Sore nipples from breastfeeding are usually a position problem rather than a skin problem, and before you read another word, the NHS is explicit that it is important not to stop breastfeeding. Fixing it takes one move, and that move feels like throwing away the feed you are already halfway through, which is the entire reason almost nobody makes it.
What follows is what the move is, how to tell whether you need it, and why the things sold to help with this cannot work while the position is wrong.
There are two ceilings in her mouth
For the first week with my eldest, feeding hurt every single time. Not at the start and then easing. The whole way through, all eight or nine or however many times it was that day, with a specific sharpness at the beginning that made me inhale through my teeth.
I did not ask anybody about it, and the reason was not shyness. It was that I had decided it was the price. I thought sore was the tax on doing this at all and that it would go once my skin toughened up, which is a theory I had assembled entirely out of things I had overheard.
The NHS description of what is supposed to be happening is spatial, and it changed how I thought about the whole thing. When your baby is attached effectively, your nipple rests comfortably against the soft palate at the back of her mouth. When she is poorly attached, the nipple sits nearer the front instead, where it gets pinched against the hard palate, and that is what causes the pain.
Two surfaces. One is soft and the other is bone. Which one you are on is a difference of a few millimeters, and there is no amount of toughening up that turns bone into anything else.
The pain is not measuring your resilience. It is measuring a distance. That was the single most useful sentence anybody could have said to me at the time and nobody did, so I am saying it here.
Now multiply the distance. ACOG says most babies in the first weeks feed at least 8 to 12 times in 24 hours, or at least every 2 to 3 hours counting from the start of one feed to the start of the next. On the evenings when it is much more than that, when the feeds pile up on top of each other in a way that has a name and a reason, a small error in position gets run through a lot of repetitions.
Some soreness early is ordinary. The NHS says nipple pain is common in the first few days. But it draws a line right after that, and the line is worth memorizing: if one or both nipples hurt at every feed, or they start to crack or bleed, get help from your midwife, health visitor or breastfeeding supporter as soon as you can.
Every feed. That was me, for a week, filed under the price of admission.
The shape at the end tells you what the pain could not
Pain during a feed is a terrible instrument and it is the only one most of us use. It gives you a number with nothing to compare it to. Is this the normal amount of bad, or is this the other amount of bad? You have no idea, because you have never had a nipple in a baby’s mouth before.
There is a better instrument and it is available for about four seconds at the end of every feed. The NHS says a nipple that comes out flattened, wedged or white is a sign the baby may not have been properly attached, and adds that the baby may also seem unsettled after feeds.
Flattened. Wedged, meaning shaped like the end of a new lipstick. Or white. Those are not degrees of the same thing. They are three separate answers to a yes or no question, and unlike pain they do not require any judgment from you.
I destroyed that evidence at every single feed for a week without knowing it existed. The feed would end and I would have myself covered before she was fully off, in one motion, the way you would close a wound. Partly cold, partly a house with people in it, mostly just a reflex I never examined.
So I had a week of data about the exact thing that was wrong with me, and I threw all of it away four seconds at a time.
Look. That is the whole instruction. It is free, it takes no time, and it converts a question you cannot answer into one you can.
The forty seconds you will not spend
Here is the move, and I want to be honest that it is emotionally expensive rather than difficult.
If it hurts, you take her off and start again.
ACOG says to check the latch and, if you feel discomfort or notice that the baby’s mouth is not wide open, to gently break the suction. It gives three steps and the order matters. Slide a clean finger between your breast and your baby’s gums. Wait until you hear or feel a soft pop. Then take your nipple out of her mouth.
Then you go again from the beginning, which ACOG also spells out. Stroke her lower lip with your nipple and wait for her to open wide, like a yawn. Pull her in close, aiming your nipple toward the roof of her mouth. And bring your baby to your breast rather than your breast to your baby, which sounds like a slogan until you notice you have been leaning down and folding yourself in half for a week.
Start to finish it costs under a minute. I timed it once, out of spite, after the twentieth time I had talked myself out of it.
Because the price is not the minute. The price is that you have a baby who has just started eating and is now not eating, and you did that, on purpose, based on a hunch about millimeters. Everything in you reads it as ruining a feed that was already underway.
I did not do it once with my eldest. Not once, across weeks. I did it for the first time with my son, sitting on the edge of a bed at some ridiculous hour, and I remember the specific feeling of it being a waste. Like tipping out a cup you had just poured.
He fussed for maybe fifteen seconds and then took it again and it did not hurt. It did not hurt. I sat there for the rest of that feed doing arithmetic about how many feeds I had spent in the wrong position with my first, and the answer was all of them.
It took me one entire child to be willing to spend forty seconds. That is not a lesson about being brave. It is what happens when the cost of a thing arrives immediately and the benefit arrives later, which is the shape of nearly every decision you are making right now.
Nights are harder for this than days, and it is worth planning for rather than pretending otherwise. At two in the morning, taking a feeding baby off is not a small correction, it is a gamble with your next hour. That is also the hour when the chair gets comfortable in ways that turn into their own problem, and the version of this that happens where you are lying down deserves thinking about while you are awake.
My compromise with myself, which I offer without any authority behind it, was that I would always restart the first feed after waking and never argue with myself about the ones at four in the morning. One good latch seemed likelier to teach us both something than four resentful ones.
Why the shelf does not help, and two things on it make it worse
There is an entire aisle for this. I bought a good deal of it with my eldest and kept it all in one drawer, and by the time my son came along I did not open that drawer once.
None of it was a scam. It just could not reach the problem, and the NHS says so directly at the top of its own list of tips: they will not be effective if your baby is poorly attached during breastfeeds.
Here is that list, all four of them:
- Change breast pads at each feed if you are using them, and if possible use pads without a plastic backing.
- Wear a well fitting bra without any underwire, so your breasts are not restricted.
- Keep breastfeeding your baby for as long as they want at each feed, and try pumping if you need a break.
- If you can, avoid nipple shields, which are thin protective covers worn over the nipple while feeding, and breast shells, which are hard covers worn inside the bra, because these can affect how your baby attaches to the breast.
Read that fourth one again, because it is the one that matters most and it is sitting at the bottom of the list where things go to be skipped.
Two of the products marketed hardest at exactly this problem are the two the NHS asks you to avoid if you can, and the reason is not safety. It is that they change how the baby attaches, and how the baby attaches is the only thing actually wrong.
I want to be careful here, because a shield is sometimes given to somebody by a person who has watched them feed and had a reason. That is a different situation and I am not arguing with it. What I am describing is buying one off a shelf at ten at night because your nipples hurt, which is what I did, and which puts a layer of silicone between the baby and the exact adjustment she needs to make.
The first three items on that list are all reasonable and none of them will fix a latch. Notice what the third one is really saying, too. Keep feeding, for as long as she wants. The advice is not to ration the feed. It is to correct the position and then let it run.
Cracked or bleeding is a different sentence
Everything above assumes sore. Cracked or bleeding is a separate category and it does not wait for you to get better at any of this.
The NHS puts it in a box on its own: get help early if your nipples are cracked or bleeding, because this increases your risk of getting an infection in your nipple.
Two more things belong with that. If your baby is properly positioned and attached and your nipples are still sore, that is a reason to ask for help rather than to keep going, because the NHS notes there may be an underlying problem such as an infection. And while you wait, the advice is to try to carry on breastfeeding, or to express milk by hand if you can.
That last instruction landed strangely on me the first time I understood it. I had assumed the response to any wound was to leave it alone, and this asks for something close to the opposite.
For the cracks themselves the NHS offers two small things. Dab a little expressed breast milk onto them after feeds, or use silver nipple cups between feeds.
My eldest cracked in the second week, which was the week after the one I have already described, and the cracking was not a surprise to anybody except me. I looked at it, understood exactly what it was, and gave it one more day.
Not because I was tough about it. Because asking felt like an admission, and because a day is such a small unit that you can always find another one. Nothing came of it in the end. I got help, it got better, and the whole thing became a story rather than an event.
I am telling it anyway, because the day I gave it was not free. It was another day at the front of her mouth for both of us, and the crack was the last warning I was going to get before this stopped being about pain.
If the pain changes shape, if a hard sore area appears, or if you start feeling generally unwell with it, that is a different ladder with different rungs and it moves faster. It has its own post and its own thresholds, and that is the one to read next if any of this describes your chest rather than your nipple.
The short version
- Sore usually means the nipple is at the front of her mouth instead of the back. Not that your skin is weak and not that you are doing it wrong on purpose.
- Look at the shape when she comes off. Four seconds, every feed, and it answers the question that the pain cannot.
- If it hurts, take her off and start again. Yes, in the middle. That is the whole technique and the only hard part is agreeing to spend the minute.
- Nothing you can buy fixes a position. The two products aimed most directly at this are the two you are asked to avoid where you can.
- Cracked or bleeding stops being a comfort question. It is a reason to get somebody to watch you feed this week, not next week.
Sources
- NHS, Sore or cracked nipples when breastfeeding, page last reviewed 16 June 2026, next review due 16 June 2029
- American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Breastfeeding Your Baby, FAQ029, last updated July 2023, last reviewed November 2025
A note on this post. Written and edited by the NewBloom editorial team. NewBloom is not written by doctors, nurses or midwives, and nothing here is medical advice. We read the current guidance from bodies like ACOG, the CDC and the NHS and write down what it says, with every claim traced to its source and named in the sentence where it appears. General guidance is not the same as an answer about your own body. Your doctor, midwife or health visitor can examine you and we cannot, so anything here that raises a question about your own recovery is a reason to ask them. If something is wrong right now, contact your doctor or your local emergency number. More about how we write these posts.