Ideal weight gain in a New Born Baby

"What does the baby weigh?” and “how is the baby growing?”  This is the most common questions that parents hear from the moment a new baby arrives.  The weight of a newborn is often used as a marker of general health, so it makes sense that it’s something everyone is watching. Babies are called newborns during their first month of life. Although your newborn sleeps a lot, powerful changes are occurring in the major areas of development.

Child Growth ( image: WHO )

Weight and Changes

Most babies who are born full term (38-40 weeks gestation) weigh between 6-9lbs ( multiply the kilos with 2.2) Birth weight can be affected by many things such as pregnancy gestation at birth ( whether earlier or later than “full term”), baby’s gender, mother’s health during the pregnancy, parents’ build, nutrition during pregnancy, multiples birth or babies health at birth. Babies can be born outside of the average guidelines and still be completely healthy.

It is expected that all newborns will lose some weight in the first 5-7 days of life. A 5% weight loss is considered normal for a formula fed newborn. A 7%-10% loss is considered normal for the breastfed baby. Most babies should be back at birth weight by days10-14 of life. If a baby loses a significant amount of weight, is sick or premature, it may take up to 3 weeks to get back to birth weight.

During the first three months of her/his life, your baby will grow faster than she/he ever will again. Will be gaining about an ounce a day, or 30 grams, which works out to 2 pounds a month, or 900 grams. By the time she/he's 4 months old, a healthy baby that's born at full term will double their birth weight.

From her/his fourth month until they turns a year old, her/his daily weight gain will drop to .7 ounces a day, or 20 grams. That will turn out to be about 1 pound, 5 ounces every month, or 600 grams. By baby’s first birthday, a healthy baby has usually tripled her/his birth weight.

Research clearly shows that breastfed babies and formula fed babies grow at different rates starting at about 4 months of age. But most growth charts are based only on formula fed babies’ growth, which leads many breastfeeding moms wondering if their baby is “normal.” The World Health Organization (WHO) has worked to develop new growth charts based on breastfed babies but not all physicians are using these when making their assessment. Make sure your physician is clear on what feeding method you are using so that the correct chart is used to assess your baby’s weight gain.

Monitoring Newborns Weight Gain

Newborns are often weighed throughout their stay in the hospital, sometimes weighed again 48-72 hours after discharge, and then at a week after birth and sometimes again at two weeks after birth. If a baby has any health concerns, weight checks may be scheduled more frequently.

If parents don’t have a scale at home, they can monitor their baby’s intake of food in more tangible ways.

By about week one, a newborn should be having at least 5-7 wet diapers a day and at least about 3-4 dirty diapers a day. (This may change with time and Formula fed babies seems to have less bowel movements then breastfed babies.)

Baby seems satisfied at least for a little while after feeding. (Some babies do seem to want to eat all the time!)

Baby does not seem overly sleepy and is alert during the “awake” times

The most important thing that parents need to health care providers is looking out for. Don’t hesitate to ask your health care provider about any concerns you have regarding your baby’s weight gain.

THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO)

The WHO Child Growth Standards were derived from an international sample of healthy breastfed infants and young children raised in environments that do not constrain growth. Rigorous methods of data collection and standardized procedures across study sites yielded very high-quality data. The generation of the standards followed methodical, state-of-the-art statistical methodologies. The Box-Cox power exponential (BCPE) method, with curve smoothing by cubic splines, was used to construct the curves.

There was wide variability in the degrees of freedom required for the cubic splines to achieve the best model. Except for length/height-for-age, which followed a normal distribution, all other standards needed to model skewness but not kurtosis (are terms that describe the shape and symmetry of a distribution of scores). Length-for-age and height-for-age standards were constructed by fitting a unique model that reflected the 0.7-cm average difference between these two measurements. The concordance between smoothed percentile curves and empirical percentiles was excellent and free of bias. Percentiles and z-score curves for boys and girls aged 0-60 mo. were generated for weight-for-age, length/height-for-age, weight-for-length/height (45 to 110 cm and 65 to 120 cm, respectively) and body mass index-for-age.

The WHO Child Growth Standards depict normal growth under optimal environmental conditions and can be used to assess children everywhere, regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status and type of feeding.