Child Proof
You Don’t Need to Burp a Baby
They won’t explode
To many parents, the biggest controversy about burping babies is deciding whether it’s best to drape them over your shoulder, sit them up, or lay them across your lap like a sack of potatoes. But some pediatricians are giving parents startling advice: Don’t bother burping your baby at all.
“There’s no physiologic reason why babies can’t burp without assistance,” says Dr. Clay Jones, a pediatrician at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts. In fact, he says, it’s probably easier for an infant to burp on their own than it is for an adult. A young baby has a very immature lower esophageal sphincter (the ring of muscle between the stomach and esophagus), and instead of staying squeezed shut most of the time as it does in adults, the sphincter often relaxes spontaneously. That’s part of why babies spit up so much, Jones explains. And when the sphincter opens, gas in the stomach should escape as easily as half-digested milk does.
Based on that reasoning, he’s long advised parents not to worry about burping. But he admits there isn’t a lot of scientific evidence one way or the other. In fact, the entire field of baby-burping research seems to consist of a single paper from 2014.
So why do we burp babies? Maybe just because we…
