Stumble It!About HBFW
Just to explain a bit about the reasons I have set up this blog…
I should say first that I’m not a “professional”. I’m not a trained breastfeeding counsellor, I’m not medical. I’m mum to two boys (born April 04 and January 06) and I’ve breastfed both of them, albeit with shaky starts each time (I’m still breastfeeding my youngest). I very much enjoy learning about breastfeeding and especially the issues surrounding the decisions women make regarding feeding their babies and I want to support more women to have better breastfeeding experiences.
I believe that pregnant women are, in general, massively encouraged to breastfeed. That would account for the relatively high initiation of breastfeeding statistics, with over three-quarters of women in England and Wales putting their baby to the breast at least once and increasing figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland as well. This is good.
However, somewhere in the first few days and weeks, it often goes a bit wrong. Currently, nine out of ten women who stop breastfeeding in the first six weeks don’t want to do so . Many women who stop breastfeeding before they wanted to feel angry, let down and guilty for using formula. There are women on both sides of the “feeding fence” who feel judged and defensive. Not all do, I know that, and it is patronising in the extreme to assume that because a woman’s feeding her baby formula, she’s wracked with guilt about it, but they exist in large enough numbers that I feel a blog like this is a worthwhile thing to do.
I want to show that there is a way forward that doesn’t involve judging women for using formula. I don’t believe in “forcing” women to breastfeed, nor do I think that the current practice of “tell a pregnant woman breastfeeding is the only option, then leave her unsupported after she’s had her baby” is anything other than counter-productive as it causes massive resentment and ill-feeling.
My aim is to leave visitors to this blog well-informed about breastfeeding, whether they are pregnant, new to breastfeeding, old hands, family and friends of breastfeeding women, healthcare professionals or simply interested in the subject, having either had a traumatic time with breastfeeding themselves or for whatever other reason.
It is not a place to judge women for their feeding method. I want to move beyond that, to a place where women can make the informed decisions that are right for them and their families, without being judged or discriminated against.
I would like to talk about the current state of breastfeeding support, from healthcare professionals, the media and society in general, as well as gather ideas from all over the country about how to improve things so that every woman who wants to breastfeed is supported to do so.
There’s a lack of concrete information about infant formula and what is out there doesn’t help women to make impartial, informed choices, because it’s all based on word-of-mouth and advertising - neither of which is exactly the best basis for a decision about something as important as a baby’s sole source of nutrition for the first months of their life. I think this is appalling - if any other group of people were fed just one thing for a significant chunk of their life, you can bet there’d be more than a few slogans about it.
I will also blog about current research, any articles I find, do a bit of myth-exploding and talk about some of the things that healthcare professionals, family and friends have said to women, both supportive and unsupportive.
As I’ve said, I don’t pretend to know everything. I know enough to realise that there’s no one easy answer. What is a good reason to breastfeed for one woman isn’t important to another. What is a perfectly understandable situation in which to choose to feed formula can leave a woman with feelings of failure and distress. It’s impossible to say, “If we do this, all women will breastfeed and if we do that nobody will breastfeed”. It doesn’t work like that; there are too many specific situations and more complex emotions involved with how women feel about their bodies and food in general. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
I really hope that people will join in, share their experiences openly and realise that it’s pretty damaging and futile being smug or disparaging about giving milk to babies. I hope that this site will allow people to see that talking about infant feeding doesn’t have to end in a turmoil of emotions that leaves everybody feeling bad - it can be a positive thing to share experiences and we can come up with a better way forward for everybody.
(NB - I refer to babies as “he” throughout, partly to avoid confusion with the mother and partly because I have two boys and so babies are usually “he” for me!)
Hi, I found your blog via ‘Dashboard’ , hopefully I will get around to linking to you as I believe that this type of breastfeeding support, non-judgemental, is extremely important.
On the whole I agree with your synopsis above but….not too sure about the ‘9 out of 10 women who give up in the first 6weeks don’t want to do so’. As a community midwife I have a great deal of contact with breastfeeding Mums, and their families, and living locally to my ‘patch I see many of them out and about. The giving up when not ‘wanting to’ is an extremely complex matter full of much individual bias leading to the decision, and on the whole it is a decision. I observe women throughout their pregnancy and I can predict (to myself) reasonably accurately who will continue breastfeeding after I have stopped visiting. For many women, who have every intention of breastfeeding baby until 4 - 6 months the initial loss of control over their lives caused by the almost total dependancy of the baby, a decrease in support from their families and our culture’s obsession with an infant’s weight gain combines to make them decide to stop breastfeeding, or to only continue when it is convenient for them, early morning and night. They had wanted to continue for months, but on their terms and to fit in with their life-style. The initial weeks of breastfeeding can be very restricting and time-consuming and many women believe that this will continue, so they decide to stop, and then have to justify to themselves why they did.
I am not saying here that this applies to all Mums who stop breastfeeding in the first six weeks but it does apply to well over 50% of them. I actually have no problem with this. I believe that a happy Mum is better for a baby than a Mum who is resenting the baby every time she puts it to the breast.
More information like your blog could help to show women that there can be life with breastfeeding, that it does become less demanding and ‘restrictive’ over time. Hope and support is the way forward.
I shall certainly point all my ‘Mum’s’ toward your pages.
Thank you, midwifemuse.
I’m afraid the links to the stats on the NCT page aren’t working from this About piece - the NCT have redesigned their site, to the detriment of mine, it would seem! That means the stats with their supporting text aren’t available from here any more, unfortunately.
I think you raise some extremely interesting points - not least the way that women expect breastfeeding will be - and when it’s not like that, it’s quite a shock. Then, if you have unsupportive family and friends and no idea that breastfeeding’s not always going to be the way it is in the early days, it’s hardly surprising that you’d turn to formula.
It’s interesting that you say that you can predict reasonably accurately who will stop in the first few weeks though - I’d be fascinated to know what you notice about the women who do stop compared to the women who don’t. I have heard “I’m going to try, but I won’t beat myself up if it doesn’t work out” quite often from women who stop early on. Now, obviously I don’t think that women should beat themselves up about feeding, but I do think that this societal expectation that breastfeeding is something that so often doesn’t work out is a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways!
Thank you for pointing women here - it’s nice to know that people are finding these pages helpful.