Nurse Francine Padrid: Latching on is a term that you'll hear nurses in the hospital and your friends talking about. That is the term we use for when the baby gets on to the breast and actually creates suction and begins the whole sucking process.
There are certain things that we look at to tell whether a baby has a good latch. The first and most important is, it should not hurt, when a baby has latched on well, you won't have pain in your nipples. You'll feel tugging, it's a different kind of sensation but it should not hurt.
The second thing you're looking for is you're looking for the baby's lips to kind of be turned out and way up as high on the breast as you can get with -- baby gets a wide mouth and then the baby gets way up high on the breast. If you pop the lip down, you could see the tongue cupped out and under the breast.
Then the next thing that's important is do you hear swallowing? Because if you listen very carefully, you can hear that little kind of a breathy sound which is swallowing. When you have all of those things, it's comfortable and you're hearing the baby swallowing, then you know you have a good latch.
If it's uncomfortable and you're seeing a baby that's frantically sucking lots of quick little sucks and it's going on for five minutes and they're getting frustrated, then you probably you don't have a good latch and the baby is just not getting enough milk.
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