Your baby is growing… do you need to produce more and more milk?

It is easy to think so. After all, a 5-month-old baby is much bigger than a 1-month-old. Because of this, many mums and dads imagine that the amount of milk produced will have to increase continuously as the baby grows. But breastfeeding doesn’t work exactly like that.

In the first few weeks, production increases rapidly as the breast adapts to the baby's needs. After this initial phase, the total amount of milk produced throughout the day tends to stabilise, with natural differences between mums and babies. Research shows that, during the first 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding, we do not need to see a progressive increase in production month after month for the baby to continue to grow properly.

This is because breast milk is not a food with a constant composition. As your baby grows, the milk also adapts: its composition changes throughout breastfeeding, keeping up with the baby's different nutritional and developmental needs. Therefore, a bigger baby does not simply need to drink more and more milk; what they receive through that milk is also transformed.

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