For some women breastfeeding is really hampered from the start by apalling care from health care professionals.  Sometimes women who have always assumed their babies would be breastfed, who have worked tirelessly before birth to secure the support they’ll need, who’s family are helpful, who really do not want their babies to have formula milk, sometimes these women do not succeed :-(  It’s not because they’re one of the magic 2% who actually can’t do it, but because something hasn’t clicked into place in the early days.  Here’s an example situation:

1. Mum has her baby, birth goes well

2. Baby isn’t interested in feeding for a few hours

3. Baby isn’t kept skin-to-skin which would make feeding more likely

4. Inflexible hospital policies mean that midwives get twitchy about the baby not feeding

5. Twitchy midwives who don’t understand how breastfeeding works decide that the baby needs forcing to feed

6. Midwives grab mum’s breast, and baby’s head and ram them together

7. Touching the back of baby’s head makes him pull his tongue in, rather than out where it needs to be to latch on well

8. Baby manages to get some milk so midwives are satisfied

9. The experience is upsetting and traumatic for baby and mother, and is also painful for the mother as the poor latch means that the nipples get damaged

10. Mum and baby leave the hospital - mum with damaged nipples, baby with bad breastfeeding technique and possibly even a phobia of breastfeeding (situation is even worse if baby has also been bottle-fed formula milk and/or if mum has been told to use nipple shields to help her nipples heal)

11. Mum is desperate to undo the mess created by the immediate post-natal care and gathers support around her again

12. Breast feeding continues to be agony.  Poor latch and nipple shields means baby feeds all the time as feeding is so inefficient and ineffective milk-removal causes mum to get severe mastitis on day 14.

13. Only way to clear mastitis is to express milk and nipples are so damaged that mum decides to bottle-feed expressed milk until her nipples are healed enough to try feeding at the breast again

14. Mum tries extra skin-to-skin contact and ‘co-bathing’

15. Mum is spending so much time expressing so she doesn’t get mastitis, crying because everything hurts and worrying that her baby’s not getting enough milk and that she may never be able to get breastfeeding working, that she has spent no positive time whatsoever with her two-week old baby

These mums *cannot* bond with their babies with all these negative hormones racing around their bodies.  Sometimes switching to formula milk is the only way for women and babies to relax enough to get to know one another.  How do mothers weigh up the physical benefits of recieving breastmilk with the emotional benefits of enjoying the early weeks of parenthood and getting to know your baby?  It breaks my heart.  I’m so angry and furious that crap care means that women have to choose!  They should be able to do both.  Everyone should be able to do both!  This is so wrong.  Midwives need more time, more money and, above all, more bloody training!

There are a couple of very mainstream parenting boards I read and post on occassionally.  There is something I’d dearly love to post about but I don’t think I have the guts!  I really need to rant though, so I’m going to do it here:

Why, why, why do people force their babies and children to do things that are so upsetting to them?  There are so many posts saying “my daughter hates school, what should I do?”; “my son screams in distress whenever I drop him at nursery”; “my daughter’s just started wetting the bed since she started school”; ”my son’s being bullied and he’s only 5!” and so on and so forth.  I always try to find out if the parents are needed to work to try and make myself understand why they are forcing their children to do these things despite all the signs of emotional distress, but mostly there is no reason other than that making your child do these things is part of being a parent.  People even write about how they feel pathetic when it upsets them seeing their child in distress!  The same sort of thing is written by parents who are having trouble doing controlled crying with their babies.  Why can’t people hear their instincts screaming out to them “this is wrong…stop doing it!”?  Why can’t they hear their children screaming out “I’m not ready for this!”?  Sometimes I wonder whether it’s because they just don’t know any other way…but then when I try to suggest ‘other ways’ I get shouted down.  So it’s not that they think there is no alternative - they truly believe the alternative would be more harmful than what they’re doing already.  In response to a query about whether or not to bring a distressed baby into the parents’ bed in the night, one poster said “I wouldn’t.  You might find it hard to get her back in her own bed and who wants a toddler sleeping in their bed???”.  Is a toddler in your bed for a few years better or worse than your baby growing up into an emotionally insecure person for the rest of his life?  There is so much evidence showing how it really is damaging to a baby’s brain to be left to cry and not to be able to form secure attachments to a small number of significant adults but people just disregard it.  A colleague of mine said, in response to the programme to be screened on C4 (comparing different parenting strategies) that if they proposed doing an experiment whereby children from one family were fed refined-sugary foods for a week and another on really healthy food, no one would ever take part because the role food has on health is well documented in the media.  But the effect on a child’s health of bad food could easily and quickly be reversed, unlike the experiment of leaving a baby to cry vs. meeting his needs…the results of which will affect that child for his entire life.

Edited to add:  So, I got up the guts and posted it.  Immediately got flamed.  The answer to my question is that parents just refuse to believe the evidence and truly, truly trust that if it’s in a book, and in a book that’s popular, then it must be right even if there are other books saying the opposite that are actually evidence-based rather than opinion-based.  But, I still don’t understand why parents refuse to believe the evidence?

Edited to add again!:  When I posted my post, I initially regretted it when I got flamed.  I’ve since had some much more helpful responses and I am starting to understand a bit more.  The thing is that I am lucky.  I’ve not only been brought up trusting in instincts, but have been supported and encouraged in that trust.  I’ve read books and spent time with people who also feel the same way.  There’s a new mum at our HE group who plans to HE and plans to do it autonomously but is very wary that it might mean her children won’t learn key things.  Don’t we all worry about that?  But doesn’t the extent to which we worry about it diminish the more time we spend with other autonomously HE’d children older than our own and the more we see our children learning without our teaching them?  So, whether or not we’re exposed to alternative ideas, if we don’t have support for them from those around us, and, perhaps more importantly, don’t see them working out for other families older than our own, then we may never truly have the courage to trust that the alternatives really do work and really do allow children to be happy and fulfilled and to grow into independence.  People are saying things like ’well it’s all very well but what happens when they’re still running to Mummy when they’re 18?’ or ‘taking a bullied child out of school just teaches them to run away from things’.  Unless parents see what happens to children who are removed from unhappy situations; unless they see that these children flourish and become happy, self-confident individuals who branch out into genuine independence happily and securely at an appropriate age; they will never trust that responding to their child’s distress and alleviating it as soon as they can will be the best option.  To so many parents, stopping a child crying by cuddling it will spoil them and no research will persuade them otherwise unless they repeatedly see real-life examples.  I wish I could package up all that I’ve been lucky enough to learn and experience and hand it to other parents, but I can’t.  All parents have to make their journey themselves and I have to just hope that the small exposure they may have to how we do things, and to how our children turn out, might add to any other exposure they have to similar families and might, just might, give them the confidence to trust their children. 

This is a programme due to be screened next week on C4 in the UK.  Not sure if I’ll be able to watch it without exploding in frustration.  Here’s an article about it.  And this is what I posted in the comments - not sure if they’ll get published though:

I can’t think of an easier, happier way of doing things than following your instincts and responding to your baby’s needs.  Leaving babies to cry is distressing and harmful to their emotional development.  Buggies are a pain in the neck and bad for the development of babies’ language.  Cots mean you have to wake up and get up frequently.  On the other hand meeting a baby’s needs before he has to cry means fewer stress hormones rushing round his little body, bathing his brain and damaging his delicate new neural connections.  Carrying baby in a sling gives you two hands free to do whatever you need (wash up/hold toddlers’ hands/whatever) and keeps your baby calm.  Sharing sleep means that, not only do you get less tired as you don’t have to wake so often, but also your presence helps your baby to regulate his breathing, temperature, heart rate and hormones ie. it’s safer. 

Oh yes, and being close to your baby is so wonderful and lovely too

The Continuum Concept mum said that it’s hard work doing it that way…surely it can’t possibly be harder work than fighting your instincts, being a slave to a routine and making up bottles?  Mothering is hard work.  Too often breastfeeding/co-sleeping/baby-wearing is blamed when actually these things make the hard work of mothering easier, not harder.

Read it and weep:  http://www.extrahandproducts2.com/

So depressing I can’t even bring myself to comment about it