Early Days
Feeding Your Baby... The Trickier Questions
With the theme of this edition being ‘awkward conversations’ I was asked to write an article about awkward baby feeding questions. It isn’t so much a case of an awkward question, but more that many baby feeding questions don’t have a straightforward or definitive answer, or the answer might be nuanced depending upon the situation, and some questions could take a whole antenatal session to explore fully.
NCT breastfeeding counsellors are trained to be knowledgeable about all aspects of baby feeding, trained in facilitation and counselling skills and most importantly trained to be parent-centred. In an antenatal session this means we respond to the needs of the group, and when we’re one-on-one in a postnatal situation we respond to the needs of the parent. Whilst we’re all mothers and have our own experiences and feelings about baby feeding, these really are not of interest or relevance when we’re working with expectant and new parents as it is their experience that is our concern.
We welcome questions, but the answer might not be straightforward...
Jenny Hemsley, NCT Breastfeeding Counsellor talks us through some of these questions.
Q: Why do so many people struggle with breastfeeding when it is such a natural thing?
Now this is a huge question!
On a simple level, breastfeeding is a natural thing but it is also a learned skill that used to be passed down the generations through families and friends. Breastfeeding was supported, encouraged and efforts would be made to solve problems together. This is embodied by the old saying “that it takes a village to raise a child”. If our predecessors hadn’t mastered it, the human race wouldn’t have survived this long. This is not to say that everything used to be perfect; there have always been babies who couldn’t latch and mothers who couldn’t produce enough breastmilk, and there were of course much higher levels of maternal and infant mortality.
Winding forward to today, over 90% of women in the UK say they want to breastfeed, yet we have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world at 12 months, with less than 1% of women breastfeeding their baby. The UK compares unfavourably to other countries with a similar cultural, economic and social profile, which suggests that it is something to do with the norms and attitudes of our society towards breastfeeding which cause breastfeeding challenges and the often associated maternal guilt. Simply put, we live in a village where, although breastfeeding is promoted, using formula milk is considered the norm and access to skilled breastfeeding support is a postcode lottery. Most people have far more experience of using formula milk, few people have an understanding of how breastfeeding works, advice comes from self-proclaimed experts motivated by selling books and an industry with a vested interest in selling baby food and related products. We’ve also massively underinvested in the support systems that new mothers need to achieve their breastfeeding goals.
I can thoroughly recommend Amy Brown’s new book, Breastfeeding Uncovered for an in-depth look at this question.
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