Breastfeeding | Motherworldly

25 Jun

Emma’s breastfeeding story

Emma is a mum of two girls and juggles motherhood with running two small businesses with her husband. She wrote this post about breastfeeding a little while ago.

Boobs.

There. I’ve said it.

This post is all about boobs.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time with my boobs out at the moment. Not because I’m a weirdo, or a life model or even a glamour model; but because we chose to breastfeed both our children. For me, it was the only choice I felt comfortable with and I was fortunate that both my girls took to it fairly easily.

It’s not been easy though. First time around I had problems with positioning early on and suffered pain from cracked nipples, mastitis and also sheer embarrassment at feeding in front of people. I remember sitting up in bed crying with pain and talking about giving up and trying a bottle but still we kept going to my goal of 6 months. Then we hit weaning and feeds were dropped and before we knew it, we reached a year.

When my first child was 18 months old, I had an early miscarriage. I am pretty sure the combination of breastfeeding and jet lag was to blame. We didn’t tell many people and we ‘buried’ the feelings. It wasn’t meant to be. My daughter still needed me, I was just getting started in the businesses, so there was plenty to take my mind off things. I don’t think we dealt with it very well.

I actually ended up stopping feeding my first at 27 months but I think my daughter would have kept going for longer had I let her. I felt I needed this little bit of my life back – although it was only once a day by that point. We also wanted to try for another baby again and thought a little break between feeding and pregnancy would be nice…

Within 3-4 months, I was pregnant again. Our second baby is now 5 months old and again she is being exclusively breastfed. I’ve been surprised by how hard I’ve found it this time. I’ve had mastitis three times and problems with oversupply. Currently my daughter is so distracted during the day, she chooses to feed mainly at night, so I’m not getting much sleep. Coupled with the fact that I am so tied to the baby as no-one else can feed her, other areas of my life are being neglected somewhat.

I’ve had to feed in business meetings, in school meetings, whilst reading bedtime stories, during mealtimes, in cafes, churches, on beaches; and I’ve spent a stupid amount of time lying down in darkened rooms with only a baby, my naked chest and my thoughts for company.

I am SO over breastfeeding now but I will continue until we both decide we have had enough. Whilst this is me doing this, my husband and I are both in agreement that this is the best thing for us all right now despite the difficulties. I love it and can’t stand it in equal measure but I know I will look back in time and feel so glad that I did this.

14 Jun

Breastfeeding in front of other people

Emma is a mum of two girls and juggles motherhood with running two small businesses with her husband. She has kindly shared some of her thoughts about breastfeeding in public.

Breastfeeding in public isn’t always easy. I’ve breastfed both of my daughters. I breastfed my eldest until she was 27 months and I’m still breastfeeding my youngest at 22 months. Up to around 5 months both times, I had letdown problems – mainly because of oversupply. I produced a lot of milk and would find I would spray, leak or soak a muslin or several breastpads with the milk I was producing. Breastfeeding discretely wasn’t always easy. Once my girls got to about 3-4 months they would come off my breast mid feed and look around, leaving me spraying everywhere. I preferred to use quiet breastfeeding rooms if I could to minimise the distractions. With my second baby, I found I had to lie down to stop the milk flowing so quickly so feeding in public was very difficult as you can’t exactly lie down in the middle of a cafe! Once I was trying to feed her in a very noisy, busy restaurant in the middle of Cardiff (Jamie Oliver’s actually). Our table was in the middle of the restaurant and there was a draft blowing on us and people kept walking past. She wasn’t really old enough for solids yet so her only source of food was milk. I ended up going upstairs and sitting on a stool in a quiet corridor outside the disabled toilet (which was occupied). I felt like a total idiot when a man came out of the toilet with his son. It was that or sit on the toilet in the ladies – not very pleasant!

I stopped breastfeeding in public both times around 9/10 months in, once most of the daytime feeds had been replaced by solids and restricted feeding to quiet moments at home or in a friend or family member’s home. This is partly because both of my daughters were quite inquisitive and would detach from my breast and have a look around. It was also because they were more likely to help themselves and the position they were feeding in was more toddler like. This made me feel uncomfortable.

I have mostly found cafes, restaurants and so on to be quite accommodating if you ask if there’s somewhere quiet you can go. I’ve not always felt comfortable asking and sometimes others with me have felt more awkward than me around me breastfeeding.

Things that annoy me:
Signs for feeding that imply bottle feeding like a bottle icon – as seen in lots of motorway service stations.
Places that don’t have a breastfeeding/bottle feeding room.
Breastfeeding/bottle feeding rooms (I don’t mind being mixed together) that smell of poo and aren’t clean.
Separate rooms for feeding choice – seems a bit weird to do that but perhaps it’s because people other than mothers can bottle feed and breastfeeding mothers can feel uncomfortable?
The implication that because your baby is over 6 months you should move over to a bottle. The adverts on tv for follow on milk don’t help this. I know many do choose to and have to if they are going back to work but for those of us making the choice to carry on, it makes it harder.

04 Jun

What’s wrong with this poster?

Walking past the Tesco store in Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, I glanced through the window into the cafe, and saw this huge poster. “Here to help,” it says, in big friendly letters. “Hungry baby? We’re happy to warm your milk for you.” There’s a smiley face, and the name of the ten year old who designed it.

That’s kind, you might think. They’re giving out free jumpers, which on a miserable drizzly day seems like a nice thing to do. And then you would realise that the poster assumes that you are bottlefeeding. And statistically, they may well be right [let’s trot out those stats again: 81% of mothers initiate breastfeeding, 58% are still breastfeeding at six weeks, 12% at four months].

While the poster does not explicitly state that breastfeeding mothers are not welcome, and under the Equalities Act 2010 they are required to accommodate breastfeeding mothers, the underlying assumption that anyone with a baby in the cafe will have a bottle of milk with them simply undermines breastfeeding, and that contributes to the rapid drop-off in breastfeeding rates in the UK. There is no poster welcoming breastfeeding mothers; there would not be room for one anyway, as the bottlefeeding poster takes up the entire wall. And it would make no sense to put up a poster stating that both breastfeeding and bottlefeeding mothers are welcome. That, however, was the response from @UKTesco, when I tweeted about the poster: please be aware, breast feeding is always welcome at the store 🙂

You might think I’m getting a bit stale if I continually bang on about not dividing up the breastfeeding mothers and the bottlefeeding mothers into separate camps. The statistics above tell us that a huge proportion of breastfeeding mothers also bottlefeed, so the distinction is very vague anyway. How hard can it be to make all mothers feel welcome, and advise them that facilities are available for whatever kind of feeding they need to do?

However there is another problem with this poster, which is that it implies bottles could be made up in advance and warmed up. This contravenes NHS guidelines to make up each feed as your baby needs it, because of the risk of food poisoning bacteria in the formula. Perhaps they could go back to offering hot water (over 70 degrees) instead. And perhaps not get ten year olds to devise their policies.

25 Mar

Breastfeeding and going back to work

In that chaotic blur of cuddles and tears that is the first few weeks with your baby, when you’re taking it one feed at a time, it’s possible that you might miss your working day. The luxury of time to sit at your desk and think, drink a cup of tea while it’s still hot, chat with other adults about matters non-baby, oh those were the days!

And as your baby grows and you settle into your new roles, perhaps the thought of work recedes for a little while; but towards the end of your maternity leave, you have to start making decisions. Whether you will go back or not; would you need to apply to change your hours; what sort of childcare you might need… and if you’re still breastfeeding, how on earth are you going to manage that?

During pregnancy and in the early weeks of motherhood, my assumption was that I would stop breastfeeding at six months, ready for when I returned to work at seven months. I interviewed several childminders and chose the one I was most comfortable with, and her assumption was also that I would be providing formula for him during the day. I arranged the date I would start back at work; and, all this in place, proceeded to wean from the breast.

Only I had failed, yet again, to consider what my son would agree to. Not only did the little terror categorically refuse to eat food of any sort, lips sealed head turned and expressing RAGE with every part of his being; but he was also absolutely not prepared to countenance the nasty bottle I kept trying to tempt him with. It was distressing for both of us. It was distressing for my partner, when he tried to give a bottle. It was a disaster.

Dani says of her daughter,

it never occured to me that she wouldn’t be ok when I returned back to work when she was a year old … it resulted in us both getting very upset & her wanting to feed even more, probably as reassurance more than anything, but I knew she had to be ok to go without when the option wasn’t there & I didn’t know how to prepare her for that without stopping the majority of feeds in the day.

Both Dani and I eventually made the decision not to wean, but to follow our babies’ lead and carry on breastfeeding when we returned to work. In practical terms, by six months in my case and a year in Dani’s, our milk supplies would have been robust enough to cope with a more chaotic feeding pattern, so for example I could feed my son on my days off and at night, and needed to express for the first few weeks back at work.

Ann tells what it was like to arrange to express at work:

My company bought a reclining garden chair for me to sit in, and put it in the shower room (which isn’t as bad as it sounds), it was actually quite pleasant …Except expressing takes ages. I was hand expressing. Every day. For two hours at the beginning to get the 400mls of milk A needed every day.

But two hours was difficult to fit in when I was working on two projects, and I was leaking if I didn’t manage to get away at the right times to express, so I had constantly sore boobs.

Then [I had to work] on site, and the medical room only had a mag lock, and you couldn’t lock it from the inside once you were in, and anyone who had a pass could walk in. And it was also used as the Muslim prayer room. And yes, I was walked in on. Twice.

My bottles of expressed milk in the office fridge caused some raised eyebrows. Ann sensibly recommends putting them in an opaque make up bag. It’s useful to know that expressed milk will keep at room temperature for a few hours, and longer in a cool bag, so you can take it home, refrigerate it, and send it with your baby the next day. If your baby will drink it, which mine did not.

My childminder was frankly horrified, and found it very hard to look after a baby who did not eat a thing from drop-off to pick-up. With my head full of going back to work, I feel I took my eye off the ball and failed to see that for my baby, it wasn’t just the milk he was going to miss, it was me.

In a similar situation, Dani actually made the decision to stop working altogether:

I handed my notice in at work, using the remainder of my annual leave I’d accrued on maternity leave to cover my notice period & once I took the pressure off to reduce her feeds, we came out of a 2 month long fog. I felt happier, L seemed happier & I accepted that was how it was going to be. What I didn’t count on was a childminder who wasn’t to be beaten & she wanted to give L another week.

With a few changes, L settled in and Dani did go back to work. She says I think that letting her do it at her own rate was what helped her eventually be ok without. There is hope for those mummies with boobaholic babies, L shows it can be done!

But babies develop and adjust to change at different rates, and Ann, no longer expressing but still feeding all night, feels that they are not there yet:

I want to continue, but at 17.5 months, I’m desperately tired, and have been horribly ill, and I’m honestly wondering whether it’s worth continuing or not.

None of these decisions are easy, and all come with a payload of guilt, one way or another. If you’re in the tiny percentage of mothers in the UK still breastfeeding beyond six months, it’s hard to access relevant support. It may feel like your peers have all stopped feeding long ago, or that the groups you’ve been going to are mainly focused on feeding newborns; in any case once you’re back at work you no longer have access to the drop-in groups and the whole thing can be very isolating. I retreated very much into online support from various forums where being a ‘toddler-feeding weirdo’ was a point of pride; now I meet such people all the time through my work, and make an effort to put them in touch with each other, so the peer support can continue. If you find yourself reading this and wondering where the help is coming from, or asking yourself who is going to understand, please get in touch, or call one of the breastfeeding helplines, where most of the counsellors answering calls will be or have been, like you, in that tiny percentage.

NCT Breastfeeding Line 0300 33 00 700 7 days a week 8am–midnight

Ann writes at beta parent and is @pixeldiva on twitter.
Dani is @boo_bowglin on twitter.

10 Dec

Running 10k

I can’t do it.
I’ve never done it before.
It will hurt.
My mum couldn’t do it.
It will be really time-consuming.
It’s tiring.
I’m not sure my body’s up to it.
I don’t know how to do it.
I don’t want to do it in public.
I have to do it all, my partner can’t do it for me.
It might be better to drive.

Oh well, I’ll give it a go. But I won’t beat myself up if I can’t do it.

The British 10k, 14th July 2013

26 Nov

Fiona’s story of Breastfeeding Twins

As a mum of two already, I knew the benefits of breastfeeding and also of natural birth and wanted both for my twin delivery and well-being when they had arrived. We joined Penny Price’s ‘Having Twins’ classes and made some great friends and learned loads. One class was tailor made for feeding, it was totally un-biased and we all discussed several ideas, different bottles, sterilisers, breast pumps and all our options also having a long session with an NCT breast feeding counsellor who talked about feeding two and showed us pictures and ideas of how to try, should we wish to.

I think if the boys were my first pregnancy I would have taken professional medical advice about delivery and feeding which in my opinion now, would have been a mistake. The Royal Berks deliver 90% of their twins by C section and the research behind this (which I extensively trawled through) is that it’s ‘safer’ to plan and deliver twins by C section. Midwives are also out of practice delivering twins, the less they deliver the less experience presumably they get and it becomes a ridiculous ever decreasing circle. I was very stubborn throughout and insisted I wanted to deliver them and feed them myself but came across very negative medical professionals. As it was they were both breech throughout my preganancy. My Consultant told me that no.1 had to be head down or it’s a non-starter anyway. Harrison turned round and engaged the night before my section… Apparently an impossibility itself and “too late” to change their plans at the RBH. Obviously the Specialist had a round of golf booked at 2pm.

Once they had arrived at just before noon, Harry roared in indignation at being removed and then decided that he couldn’t be doing with this breathing lark, causing mild hysteria and a quick trip upstairs to SCBU. It took the staff about 5 mins to realise he was a total drama queen (like me) and well over four hours (paperwork and procedures) to return him to his anxious mother.

Alex latched on in ‘Recovery’, beautifully, encouraged by a smashing midwife and we admired him for what felt like hours. He had several snuggles and sucked away like he had done it many times.

At about 5pm we were reuinted as a family and I was relieved no-one had given, Harry any formula. He was quite wriggly but we had a go at double feeding. I had my best friend and fantastic doula Ailsa on hand and she propped me up in bed with two V shaped pillows and tucked a baby under each breast (rugby ball style) and we were all happy and comfy. It was frankly a euphoric moment and one I will treasure forever.

We slept like that, I had my catheter in still and a steady stream of drinking water, biscuits and my iPhone so why move? In the morning the midwife was amazed and asked me if I was ok and did I need any formula. We had had a good night, just the three of us. We all drank, snuggled, snoozed and updated facebook. Why would I have needed formula?

I stayed in the RBH for a week which is unusual but the boys weren’t putting on ‘enough’ weight … and I was encouraged many times to give them a bottle. I have to confess to feeling I would be a failure if I did. It got to a point where I just wanted to get my boys home and settle so I tried the bottled milk, I always fed them myself first and then topped up with a weeny dose of the stuff. It worked a treat and we trundled home like a travelling circus of bags, balloons, flowers, buggy.

We managed to breastfeed Alex and Harry for the first six weeks of their lives. I was lucky enough to always have Carl on hand to help, Ailsa my doula ‘extraordinaire’ and a huge circle of family and friends who cooked for us, walked dogs, got our shopping, did the school run and endless errands and jobs.

My advice to any Twin parents would be

To prepare in advance and do all the research so you know how to breast feed and where to get help if it gets tricky
To get hold of several pillows (V shaped are awesome) and take them into hospital
To remember you are not ill (and neither are they) so medical professional may not be the ideal source of advice. You are the parents and most likely your gut feeling is right; join twin clubs and make other twin parent friends and ask them what they have been through and tried.
To accept ALL help available
Cherish every moment, it’s a unique club and although its hard work I genuinely believe its not all that much harder than a single baby, just a million times more special.

NCT Breastfeeding Counsellors can support you with feeding twins. Call the NCT Breastfeeding Line between 8am and midnight, 365 days a year, on 0300 3300 0700

22 Nov

What does your NCT Breastfeeding Counsellor do for you?

Sometimes I think I have the best job in the world. I meet parents-to-be at the most exciting time, towards the end of pregnancy, and help them to think about what they want for the first days and weeks of their babies’ lives. I find the subject of breastfeeding endlessly fascinating, and could easily fill twice as much time as I usually get to spend with parents antenatally. Since I qualified 3.5 years ago, I have learned so much from the people I work with, and I like to think that my approach constantly evolves and improves to take account of the different decision-making processes used in different families. I have grown to be more accepting of different styles of parenting, and to value parenting in itself, in all its different facets.

At the moment I am very busy facilitating breastfeeding sessions on antenatal courses in Wokingham, Twyford, Reading, Bracknell, Crowthorne and Camberley, and sometimes as far afield as Marlow and Slough.

For the last four years, we have had a weekly drop-in breastfeeding support group at Brambles Children’s Centre. This started slowly but has gone from strength to strength. We see around 350 new parents a year at the group, and have a great working relationship with the Health Visiting Team, who work across the corridor from us at the baby clinic. Unfortunately the Children’s Centre management has decided to close down the group, choosing to direct their funding towards more targeted and measurable working. We are not yet sure if this will involve NCT, but it’s certainly very sad not to be working from Brambles anymore.

I also host the Bumps and Babies group that meets on the first and third Wednesday of the month at the Bradbury Centre in Wokingham. Every other meeting has a speaker or an activity, but the group mainly has a social support function, giving new mums the opportunity to get out of the house and meet people. I’m there to provide breastfeeding support if it’s needed.

Breastfeeding Counsellors can work on the NCT’s national Breastfeeding Line (0300 3300 0700) listening to and supporting mothers and fathers across the country. I usually do three hours a week on the line. I also get local calls from parents I have met on antenatal courses; most days there is at least one call, text or email, and sometimes these turn into home visits. All of this part of my work is voluntary. You may also have seen me on Facebook on the NCT page and Wokingham Gossip Girls, just reminding people that support with breastfeeding is available.

When I started my training, my son was eight months old and not taking well to solid food, so introducing solids has always been a subject of great interest to me. I run Introducing Solids Workshops locally, and I’m part of NCT’s Introducing Solids Team, developing our policy, working on the website and information centre to communicate about the subject, and delivering study days for other Breastfeeding Counsellors to be able to run workshops.

People ask me if this is a full time job, and I can honestly say that there isn’t time for much else, although it isn’t full time paid work. I’m very lucky to have a supportive and understanding partner, as well as support from the local team of antenatal teachers within NCT. Sometimes my job is hard work, frustrating and draining, and it feels like you’re carrying the weight of parents’ disappointment and anxiety; sometimes you don’t do anything at all and not doing anything works for that family; and sometimes it’s the most satisfying and interesting work I could ever imagine doing.

[This post is a description of one working week. These are my views and my words, and I do not speak for or represent NCT]

14 Sep

Dani’s breastfeeding journey

I have two daughters, Bella 2 & Lauren 9 months. I don’t know when I decided I was going to breastfeed or whether it was even a conscious decision, but when I got pregnant with Bella, the decision had already been made. I remember going to the breastfeeding antenatal class & coming out thinking “yes, I can do that!”. I read the books, I was looking forward to breastfeeding my daughter when she arrived. I had no reason to believe it wouldn’t happen. I knew about cluster feeding, growth spurts, I’d seen how a baby should latch. Simple, right?

Bella arrived on her due date after a long & tiring labour. I’d planned a drug free labour but ended up having a relatively new labour drug called remifentinal, offered by my hospital. I asked for that 16 hours in because I’d been advised it wouldn’t cause my baby to be drowsy, unlike other forms of pain relief, such as pethadine & an epidural. I had skin to skin with Bella as soon as she was born & tried to latch her onto my breast, but she showed no interest whatsoever & after an hour, we decided to try again later, once I’d been stitched up & moved to the post-natal ward.

For 16 hours, Bella showed no interest whatsoever. I tried, the midwives tried, & she simply fell asleep. I hand expressed miniscule amounts of colostrum which was syringe fed to her instead. Then, late that night, she woke crying & a midwife came to help me latch her on. Bella would latch on but wouldn’t suck & before long, she became so distressed that she started to scream & I ended up having a midwife shove her onto my breast, causing her to cry further. The night continued like that & both Bella & I were crying. I continued to hand express for her & begged the midwife not to give her formula.

We stayed in hospital for 4 nights because I couldn’t get Bella to feed from me. In this time, she was tested for jaundice on several occasions, but her levels were ok, though she was very sleepy & quite an alarming shade of yellow. On day 3, my milk miraculously came in, in spite of her not suckling & I started using a hospital grade pump to express, & cup feeding her. Finally, on our 4th night, she seemed to “get it” & began feeding, albeit only from my right side in rugby ball hold. A midwife spent several hours with me that night trying to get Bella to feed from my left side, but didn’t succeed. I accepted that I would probably have to feed her from one side only, but this didn’t concern me. It seemed a small sacrifice to make if breastfeeding was going to work out. On day 4, the midwife who’d helped me so much the night before weighed Bella before we were discharged at my request. She had, somehow, in spite of the shaky start, only lost 5% of her birth weight, so we were free to go home.

Back home, I just couldn’t get Bella to feed at all. It didn’t matter if I tried to feed her before she was crying, or when she was crying, she’d latch on & then pull right off. After 5 hours, she fell asleep, clearly exhausted, but she’d not fed so I knew she would wake hungry again. She did, & the whole process repeated itself. I sent my partner out for nipple shields the next morning, & when a midwife came to see me, she tried over & over to latch Bella on, with no success & she left, advising me to keep trying & to express & feed that to Bella if need be. For the next 8 days, Bella was almost completely express fed. I did, rarely, get her to latch on with a nipple shield, but that would be following several hours of screaming, then a 5 minute or so feed before she’d fall asleep exhausted, only to wake minutes later & the cycle to repeat itself.

I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I knew having a newborn baby was going to be hard, but I didn’t think it was supposed to be like this! I blamed myself, I barely stopped crying & was wondering if we could return the baby. No-one could tell us why breastfeeding wasn’t working & why Bella wouldn’t latch. Just that “she’d get there eventually”.

The worst night of my life was when Bella was 12 days old. For some reason, that night I was completely unable to express. I had no milk to give Bella, it was a Sunday night & I had nothing to feed her. I called the midwife unit at my hospital begging for help & was told we could go in & they’d give us formula. When we went there, Bella was screaming with hunger, a midwife gave me 4 bottles of formula, told me to go to bed & let my partner take over the night feeds & let me go to sleep, then gave me some sleeping tablets & sent us on our way. We had no idea how to formula feed & my partner was as tired as I was. I woke at about 1am to hear him crying, Bella was throwing up the formula & screaming & in desperation, I called the midwife unit again & eventually we were readmitted after I pleaded with them to help. When we arrived, Bella was taken away from me for the night, I was given more sleeping tablets & put away in a make shift room at the end or a corridor after a midwife asked “did you not think having a baby would be hard work?”. The next day, I pumped what I could for Bella & was later (wrongly) diagnosed with PND & put on anti-depressents & discharged. We didn’t leave the hospital that day, I wasn’t ready to go home, I needed more help. & I spent another couple of nights on a nicer ward, with kinder midwives, who helped me combine feed with formula & expressed milk Bella & reassured me that my experience wasn’t “normal” & that what I was doing was ok. We left hospital when Bella was 15 days old with a much more settled little girl.

I continued to express until Bella was a month old, but my supply was dropping in spite of round the clock pumping with a hospital grade pump & I made the decision to formula feed her exclusively. I was never happy with this decision, I’d wanted to breastfeed so much & failed. I mourned what we should have had & felt guilty for not being able to give Bella the best. I tried to relactate many times over the next few months, but Bella screamed if she was placed anywhere near my breast & I had to accept it was never going to be.

I found out I was pregnant again when Bella was 8 1/2 months old. I was overjoyed, but I was also determined to “get it right” this time, yet haunted by my breastfeeding experience with Bella & this played on my mind throughout my second pregnancy. At my lowest points, I almost made the decision not to try in case I failed again.

I armed myself with more information, I went along to breastfeeding support groups to make myself “known”. I called the lactation consultant at my hospital & told her my story & asked for her advice for the second time round. She promised me she’d keep an eye out for me going into labour & help me if need be.

I gave birth to Lauren 5 days after her due date. My labour was very different to Bella’s, it was shorter, I kept active, I managed it drug free & she was born in the water at the midwife led unit at my hospital. While we were still in the water, I tried to latch her on, but she was fussing & after half an hour, the midwife suggested we got out & had skin to skin on the bed & try again. I honestly believed at this point that it was going to be history repeating itself. Once on the bed, the midwife instantly got Lauren latched on & she fed for 1 1/2 hours on both breasts. I cried with happiness.

Lauren’s almost 9 months old now & our breastfeeding journey simply went from strength to strength. She really was born to breastfeed. She really was a textbook breastfed baby, cluster feeding, growth spurting, comfort feeding. She has healed my wounds from “failing” Bella, I’ve realised that some obstacles are pretty much insurmountable & I did everything I could with Bella, it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve since discovered Bella has a severe lip tie, & I suspect a lesser known posterior tongue tie, neither of which were ever picked up. This may have been why it didn’t work, who knows?

I’m loving feeding Lauren & am looking forward to hopefully continuing to do so until she self weans.

***
National Breastfeeding Helplines

NCT
Breastfeeding Line 0300 33 00 700
7 days a week 8am–midnight

La Leche League
0845 120 2918

The Breastfeeding Network
Supporterline 0870 900 8787
7 days a week 9.30am – 9.30pm

BfN Drugs in Breastmilk Helpline 0844 412 4665

Association of Breastfeeding Mothers
0300 330 5453

National Breastfeeding Helpline (NHS)
0844 20 909 20

19 Jun

Toxic Milk

This week, The Guardian continues it’s one-newspaper ‘backlash’ against breastfeeding with an article from Florence Williams about The Wonder of Breasts.

Williams starts with some really interesting stuff about the changing components of breastmilk and how they act to protect and nourish the developing infant. But then halfway down she launches into a terrifying rant about how every chemical with which you have ever had contact has accumulated in your body and is poisoning your baby through your milk.

She then makes the fascinating, many-layered statement:

The breastfeeding lobby is sometimes reluctant to highlight breast-milk contamination because they don’t want women to have another excuse not to breastfeed.

From where I’m sitting in my comfy seat in the breastfeeding lobby, I am blissfully ignorant that most women want an excuse not to breastfeed. For one thing, I don’t see it as my job to gatekeep the information, just as I don’t deliberately protect women from the risks of formula feeding, on which more later. If you will forgive me for mentioning it yet again, parents need to be able to make an informed choice that suits their circumstances and their inclinations. This article undermines informed choice by scaremongering and not giving the entire picture, and it insults women who want to breastfeed, especially those who are finding it hard, or who have given up after a struggle, and did not have the luxury of needing an excuse.

I’m no chemist so I don’t have a clear answer to this, but the first thing I would want to know in order to feel fully informed is whether the chemicals found in breastmilk, at those doses, is harmful. ‘PCBs,’ she says, ‘at elevated levels […] can interfere with thyroid function.’ Are these elevated levels? I do know that the UK government monitors the chemical levels in breastmilk (purely as an environmental pollution measure) and that they are decreasing, and this is supported by this excellent article from Best For Babes.

I would also want to see a straight comparison with the chemical levels in formula milk, which for those of you who did not know is made out of cows’ milk. Cows, which arguably have a more restricted diet than humans, are also subject to environmental pollution. The nutrient balance in cows’ milk is significantly different from that in human milk and lacks many of the interesting ingredients discussed by Williams in the first part of her article.

Then I would want to consider the potential for pollution or contamination during manufacture, storage, and making up of formula milk, which in its powdered form is not sterile. And finally, I would compare the relative risk of exposure to these chemicals with the risk of not breastfeeding, for both mother and baby.

That, then, would be an informed decision.

BabyCenter has a nice Q&A on toxins in breastmilk written by former NCT Breastfeeding Counsellor Caroline Deacon; and an article published in 2008 in the journal Environmental Health gives some interesting perspective on communicating about the presence of chemical substances in breastmilk.

06 Jun

What backlash?

The recent Time article has provoked quite a controversy, not least (in my opinion) the decision not to use that cover in the UK. According to The Guardian, this controversy about a photograph of a mother breastfeeding her 3 year old constitutes a ‘backlash against breastfeeding,’ and at the weekend they published Zoe Williams’ wide-ranging thoughts on this matter.

Williams’ article is littered with factual errors, assumptions, judgemental remarks, and references to ‘protests’ that never actually happened. She refers to extended breastfeeding in the first paragraph, but then goes on to discuss ‘breast is best,’ attachment parenting and government policy on health promotion, without ever coming back to her initial, rather impolite remarks that breastfeeding advocates are ‘evangelical to the point of dogmatism,’ and that she thinks we think ‘extended breastfeeders make [us] all look a bit weird,’ and that this is why we don’t discuss extended breastfeeding very much. In fact, we don’t discuss it much because it doesn’t happen much. If fewer than 2% of babies in the UK are exclusively breastfed at six months, just try and quantify the number who still get any breastmilk at all by the age of three years.

Williams goes on to dismiss the ‘benefits’ of breastfeeding as mostly syllogistic, methodologically flawed, and generally ignored by parents, while also noting that “I didn’t care whether of not the health benefits were real, I’d do it again even if it made the baby’s IQ go down,” thus negating the point of her entire argument against the ‘benefits’ of breastfeeding: like most mothers, she is not basing her decision on health or any other benefits. Mothers are biologically driven to nurture their young.

I use the term ‘benefits’ very cautiously. Breastfeeding is the baseline; it is formula milk that needs to prove its case. Research into breastfeeding may be methodologically flawed (because how can you carry out randomised controlled trials on babies?), but there is certainly no robust research showing health benefits for formula. As for the research, Analytical Armadillo has recently posted an excellent round-up of some very current research from a number of peer-reviewed journals. Williams’ guru in this matter is one Joan Wolf, who supports her view of parenting as a world of extremes, without nuance.

Moving on to attachment parenting, Williams quotes feminist criticism of co-sleeping which describes “putting the child in the bed between the father and the mother.” This is an unsafe practice, and UNICEF guidelines for safe co-sleeping can be found here. The feminist angle here seems pretty spurious, pitting notional extremes of motherhood against each other. Feminism, surely, means we all have the right to choose our own pathway?

Mothers do not divide neatly into two camps: Breastfeeding Mothers versus Formula Feeding Mothers. As Williams points out, the majority of mothers in the UK do initiate breastfeeding (though she quotes an imaginary 91%; the most recent Infant Feeding Survey gives an initiation rate of 81%). NHS South Central provides some interesting data on duration of breastfeeding; locally, we have a high initiation rate of 88%, down to 79% by five days, 72% at two weeks, and just 58% of mothers are still breastfeeding at six weeks. Therefore most of the mothers in the supposed Formula Feeding camp are mothers who have breastfed for at least some amount of time, some of whom will have made a positive decision to stop; but we know that 90% of the mothers who have stopped by six weeks would have liked to continue for longer. So it’s not the case, as William proposes, that the majority of people are not taking any notice of the public health messages about breastfeeding. In the 2005 Infant Feeding Survey, 84% of mothers said they were aware of the health benefits of breastfeeding; those who stopped before six weeks cited, in the majority, lack of support. Williams lightly dismisses the struggles and the disappointments felt by women who choose formula feeding because it’s the only choice they have.

Williams’ main premise seems to be that the government is trying to brainwash mothers into breastfeeding out of misguided social policy. She misses the point, and she misunderstands the research, but at least she gets a plug for her own book.