Katie Ferraro (0s):

So the volume of milk and the frequency of the milk feedings at 12 months of age looks remarkably different than six months of age. Because over that weaning period, your baby's replacing that nutrition from milk with the foods they're learning how to eat. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered Dietitian, college nutrition professor, and mama of seven specializing in baby led weaning. Here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (45s):

Hey guys, welcome back talking today about milk. How do you drop a milk feed while you're weaning your baby? And when we say milk, we're talking about the weening period from six to 12 months of age, as your baby's learning how to get more nutrition from food. And we'll gradually back off of the breast milk and or formula we'll, there's a transition that happens. It doesn't happen overnight. We don't flip the switch and go from milk to food. We're gradually going to be phasing out. The amount of nutrition baby is getting from milk. So when I say milk, I'm talking about breast milk and or formula up until the one-year mark. And then we generally make the transition to cows milk. So we're going to be focusing on the actual dropping of the milk feed.

Katie Ferraro (1m 26s):

How does that happen before we get started? I want to tell you guys a quick story. I got a message from a mom the other day, who her baby was nine months of age. She said, I just bumped up. So we're doing solid foods three times a day, but it's a lot. The baby's eating three times and my mother-in-law's pressuring me to give the baby a snack. And I'm also still nursing eight times a day. I'm getting up twice in the middle of the night, said, whoa, mom, you're feeding this baby more than 12 times a day. At nine months of age, you definitely don't need to be doing it that much. If it feels like too much, it probably is. She said, gosh, I don't want my baby to be hungry. And I know that that's top of mind for so many of us, we want to provide nutrition and prevent hunger.

Katie Ferraro (2m 10s):

But as your baby is getting bigger, they're actually going to slow down the rate of growth. And I know it's so counterintuitive and that's kind of the point of today's episode is to kind of strike out some of these myths that we hear about the transition our babies are going through. As they're learning to get more nutrition from food. If you think eight times a day of nursing feels like too much at nine months of age and you want to change things, you definitely can. There's no right or wrong way to wean your baby. But we knew do need to acknowledge that as your baby approaches the six month mark, baby needs nutrition from sources, other than breast milk, just your breast milk. And certainly other than formula, because even though formula can provide iron, there's still a lot of other nutrients from foods, the different texture experiences learning how to be independent with eating all of that from starting solid foods.

Katie Ferraro (3m 1s):

But again, this is a transition. It doesn't happen overnight. So what is the best way to drop a milk feed? Or a lot of times I get the question, what's the best milk feed to drop. And my suggestion is you need to do what works for your family. So please know that there's no wrong way to drop a milk feed, but what parents are sometimes confused by and I get this, I myself was confused as a new mom. I don't get it. My baby's getting bigger, but they're taking less milk. Meaning breast milk and or formula. Yeah. That's what happens during weaning. You think like, as your baby's getting Bader, like the size of the clothes go up, the size of the diaper goes up. You just think, okay, the amount that they're taking in across the board goes up, that's actually not true for many babies.

Katie Ferraro (3m 48s):

The max volume of milk that they will take as an infant will top out somewhere around eight or nine months of age. And what's happening there is that's usually the period where the baby led weaning food stuff starts to click the first few weeks and months. If you've tried baby led weaning or even learning about it, you probably know it's slow going. Meaning there's not a lot of actual eating that's happening. And that's fine. That's typical that's to be expected because your baby is learning how to eat. So at the six and seven month mark, most of your baby's nutrition is still coming from breast milk and or formula. It's exactly why you don't need to be stressed about the amount of food your baby is eating early on.

Katie Ferraro (4m 31s):

It just doesn't matter. You need to give your baby the opportunity to learn how to eat. And that's what your baby is learning how to do during baby led weaning. So when it comes to dropping a milk feed, you'll hear some experts say, do the night feed you other ones, other ones they do the morning. One I know for most of you by around the eight or nine month mark, you'll be ready to drop the milk feed. That's either one breastfeeding session or one bottle feeding session, or maybe more remembering that all babies develop at different rates. So some babies will be ready to drop a milk feed earlier than others, but certainly the amount and the frequency of the milk that your baby drinks at 12 months will look remarkably different from what they used to do at six months of age.

Katie Ferraro (5m 15s):

And we need to acknowledge that, that we're working on a continuum here. We're slowly food intake is going up and slowly milk intake is going down. If you're breastfeeding, you are more than welcome and encouraged to breastfeed. If it's working for you and working for baby, do it well past one year, do what works for you, but you need to allow your baby the opportunity to have some time where they learn how to feel hungry. And I'm by no means saying to starve your baby out. But if you're constantly giving your baby milk, little snacks of breast milk all day long or little bottles all day long and their stomach is never truly emptying and they're not being allowed to feel hunger and learn how to use food, to help alleviate those feelings of hunger than we're doing our babies at disservice.

Katie Ferraro (5m 59s):

So again, we don't starve our babies out, but it's okay for the babies to go longer periods of time. As they're learning to eat and get more nutrition from food. My suggestion for the milk feed that I drop, I always drop the first milk feed. The one in the morning. Some parents don't feel comfortable doing that, but I want you to know that by eight or nine months of age, when your baby really starts getting the hang of eating solid foods and the amount of nutrition that they're able to get from food increases, it's perfectly fine for your baby to wake up from an overnight fast and have breakfast. Breakfast is to break the fast, right? If you have the food ready, that's the caveat there because some parents are like, whoa, wait a minute. My baby's gonna wake up.

Katie Ferraro (6m 38s):

They're starving. And now it takes me 15 minutes to get breakfast together. No way I got to have some milk in there to tie the baby over til it's breakfast time. If that works for you, that's fine. But if you can do something ahead of time or something easy for breakfast, or maybe even prep it the night before and have your baby get up and go right to the table, that's perfectly fine. And what happens a lot of times in that situation where you're dropping the morning feed, and if you're breastfeeding, you're probably engorge, you're going to need to pump some of you might not pump and just need a breastfeed to get the milk off of you. And that's fine, but let's say you're bottle feeding. The baby can wake up. You could not do a bottle. You could do breakfast. And then you're getting in the habit of offering the milk after the meals. And that's really the patterning that we want to move towards as your baby approaches.

Katie Ferraro (7m 22s):

One year is the baby's eating the food because they're hungry. And they're learning that, gosh, when I eat X, Y, or Z amount of food that I determined baby saying this, then I feel less hungry. We can follow that meal up with milk. And what we're doing is milk is kind of acting as a snack in between meals for a while, early on, but as your baby gets more proficient at eating, as they eat more food, we put the milk behind the meal so that baby's having breakfast and then some milk and then lunch and then some milk and then dinner and then some milk. And then most families will continue either a night bottle or night breastfeeding session after dinner in order to kind of tide the baby out overnight. I remember with my quadruplets, I went for their six month checkups. So when they were six months adjusted age, and this is for babies at one time.

Katie Ferraro (8m 3s):

And I remember that appointment because my husband had a work thing come up and he couldn't go. And I went all by myself, which I almost never went anywhere with four babies by myself. So when they were, they were six weeks premature. So when they were seven and a half months, chronological age was there six months checkup. I remember the doctor saying we had just started solid foods. And I know they don't eat very much at the beginning. So most of their nutrition is coming from milk. He said, what's your bottle schedule? And I was pumping giving about half of their nutrition from breast milk and half from formula. But it all came out of a bottle. I said, they're drinking three, eight-ounce bottles a day. And his jaw dropped on the ground. And I saw the look on his face and I shot him like the evil eye. And I was like, are you judging my feeding schedule? And he's like, that is an aggressive amount of milk for a baby to be drinking at six months of age.

Katie Ferraro (8m 46s):

And I was like, Hey, it is working for me right now. I can't do more than 12 bottles a day. And they were meeting their nutrition needs with three eight ounce bottles. It's definitely aggressive. Most of you guys are doing six ounce bottles around the six month mark. If you're doing bottles, if you're breastfeeding, you're like, I don't even know they're talking about, I don't know how many ounces I'm feeding. You're not at risk for potentially overfeeding your baby if you're breastfeeding, but the risk is there with formula or bottle feeding. So I was always conscientious of it, but it just, I share that story to give you guys the insight that all babies are different and there's lots of different ways to get the nutrition into your baby. But most of you, as your baby's getting more proficient at eating food, you're going to want to be dropping at least one milk feed.

Katie Ferraro (9m 31s):

It will generally happen around the eight or nine month mark, if you can't figure out which one to do, look at your schedule, see if it works to do the morning one, because anecdotally, yeah, I've found in my own family and certainly with the many families that I've worked with, that if you drop the morning feed and the baby starts the day eating food, especially around the eight or nine month mark, once they really get the hang of things, it kind of sets the stage for positive feeding throughout the rest of the day. Like if they have a good breakfast, they're going to have a good lunch. They're going to have a good dinner. And part of that is because you're getting in the habit early of allowing your baby to feel a little bit of hunger as they will. When they wake up, respond to that hunger cue with food, you put the health full food out there, right?

Katie Ferraro (10m 11s):

The division of responsibility in feeding. It's your job to provide the wholesome food in a safe environment at set mealtimes. But it's ultimately up to your baby to determine how much or even whether they eat. So keep that division of responsibility in feeding rule at the top of your mind, if you can. I always like to say, it's not my job to determine how much or even whether my baby eats. But if my baby is pumped full of milk all day long and not allowed to feel hunger, then I'm definitely interfering with their learning ability. So play around with your own schedule, as it goes with everything and babies. You guys know when you mess around with the schedule, it's a little Rocky for the first few days, right? When you take the pacifier away or when you change the nap schedule or when you're changing anything in the schedule, it might be a little dicey.

Katie Ferraro (10m 54s):

The first few days, your baby might cry a little bit more. It might take you a few days to get back into the groove. But our ultimate goal is that by the time your baby's approaching their one-year birthday, you're hopefully feeding the baby three meals a day. They're having milk behind that food, meaning that they're learning to drink it after the meal. And you can eventually get in a routine where your baby can drink along with food. But most babies are very distracted by the milk in the cup. If it's there, when they're learning how to eat. So I let them do the food undistracted, and then I'll bring the cup in generally doing five minutes practicing with the open cup after each meal, starting at about the time your baby is six months of age with the ultimate goal. Again, by the time they turn one, eating three meals a day and drinking their milk out of an open cup.

Katie Ferraro (11m 39s):

Now, if you're continuing to breastfeed, that's great, but your baby still needs to learn how to drink out of an open cup. And as we get towards the one-year mark, we'll make that transition to cow's milk. Now, if your baby is allergic to cow's milk, or if you're in a vegan household and don't drink animal products, you'll do different, but for everybody else, whole milk, full fat cows milk age one. Now how much of that? Well, the AAP says babies 12 to 24 months of age should be drinking somewhere between 16 to 24 ounces. That means two to three cups. Okay? So for parents who have a 10 month old, who's drinking 40 or 42 ounces of formula, my concern is wow. That's way too much. That's almost twice as much milk as there'll be needing in just two months.

Katie Ferraro (12m 22s):

Let's start dialing back the formula, getting close to that 16 to 24 ounce guideline as we approach one year. And then when you make the transition to cows milk, you're not dramatically changing the view. All you move milk, that that baby is drinking. So again, 12 to 24 months of age, and we like to see the baby drinking somewhere between 16 to 24 ounces. In my experience personally never went above 20 ounces of milk for a one-year-old. I find that babies who drink and toddlers who drink too much milk, you guys know exactly what it does. It sabotages intake at mealtime. So if you find your older baby, really isn't interested in foods at 10, 11, 12 months of age, as you would expect them to be, or they're coming to the table.

Katie Ferraro (13m 5s):

And they're really distracted from the outset. When we dive a little bit deeper, we usually find those are the babies who are either a, having a lot of snacks or snacks too close to mealtime, or they're drinking too much milk. And that milk is generally too close to mealtime. So just start paying attention to the amount of milk that your baby is drinking goals to get somewhere between 16 to 20 or 16 to 24 ounces. By age one, we transitioned to cow's milk at around the one-year mark. You can go cold Turkey if you want. The way. I always did it with babies who were on a combination of formula and breast milk was by the time they turned one, I was definitely done pumping and wanted to be done again. You may decide to breastfeed or pump longer, and that's wonderful, but I was, I think most parents would agree. We're all done with buying formula by the time our babies turned one.

Katie Ferraro (13m 48s):

So what I would do is I would take my last canister formula and whatever breast milk I had left right after their one-year birthday, I would do half and half. So every bottle or a cup of milk that I would serve would be half Breastmilk formula and then half cows milk. And when I ran out of breast milk, I ran out of formula. Usually just a few days into it. We could do 100% full fat, whole milk cows milk. And again, we don't give reduced fat milk products to babies until age two. Do you want to do that whole milk from one to two? When you make that trip, then there are certainly babies and families out there that don't drink. Cow's milk. Have a very good friend of mine, a dietician with two girls, they just don't drink milk. They don't even put milk on their cereal. They just don't have cereal. She said, and they don't drink milk and they get calcium and vitamin D from other sources in the diet.

Katie Ferraro (14m 29s):

And that's fine. So you don't have to do this, but if you're just looking for a guideline, let's try to keep it between 16 to 24, or if you're on the more conservative side, 16 to 20 ounces of milk by the time your baby turns one. So don't be way overdoing it before that, if you're looking for a feed to drop, I always suggest the morning feed, but there's no wrong way to do it. Just around that eight or nine month mark start taking stock of how much milk your baby's drinking and look for a way to cut back on that. So you give your baby the opportunity to be getting more of their nutrition from food. Cause that's the whole point of the weaning process. Thanks for listening. Bye now!