When Do Babies Blow Raspberries

It really is a milestone

Blowing raspberries — sticking the tongue out between the lips and blowing, usually with a great deal of spit — is not just a phase babies go through. It is on the CDC's checklists as a listed six-month milestone, worded as "blows 'raspberries' (sticks tongue out and blows)".

It is one of the items added in the 2022 revision. That revision, carried out by an American Academy of Pediatrics expert group and published in Pediatrics, rebuilt the checklists around milestones that "most (≥75%) children would be expected to achieve" at a given age and that are "easily observed in natural settings". A raspberry is about as observable as a milestone gets, which is presumably why it made the cut.

The ages three bodies give

• HSE (Ireland): at five months, a baby will "make 'raspberry' (spitting) sounds".
• ASHA: in the four to six month band, babies "blow 'raspberries'", alongside vocalising different vowel sounds sometimes combined with a consonant.
• CDC checklists: six months, meaning the age by which most children do it.

Read those together and the honest range is roughly four to six months, with a lot of babies doing it earlier and some doing it later or barely at all. The three sources are not in conflict; the HSE and ASHA are describing when it typically appears, and the CDC number is a 75th-percentile marker.

Where it fits in the sequence

Raspberries sit between cooing and babbling. The CDC lists cooing sounds like "oooo" and "aahh" at four months, then raspberries, squealing and taking turns making sounds at six months, then consonant strings like "mamamama" and "babababa" at nine months. The HSE follows the same arc: chuckling at three months, "ah-goo" at four, raspberries at five, "baba" and "gagaga" at six.

What it is actually practice for

Speech needs the lips, tongue and breath to work together with precise timing. A raspberry is all three at once: tongue forward, lips closed around it, air pushed through in a controlled stream. Babies who are blowing raspberries are rehearsing exactly the machinery that later produces "b", "p" and "m" — which is why the first consonants most babies land on are the ones the lips make.

It is also social. Most babies do it more when someone does it back. The HSE lists blowing raspberries among the things babies enjoy doing with a parent, in the same breath as tickles, cuddles and counting toes, and its general advice for nought to twelve months is to "copy their sounds and actions – this shows you are interested" and to "leave little pauses for them to take their turn".

The AAP describes the same principle from the language side: after about six or seven months a baby "begins actively imitating the sounds of speech" and becomes "much more responsive to the sounds she hears you make". A raspberry exchange is a conversation with no words in it.

The mess is not a problem

Raspberries produce drool, and they often coincide with the months when drooling increases anyway. Neither means teeth are on the way, and neither needs managing beyond a bib. Babies also frequently blow raspberries with food in their mouth, which is startling for the person feeding them but is exploration rather than refusal.

If your baby is not doing it

Plenty of babies never blow a proper raspberry and go on to talk perfectly normally. It is not a required step, and no guideline lists its absence as a reason to seek advice on its own. What the guidance watches is the wider category: whether a baby is making a growing variety of sounds and using them with you.

The HSE's thresholds for that are: contact a GP or public health nurse if by four months your baby does "not coo or make sounds"; if by five months they do "not chuckle or laugh". The AAP gives the seven-month line: "If she doesn't babble or imitate any sounds by her seventh month, it could mean a problem with her hearing or speech development." And at any age, contact someone if your baby loses a skill they already had — the instruction the HSE repeats at every month of the first year.

If your baby was born early

Use corrected age. A baby born two months early sits two months behind their birth age on all of these milestones, and the HSE's worked example is a ten-month-old born two months early having a corrected age of eight months. The AAP advises adjusting until two years, by which point most children born preterm have caught up.

One last thing worth saying: raspberries need a mouth that is free. A baby with a dummy in for long stretches has fewer chances to experiment, and the NHS advises offering a dummy only at sleep times once a baby is six to twelve months, on the grounds that "it's hard to learn to talk with a dummy in your mouth".

Raspberries at mealtimes

The raspberry stage tends to collide with the start of solid food, and the two get confused. A baby who blows a spoonful of puree across the room has usually discovered a new noise rather than rejected the meal, and the same baby will often take the next spoonful happily. Treating it as refusal, and stopping the meal, teaches something that was not intended.

It is worth separating from the signs that a baby has genuinely finished. The CDC's revised checklist lists "closes lips to show she does not want more food" at six months, which is a different behaviour entirely: lips closed and turning away, rather than lips open and blowing. Watching for that closed-lip signal, rather than stopping at the first mess, keeps mealtimes readable.

Some babies do it constantly for weeks

A stretch where a baby blows raspberries at every opportunity, including in the middle of the night, is normal and self-limiting. The AAP describes babies repeating one sound for days at a stretch before moving on to another, and this is the loudest example of that pattern. It passes when the next sound arrives.