“What is the solution for tongue-tie of children in the first
days of breast feeding?”
When the second child of Tita Emrich, Justin was just born,
she felt very hard to give him a breast, “I mostly burst into tears while
trying to push the breast into his mouth”. The mother who had 4 children wasn’t
stuck in any trouble with previous kids, but with Justin, it was really
different. He had a hard disease about short tongue ligament (tongue ligament
which is a piece of skin under the tongue has the function to keep the tongue
stick to the palate). Specialized doctors said it was ankyloglossia or people
called it tongue-tie. Tongue-tie has different levels, according to Janet
Grabowski doctor, “tongue-tie will not affect much to the real function of the
tongue. If it’s worse, children won’t put their tongue at the right place of
breast, so they can’t get enough breast milk. In some rare cases, tongue-tie
may cause after-effect later.
If tongue-tie is
worse, children can’t get enough milk
With Justin, tongue-tie was recognized early because of the
difficulty to be breast-fed. Maureen Fjeld expert, director of The Calgary
Breastfeeding Centre analyzed, this symptom can harm to the mother’s nipples.
“Because the child can’t reach the nipple which is too far for them, they tend
to chew nipples” – Fjeld said. There are many cases mother didn’t recognize
tongue-tie till the baby lost weight, and then breast feeding depended on
nutrition experts.
A method which is suggested by many experts is surgery to
lengthen the tongue ligament, a simple small surgery which is operated by
direct desensitizer in the doctor’s office for hard tongue-tie. With the
moderate levels of tongue-tie, they don’t endanger to breast feeding process,
or the ligament will be lengthened itself when the child grows up, or even the
ligament can be broken and cured itself.
There are many
cases mother didn’t recognize tongue-tie till the baby lost weight
Fortunately for Justin, tongue-tie was realized soon when he
was just 2 weeks, so he just needed a small surgery to lengthen the tongue
ligament a bit, and then breast feeding became faster and smoother with just 10
minutes for each time.
