How to Know When Your Newborn is Hungry

Learn to read your baby’s cues in three simple steps! 

If you’re not feeling confident about deciphering the meaning of your newborn baby’s behavior, you’re not alone; most parents find this challenging. To fast-track your learning process, we’ve broken down the art of learning how to interpret your baby’s cues into three simple steps.

Why learning about cues is important

It’s particularly challenging to interpret newborn behaviors, some of which are voluntary and related to reflexes, and others which are deliberate. Even more confusing, many of these behaviors are displayed for just about anything that troubles them – so how are you ever supposed to know exactly what they need?

While things get easier as baby matures and they can give clearer signals to indicate what they want, navigating the seemingly endless periods of newborn crying and fussing, and pinpointing the cause of your baby’s distress, can be stressful as first-time parents.

It might be tempting to rely on the clock to prompt you to give your baby their different care needs; but relying on the time won’t help you to gain confidence in your abilities, your sense of competency and your ability to become attuned to your baby’s needs.

By following these three steps, you can learn to read baby’s cues confidently and respond to them in a timely and appropriate manner.

Step 1: Identify your baby's behavioral cues.

You might have been told that the following behaviors are signs that your baby is hungry:

• licking or smacking their lips;
• sucking on their lip, tongue, fingers, or fist;
• fidgeting;
• bobbing their head forward and side to side with an open mouth;
• opening their mouth wide when touched on the chin, cheek, or lips;
• fussing and crying.

These behavioural cues alone are not proof of hunger. Rather, they can best be described as ‘sucking cues’. A newborn baby can display these behaviours when they have a desire to feed, but baby may also want to suck when tired, for comfort or pleasure, or simply because their rooting reflex has been triggered.

You might assume that your newborn would refuse to feed if they were not hungry, and so accepting a feed and sucking must mean she is hungry; but this theory isn’t true for newborns. You may be inclined to place your breast or a bottle into your baby’s mouth to gauge their receptiveness to feeding, however this can trigger their sucking reflex, in which case your baby will suck whether they are hungry or not.

Therefore, you can’t rely solely on behavioural cues to determine when or if your baby is hungry. Instead, you need to also consider timing and context.

Step 2: Understand your baby's rhythm

Your baby’s circadian rhythm influences multiple bodily functions, including hunger and tiredness. In general, babies tend to want to sleep and eat at semi-predictable times based on their age. Therefore, if you learn what these sleeping and feeding patterns are for your baby’s age, this can support you to anticipate your baby’s needs and interpret whether your baby may be displaying certain behavioral cues due to hunger or due to tiredness. 

Once you’ve read the relevant information ask yourself:

• How long has it been since your baby last fed? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be hungry again at this time? Or is it too soon for hunger?
• How long does it take for them to complete a feed? Feeding too fast or too slow can be problematic for a baby (consider the ideal feeding duration for your baby’s age).
• How long since they last napped? The younger the baby, the less time they can comfortably tolerate remaining awake.

Step 3: Consider the context

Context includes information about what’s happening to and around your baby when they display particular behaviors. When deciding on the reason for your baby’s behavior, you can look for possible triggers, for example:

• What is their environment like? Is the environment supporting them to feed effectively or distracting them? Will it encourage them to fall asleep or stimulate them to remain awake?
• What are you doing while feeding your baby? Are you attentive to them while feeding or distracted by your phone? Could you be annoying them by jiggling or twisting the bottle, frustrating or stressing them by your efforts to make them continue sucking when they have already shown signs they want to stop?
• Have they had enough sleep? Is tiredness affecting their feeding?
• Do they display physical signs that point to a physical condition or problem?

Putting it all together

Consider the following example:

Your baby woke 30 minutes ago after having a two-hour nap. Prior to her nap, she had a feed but didn’t drink as much as usual. She’s been content lying in her rocker since she woke up while you’ve been busy with housework. Now your baby begins to fuss and cry. You consider her cues, the timing and the context. You conclude that she might be bored from being in her rocker, or hungry since she last fed over 2.5 hours ago. You first try cuddling her and giving her attention to rule out boredom, but she continues to fuss. You then try to offer her a feed, which she willingly accepts.

In this scenario, by noticing baby’s cues and considering them alongside their timing and the context, you are accurately able to narrow down the possible causes for your baby’s fussiness and are best able to respond.

While using these three steps will see you best placed to understand your newborn’s behavioral cues and determine if the cause is hunger, remember that no parent will get it right 100% of the time. It’s more than likely that you’re going to get it wrong at times. It’s okay if you make mistakes when deciding what your baby wants or needs. But it’s not okay to further add to their distress. If what you’re doing is not working, stop and reassess the situation.

Sometimes, you just need to use a process of elimination, and choose the most likely cause first, starting with hunger and tiredness, and work your way through other possibilities.

The more you understand what is ‘typical’ for a baby the same age as your own, the more chance you will have to correctly interpret their cues alongside the timing and context and decide on the most logical reason for the behavior. Over time, the greater your accuracy will be and the more confident you will feel.

By Rowena Bennett, RN, RM, CHN, MHN, IBCLC.

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How Baby Care Advice can help

We appreciate that unless you have extensive experience in child development and understand the impact that different infant feeding and settling practices can have on a baby’s behavior, it can be difficult to know how and where to start to resolve a baby care problem. There are multiple ways in which we can help you gain a greater understanding of your baby’s needs and your role as your baby’s parent and caregiver.

Rowena Bennett’s parenting books

Written with the insights of decades of experience and backed by current evidence and research, Rowena’s books on healthy sleep practices, bottle-feeding aversion and baby-led feeding principles provide parents with a wealth of practical advice and information to help guide them through their baby care problems. Available in hard copy and e-books through our website and leading online book retailers.

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