expressing breast milk

Expressing allows you to continue to give your baby all the nutritional benefits of your breast milk, even when you can’t feed your baby yourself. There are many reasons why you may choose to express your milk:

• Most commonly, to build up a store of milk for when you can’t be with your baby.
• You may simply want some time out, perhaps enjoy a night out.
• To relieve engorged breasts.
• To stimulate extra milk production.
• It gives your partner the opportunity to get involved with feeding.
• When you return to work.

Expressing simply means removing milk from your breasts, so that it can be given to your baby by someone else, usually in a cup or a bottle.

Unless your healthcare professional recommends it, it is not advisable to express milk until baby is about four to six weeks old. This gives you plenty of time to establish breastfeeding and to resolve any little difficulties that may crop up.

Although dad can't express milk or breastfeed, he plays a key role in the success of breastfeeding. As well as supporting and encouraging you through the breastfeeding experience, it is important for dad to have skin-to-skin contact with his baby. Feeling his father’s heartbeat will encourage your baby’s temperature, breathing and heart rate to settle, and give dad and baby the same closeness as you feel during breastfeeding.

Expressing breast milk is a vital part of the modern breastfeeding experience and can be especially important when if you decide to go back to work but still want your baby to feed with your breast milk. This page explains what exactly expressing is and how it can be useful. If you can’t find what you’re looking for here, try our how to express breast milk and storing breast milk pages.