How Much Milk Should I Leave for My Baby?

Worried about how much milk to send with your baby when you are away?

Most babies should eat 1 -1.5 ounces of breastmilk for each hour in between feedings.

Example, if you nurse your baby at 7 am, and they will eat again at 10 am, they should take between 3-4.5 ounces.

Many mothers struggle with this when they go back to work, often hearing from their care provider that their baby is still hungry or eating more than they are leaving.

There are many reasons that this may happen, and it is possible that the baby is going through a growth spurt, but use your own intuition and judgement.

Possible reasons include:

• Care providers may try to feed the baby any time they are upset, when they might not be hungry.
• Baby enjoys sucking on the bottle nipple after they have finished all the milk in the bottle, leading the care provider to think they want to eat more.
• Baby can get milk faster through the bottle than the boob, and doesn’t realize they are satisfied because they finished the bottle so quickly.
• Formula fed babies usually do eat more as they grow. And the composition of formula doesn’t change as the baby grows. However, breastmilk composition does change, and the same amount should be enough for the baby as it grows.

Of course, every baby is different. Above all, trust your instinct.

The amount of milk to leave for my baby was one of the hardest things for me when I went back to work. He started out in the 2nd-3rd percentiles for weight. I was KEENLY aware of how much he was eating.

I played around with the timing between bottles and the size of bottles as time went by. I started with 3 oz bottles every 3 hours. But sometimes it worked better to feed smaller bottles slightly more often, or I sent a smaller fourth bottle for the day “just in case.” The whole time I was barely keeping up with pumping as much as he was eating, but I tried to remind myself to trust my body, and if needed it was okay to supplement with formula.

It was hard to know exactly how things went while I was away from him, and for the most part he was breastfed on the weekends so I couldn’t measure how much he was getting. I asked his daycare teachers lots of questions, especially when they told me he was more hungry or “wanted more.”

I also waited until 6 months to start my baby on solids, so I felt like he needed a bit more milk by 6 months. I went up to 4 – 4.5 oz bottles.

After starting solid foods, the pressure I put on myself went down, and I felt much more relaxed about it.