree of engorgement and swelling,” he continues. And once you have started to wean, he gives his OK to taking aspirin. ‘Aspirin is a good anti-inflammatory and can relieve some of the discomfort of engorgement,” he says.

Whatever you do, avoid any extra stimulation to the breasts during weaning. ‘Anything that stimulates the breasts will promote more milk production,” warns Zimmer