17/11/2025
This article might be helpful for some.
Are you worried about clicking & gulping noises and whether it means your baby is swallowing air?
Gulping is just fast swallowing. Think of someone “downing” a pint of water. They tip back their head, pour & gulp. They are not taking in a load of air - they are swallowing. Gulping is fast swallowing, and it can be noisy, but that doesn’t mean there is air.
Clicking is about changes in vacuum. Everyone can make the click noise. Push your tongue upwards against your palate hard. Now quickly pull it downwards. You’ll hear a click, but you didn’t swallow! The click is from the break in vacuum, not from a swallow. When breastfeeding, the click usually happens when the tongue loses contact with the breast in the same way that you lost the contact with your palate.
ALL babies will click sometimes. They will click if the positioning isn’t quite right and they are struggling to keep up with the milk flow. They might click if feeding from a really full breast. They will click simply because they are a bit immature. Remember that a baby goes from no breastfeeding in utero to suddenly breastfeeding for hours a day - perhaps 6 hours? Imagine if you went from doing no exercise to exercising 6hours a day. Muscles get tired. The tongue is a muscle. Sometimes the tongue drops and then re-engages. A little clicking is not an issue. If your baby is constantly clicking throughout every feed however, then get some feeding support to see if a change in positioning or feeding pattern might help.
Studies do not back up the idea that clicking causes a baby to swallow lots of air. MRI of babies actively feeding found no air in the oral cavity while the baby remained latched (Mills et al 2020). I have spoken to someone who has watched ultrasound of babies feeding and has told me that even when you hear the click, no air is seen in the oral cavity. Ultrasound of breastfeeding babies stomachs show that breastfeeding babies do not have a lot of air in their stomach (Gridneva et al 2017).
All of us swallow a little tiny bit of air when we swallow - including adults, but there is no evidence that babies are taking in large quantities of air when you hear a click.
