Breastfeeding is not a unique parenting experience. It’s the first give and take interaction that we have with our children. It’s not just about food. It’s a relationship. For me it was the place where I had to learn that I can’t force my children to do something and that in some ways I’m as dependent on them as they are on me (you can not force feed a baby at the breast). I learned that change is the normal state of children (breastfeeding a newborn is totally different from a 3 month old from a 9 month old from a toddler). I learned that stages of parenting end — no matter what you do (all babies wean sooner or later, easily or with tears). So when I ran across this blog post (which is not at all about breastfeeding) I thought this mama’s words were good breastfeeding advice:
We think our children and their lives are about us, when really it’s about them. And that’s where we go wrong…While having babies doesn’t come with a “contract” like marriage and business relationships, the act of conceiving, birthing, and keeping your baby creates a binding contract. You promise to love that baby unconditionally, treat it fairly, and set it free when it’s time.
Successful breastfeeding sometimes takes a lot of letting go of our own preconceptions about what mothering will be like and accepting our babies for the unique people that they are.
Yes, of course everyone knows this. But it’s true for successful breastfeeding too. According to one study (Clinical Pediatrics, Vol. 33, No. 4, 214-219 (1994)):
Strongapproval of breastfeeding by the father was associated witha high incidence of breastfeeding (98.1 %), compared to only26.9% breastfeeding when the father was indifferent to feedingchoice
NEW YORK, Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ — For World Breastfeeding Week, Phantom-Financial announces the unveiling of a life-size park bench sculpture of Angelina Jolie nude with her twin babies by New York artist Daniel Edwards just minutes from Brad Pitt’s own birthplace in the Oklahoma City Metro area in September before its Fall exhibition in London.
“Landmark for Breastfeeding,” inspired by last year’s cover of W magazine featuring Angelina Jolie suckling her baby, depicts a seated nude Jolie double-breastfeeding twins. The tranquil bronze statue demonstrates the “football-hold,” an accepted technique for breastfeeding two babies simultaneously…
My thoughts? I sure hope this helps people feel more comfortable with breastfeeding rather than providing shock value. I have the feeling it will probably go both ways, depending on the viewer. Also it doesn’t look like a very comfortable nursing position to stay in for very long (but it is a statue after all…).
Breastfeeding isn’t something that we can do to babies — we have to create an environment where babies can breastfeed. Mothers offer access to the breast and support babies’ instincts and skills. Babies do the work. As a breastfeeding advocate and supporter, I’ve discovered that I have to learn what makes it possible for babies to figure out how to breastfeed. To nurse effectively, babies need to feel calm, safe, and comfortable so I’m always excited to find information about promoting infant mental health.
My latest discovery is the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health. They have position papers about responding to infant cues, “crying it out”, and “time outs”. I love the fact that these papers reference studies to justify their claims. A little preview from their position paper on responsing to infants’ cues:
AAIMHI maintains that babies’ upset feelings are to be taken seriously, and that parents should be encouraged to do whatever they can to help soothe their babies (for example holding, stroking, rocking, singing, or talking to the baby). When parents help babies to manage their difficult feelings, their babies learn how to do this for themselves as they grow older, thus they develop a healthy autonomy. This is true even if the crying persists – as often the cause of a baby’s cry may not be immediately evident to the parent. However, research indicates that responding appropriately to infants’ cues can have positive long term, and possibly even transgenerational consequences.
It really is different nursing an older baby or toddler. I’ve heard women say that they would never nurse a baby that could ask to nurse. While that might work for them, I found that breastfeeding just started to get easy around the time my babies started to talk. At the end of the first year we’d solved most of the problems, the pressure was off because the children were eating other foods as well, but the comfort and bonding were still there (oh yeah, and it was still excellent nutrition). Also little kids say really funny things about anything in their life — including nursing. Anyway, this is a long introduction to an article that is a taste of what it can be like to nurse a toddler. Molly Remer writes about her 2 1/2 year old:
At dinner, eating grapes, my boy picks out a large grape and a very small grape. He is delighted with the small grape, “baby grape! Baby grape!” He holds up the large one and announces, “Mama grape.” He sets them on the table and carefully pushes the small grape towards the large one until they are touching. “Dat baby grape have na-nas!” he reports with obvious satisfaction. Later, he eats them both.
This is just a tiny excerpt — check out the whole thing at Literary Mama. It’s called Nursing Johnny Depp. (There is a plastic Jack Sparrow action figure involved here…)
Check out this hiking adventure from Erin Lotz at Outdoor Baby where two moms forget a very important item on their Grand Canyon trip. Here’s a little bit of the intro:
We planned to hike to the river, spend a night, hike along the river, spend another night, and then hike all the way back. I think that was the itinerary. I was to procure three items that would be shared and were considered critical (as opposed to our shared pots and tent which were less critical). I was to bring a breast pump in order for us to “pump and dump” and therefore continue lactating for our breastfed one-year-olds. I was also to bring a coffee press mug for Kristine. Since she would be pumping and dumping, she could indulge in coffee on this trip — something she was looking forward to nearly as much as the hike itself. Finally, I was to bring one of the two dinners. Now remember, packing was somewhat haphazard.
On June 11, 2009, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (NY) and Senator Jeff Merkley (OR) introduced the Breastfeeding Promotion Act in both houses of Congress, to provide a unified national policy to keep mothers, their children, and their communities healthy. This is the first time the bill has been introduced in the Senate.
The Breastfeeding Promotion Act (H.R. 2819, S. 1244) includes five provisions:
Amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding women from being fired or discriminated against in the workplace.
Provides tax incentives for businesses that establish private lactation areas in the workplace, or provide breastfeeding equipment or consultation services to their employees.
Provides for a performance standard to ensure breast pumps are safe and effective.
Allows breastfeeding equipment and consultation services to be tax deductible for families (amends Internal Revenue Code definition of “medical care”).
Protects the privacy of breastfeeding mothers by ensuring they have break time and a private place to pump (applies to employers with 50 or more employees, see text of legislation for details).
Something to think about and write to your representatives about. It’s exciting to see breastfeeding become a visible, national health care issue. Having said that, I still think that what breastfeeding mothers and babies really need is good maternity leave policy. Protecting mothers’ ability to pump milk for their babies is a great start but not a true replacement for time together during those first months of life.
I thought you might enjoy this short video clip about the benefits of bedsharing to breastfeeding babies. It’s a really short clip and doesn’t talk about guidelines for safe bedsharing. For more about safety, check out Dr. James McKenna’s website.
Here’s a link to a free, on-line presentation by one of the world’s experts on this topic: Karleen Gribble. I found it informative without being at all dry. Here is what she says about the presentation:
I recently gave a presentation at the Gold09 conference on infant feeding in emergencies and what individuals and organisations can do to prepare to make a difference for this year’s World Breastfeeding Week, the theme for which is “Breastfeeding: a vital emergency response.” Denise Fisher of Health-e-Learning kindly agreed to place this presentation online free for anyone to view so that more mums and babies in the most difficult of circumstances can benefit from WBW. I know that some have struggled to think about how they can make this theme relevent for their community, this presentation gives a heap of ideas of different things you can do. Details are below. Please pass the details about the talk onto anyone who you might think would be interested through your networks- it is just as applicable to “ordinary mums” as health professionals. The more awareness there is of how to help mums and babies in emergencies the more there will be who will genuinely be helped and the fewer harmed- so sadly many babies die because of well meaning but inappropriate aid.
Karleen Gribble
Australia
If you would like to give people direct access to the recordings without having to go through SummitZero, we’re perfectly happy for that too. You can distribute these direct links as you wish.
Here are the opening paragraphs from a 1998 article in the Harvard Gazette:
America’s “let them cry” attitude toward children may lead to more fears and tears among adults, according to two Harvard Medical School researchers.
Instead of letting infants cry, American parents should keep their babies close, console them when they cry, and bring them to bed with them, where they’ll feel safe, according to Michael L. Commons and Patrice M. Miller, researchers at the Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry.
The pair examined childrearing practices here and in other cultures and say the widespread American practice of putting babies in separate beds — even separate rooms — and not responding quickly to their cries may lead to incidents of post-traumatic stress and panic disorders when these children reach adulthood.
Breastfeeding advocates have known for a long time that responding to babies’ cries supports successful breastfeeding. Because babies do the work in breastfeeding (mothers just create access and a supportive environment), breastfeeding relies on responsiveness to what babies communicate.
I was happy to see that there is research on this topic relating to mental health (not just feeding choices). I’m sad that the research is over a decade old and still not widely publicized. Maybe it’s just hard to go against cultural beliefs.
I still need to track down the actual studies that this article is based on. I’m looking forward to reading them. I’m hoping that they are good quality research — and I hope even more that there have been follow-up studies in the last 11 years.
