Anatomic factors which interact to affect how your baby sucks at the breast: an overview

Dr Pamela Douglas18th of Aug 202319th of Sep 2025

Features of your baby's anatomy which affect breastfeeding

The following anatomic features in your baby are genetically determined.

Width of shoulders from tip to tip
Length (or height)
Chin shape
Palate height
Configurations of fascia (or connective tissue) and mucosa in the floor of the mouth. You can find out about your baby's variable oral connective tissue anatomies here.

Features of your own anatomy which affect breastfeeding

The following anatomic features in your own body are genetically determined.

Elasticity of nipple and breast tissue
Nipple width
Nipple height
Length of upper arm relative to breast fall
Breastfall
Direction nipples look
Breast-belly contour. Breast-belly contour is mostly genetically determined. Regardless of genetic predisposition, your own unique breast-belly contour is unable to be changed at this time. It is the way your precious body is shaped right now. We simply need to know how to work with each of our diverse breast and body shapes. You can find out about your breast-belly contour here.

Elements of breastfeeding which depend on how your baby fits into your body

Next, we'll consider the aspects of breastfeeding which are functional. This means that these aspects depend on context (things you can change, and things you can do). Functional elements also interact together to affect each other. Functional elements can be changed, depending on the way you fit your baby into your body. Here they are.

Your breasts' landing pads. You can find out about the landing pad here.
The amount of your nipple and breast tissue which is drawn up into your baby's mouth
The amount of back-to-front head and neck tilt your baby has during breastfeeding
The amount of rotation or twist of baby's neck, spine and pelvis during breastfeeding. This includes a torticollis, which is functional when it doesn't cause a measurable limitation to your baby's side-to-side head turning when you're doing it for her (though a functional torticollis affects head-turning preferences). You can find out about torticollis here, here, and here.
The shape and movement (or contour) of your baby's tongue. The shape and movement of baby's tongue depends on how all the previous elements interact together. You can find out about your baby's tongue movements in breastfeeding here.

Breastfeeding problems emerge when feedback loops can't compensate

You and your breastfeeding baby are likely to be located somewhere on a very wide spectrum of normal anatomic diversity, for each of your many anatomic features. You and your baby are will be quite unique anatomically relative, to other breastfeeding pairs. So many anatomic factors influence your breastfeeding relationship!

What matters is that you and your baby know how to practice fitting together in a way that brings as much of your nipple and breast tissue into your baby's mouth as possible, regardless of your unique anatomic characteristics. Some anatomic factors might pose challenges, but a mother-baby pair have built-in resilience because there are so many other factors which compensate.

Some mother-baby pairs are more resilient than others, not because that woman is trying any harder than the mother for whom breastfeeding isn't going well, but because she and her baby have more anatomic buffer (or 'give', or resilience) in their shared anatomic systems.