‘Why you should never stick your fingers in your baby's mouth'

"You might think you're helping to quickly remove food or a toy before your child chokes, but it's actually really dangerous," Nikki Jurcutz from Tiny Hearts Education reveals.

If you’ve ever been to a baby first aid course, you might remember the choking part of the lesson well.

I remember because the idea of putting my tiny baby over my lap and banging him on the back to dislodge whatever he was choking on seemed counterintuitive.

I’d spent so much time being careful with my pregnant belly, making sure my newborn baby’s wobbly head was well supported, it felt wrong to bang him on the back so hard.

But I guess a bruised back is better than a child choking to death.

Before you get to the choking stage though, a child has to have something in their mouth, and while it can be tempting to use your finger to hook the object – a bit of food, LEGO, a toy – out of the baby’s mouth, that can actually be quite dangerous.

“Avoid sticking your fingers into your child’s mouth,” Nikki Jurcutz of Tiny Hearts Education said in a recent Instagram post.

The advice was news to me, but Nikki has two very good reasons for telling parents to avoid using this technique.

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Don’t put your fingers in your child’s mouth

Both Nikki’s reasons make a lot of sense.

“By blindly sticking your finger in, you may push the food further back,” she said.

“It can cause your child to be distressed. A distressed child may gasp/cry and they may breathe in.”

So what do you do instead?

Nikki said depending on how dire the situation is, there are a few steps you can take to try to get a toy or piece of food out of a child’s mouth.

First, open your own mouth and stick out your tongue, making an “aah” sound. The goal here is to get the baby to mimic you in the hope that they’ll give up whatever is in their mouth.

Nikki Jurcutz demonstrated how to safely remove food from a baby's mouth. Photo: Instagram

If that doesn’t work, try distraction. “Give the child something else, a bit of banana for example. Often when you give them something else, they might spit what’s in their mouth out.

“As an absolute last resort, if you must use your fingers, you must do it carefully,” Nikki said. “You need to go on the side of their cheek, very carefully push the food out from the front without going too far back or distressing your child.”

Originally published as ‘Why you should never stick your fingers in your baby's mouth'