How to wean your baby off a nipple shield

A shield is a tool, not a verdict on your feeding.

Some babies need one only briefly — a week or so to get going. Others need it to create a good enough latch to feed efficiently at all, and for those babies the shield is doing real work. Either way, most babies can be helped off it, and it usually comes down to a handful of adjustments rather than one dramatic change.

You can try these at home and reach out to a lactation consultant if you need to.

Four things to try

1. Start the feed with the shield on, just for a few minutes — enough milk that your baby isn’t hangry. Then take it off quickly and offer the breast directly.
2. Hold your breast like a sandwich, compressed in line with your baby’s mouth, and keep holding it through the feeding rather than letting go once he’s on.
3. Try a more laid-back position. Leaning back changes the angle and lets gravity help hold him in place.
4. Offer the breast a little earlier than he’d normally eat, before hunger turns into fussiness. A sleepy baby is often a more willing one for this.

The first tip is the one that surprises most mothers, and it’s the one worth trying first. A hungry baby has no patience for something new. A baby who’s taken the edge off usually does.

The one rule. If your baby gets fussy at any point during these attempts, stop. Soothe him, and try again later. Pushing through frustration can lead to breast aversion — a learned resistance to the breast itself — and that is much harder to undo than keeping the shield a while longer.

Which is worth saying plainly: there’s no prize for getting off the shield quickly. Slow attempts that end calmly get you there. Forced ones can set you back weeks.

If it isn’t working

A shield that’s still needed after a few weeks of trying usually means there’s a specific reason your baby can’t hold a latch without it — the shape of his mouth, a tight frenulum, or how he’s using his tongue. Those are findable, and they’re much easier to find by watching a feed than by reading a list.

And if the shield stays for now, that’s a legitimate outcome too. Your baby is fed at the breast. That counts.