To think the way to encourage breastfeeding is to back off and do nothing at all?

[misspontypine]

I have been reading about the ways that breastfeeding is encouraged in the UK, it makes me so angry to read about posters saying breast is best and people being refused formula in hospitals and trials to give incentives to breast feeding mothers. The idea that women need such intensive advertising to make life choices that they are perfectly able to make without simplified adverts is very wrong in my opinion.

I am British but I live in the Sweden. Last year I had my ds in Sweden and my experience of breastfeeding preasure has been non-existant. The midwife wanted to know that my baby was latching and his nappies were yellow breastfed baby poo rather than black before we went home but apart from that there were no posters of classes or incentives.

Most mums breastfeed, a handful don't, a close friend of mine formula feeds because she had problems with her milk comming in. She intended and tried to breastfeed but she couldn't so she uses formul, that is how she sees it, an English friend came to visit me and we all got together. My English friend had breastfeeding issues and ended up ff her baby, she was talking about the guild and regreat and grief surrounding her failed breastfeeding attempt, my Swedish friend was really confused, she sees it as a medical need.

My ds was (very allmost) conceived by IVF, I know very well that a woman's body doesn't allways do what it is "supposed" to do.

In Sweden if you need breastfeeding help you can easilly access it, people don't tend to hide their boobs, nudity is much more excepted, my dp's family have mixed sex saunas so a bit of a bit of nipple isn't going to make anyone blush. I think these things help make breastfeeding work well but I also think that letting women make the decision to breastfeed (or not) as adults, without any simplified, in my opinion patronising, posters is the way forward.

AIBU? Has anyone ever decided to breastfeed because BREAST IS BEST!!! has been so pushed on you?

Were you bombarded with formula advertising in Sweden?

It's easy in Sweden because most mums breastfeed. In the UK where most mums don't, a bit more encouragement is needed to even make women realise it's an option.

They have the same rules as the UK, no infant formula but you can advertise follow on formula.

What noblegiraffe said.

But do they push formula? Is it in your Bounty pack, every pregnancy magazine, women's magazine, every time you turn on the telly, product placed in celebrity homes features, brainwashed into the HPs who are v quick to suggest moving on to formula and often woefully badly trained at BF support? Does Sweden have a culture where for the last 40 yrs or so the majority of babies were FF so the 'support network' of older family members etc has no BF experience? You're talking about a completely different set up.
I'm sure we have much to learn from Sweden and other countries with good BF rates, but I don't think doing nothing would work.

misspontypine

In Sweden if you need breastfeeding help you can easilly access it, people don't tend to hide their boobs, nudity is much more excepted, my dp's family have mixed sex saunas so a bit of a bit of nipple isn't going to make anyone blush. I think these things help make breastfeeding work well but I also think that letting women make the decision to breastfeed (or not) as adults, without any simplified, in my opinion patronising, posters is the way forward.

Mmm, but this is the UK, where contempt for personal choice is strong and if people aren't choosing to do X it's because they're lazy or ignorant.

Even BF advocates are coming round to the idea that the question is how do you make breast normal when our culture is so anti?

I was going to say the same as noble - it's different in Sweden because there are more mums breast feeding.

I think i heard on BBC Breakfast this morning that there are parts of the UK where only 1 in 5 mums choose to BF.

I FF DC1, (bowed to my mothers pressure to FF from the start as she thought BF was somehow horrible), tried and failed to BF DC2, and because of breast is best pressure i tried again with DC3. I managed that time and i loved it. Currently preg. with DC4 and will 100% be hoping to BF again. So the breast is best message did work for me.

It hasn't really worked so far has it? Which is why the UK has such a poor breast feeding record.
Why would doing nothing mean anything changed? Surely the trend to not breast feed would just continue?

As noblegiraffe said its such a different culture.

I have a friend who is encouraging breastfeeding as a trial in a deprived part of this city, with young mums. The first year it went well, by year three it has far exceeded expectations because the new mums were doing what their firends with kids were doing.

Advertising works.

Formula is more normalised in the uk and boobs are seen as only sexual objects. That's why some people are horrified and disgusted at breast feeding mothers.
I had only considered breast feeding and unfortunately had to stop due to health issues at 6 weeks and felt guilty and was worried about reactions of people when I was bottle feeding in public, the reaction so far is nothing or positive. Where as I may have got more negative reactions if breast feeding. Which is sad.

YANBU.
The midwives knew I would never be able to breastfeed, it was in all my notes. I still had to 'try' before I could get formula for DS.
Try how? Try reconnecting scarred tissue with the power of my mind?
Just what I needed after a 26 hour labour.

I remember sitting in the clinic waiting to get my DS weighed just after he'd been born listening to young mums talking about how they would never ever BF because it "makes your tits saggy".
That was their priority - avoiding saggy tits.

Doing nothing to encourage BF really isn't an option.

Practically nothing is being done though, and it's clearly not working! I've had 7 kids- in 23 years I've seen a few posters tacked up with a smiley mum and a tv advert.

We need to start with girls AND boys in schools to make them know that breasts are for feeding, then promote BFing as something hard but worthwhile for as long as you want to do it, and then get better support.

To encourage breastfeeding, there needs to be more antenatal and perinatal support.

My antenatal class consisted of 5-10 minutes breastfeeding information, including a diagram of the breast and a woman holding her doll to her chest in a cradle position. At least when my mum was younger, they got an actual mum and baby demonstrating!

I was unprepared when DD really struggled to feed. i had all the information about how to tell if things were going well, I knew they weren't, but nobody seemed able to actually help. I was doing everything 'right' according to midwives etc, to cut a long story short after 8 long, stressful weeks she was diagnosed with tongue tie. I know of many other similar stories, and I wonder how many women who couldn't breastfeed actually had tongue tie babies.

There is a fabulous peer support group in my area, and I credit them with my breastfeeding success. However, I had to find out about them myself. There wasn't any information given to me either at antenatal classes, or at discharge from hospital even though they knew I was struggling. Likewise, there is a feeding clinic at my local hospital which I didn't find out about until DD was actually diagnosed with tongue tie- yet they could have made the diagnosis had I been sent there at the first signs of difficulty.

Where is formula being pushed in the UK? My experience was all I heard was " breast is best" from all the professionals I encountered who were doggedly determined to make me feel inferior when after struggling and loathing bf for about 2 months I gave up.

And as I've said on other threads as DS hasn't been near a doctor since his MMR(he's now 23) I personally think the socio-economic factors were just as important in contributing to his good health.

There wasn't any formula in the bounty pack, but I was sent some at 6 months and last week (coming up for 1.)

Personally my experience is that my family in the UK did and do breastfeed whereas my dp's family didn't breastfeed their children. They had bonkers rules when my dp was a baby like you had to weigh the baby aster every feed to know exactly how much milk the baby had taken.

I am the sort of person who doesn't like to be told what to do so any breast feeding preasure would really put me off.

I would have thought that education of you people about the benifits of breastfeeding would be better. I don't remeber any lessons about bf and I have an A-level in biology.

I think women in Sweden are more " body confident". They are used to being nude at swimming/ saunas etc. As are middle class women in Britain. But the groups that are least likely to bf in the uk are not . I bf and don't really care who sees my boobs but we go on holiday each year to places where most women don't wear bikini tops. And my boobs are quite nice:p
But seriously, it's not that most women can't do it without support( ime babies just latch and feed hourly for the first few weeks!) But if you think that this isn't normal, and family/friends then tell you they are not getting enough because they are feeding all the time so tell you to give a bottle the that spells the end.

missponty you are music to my ears. I wish in my past posts regarding breast feeding I could have put this as well as you have. I am in total agreement with your thread. Very well written

To be honest, I found the formula pushing was coming more from friends and family. Though I did have one GP tell me to formula feed when I went for help with DD.

Comments like 'give her a bottle and she'll sleep better' 'breast fed babies are clingier' 'she can't be hungry again already, are you sure you have enough milk for her?'.

unfortunately in the Uk(in my area at least) bottle feeding is seen as the norm- I found that people just automatically assume you are bottle feeding- I had one nice lady who saw me struggling to get DD's dentinox in her recommend that I put it in her bottle next time. Never mind the fact that I had just openly breastfed Dd in front of her. At my local sure start there were only 2 other women I ever saw there who breastfed their babies.

I have never seen nor experienced pressure to breastfeed. It was never mentioned to me by any NHS professional apart from when I had just given birth but there was no pressure or expectation. I did have problems initially as I think most women do and at around two weeks I was close to giving up. Luckily after a call to the midwife team at my surgery and a quick visit I was back on track. I would have felt guilty if I had given up but that guilt was entirely of my own making. I wanted to do what I thought was best for my baby. There may be a minority who are evangelical about it but you get that in all walks of life. When people start referring to "breastfeeding nazis" then huge damage is caused. Whether you breastfeed or not we should all just get on with it and stop the media storm it creates. Who cares how your friend/neighbour/woman in the cafe feeds their baby? You do what is right for you and your baby. I think it's a shame when people don't try to breastfeed but what business is it of mine?!

Campaigning and advertising seems to making a big difference, bfing rates have been steadily rising since 1990. Nearly doubling in some areas (like Northern Ireland).

There needs to be more support for people wanting to bf, pre and post natally, and support for those that can't.

And what is the advertising budget for formula companies? Most are spending HUGE sums on advertising, especially the follow-on milks with EXACTLY THE SAME NAME as the infant version - ie. brand recognition. If their advertising didn't bring in sales they wouldn't do it.

Also, some advertising is quite devious, lists published as to "what you need for baby" from websites and shops which include bottles, sterilisers etc... if you have the kit there, you will be tempted to use it at 3am and you don't know why baby won't attach. Whereas if you don't have the gear, in the light of day you might see your health visitor rather than buying formula and bottles etc.

For years there was no money invested in breastfeeding and rates fell through the floor - and now there is no "culture" of breastfeeding. If breastfeeding does protect children against obsesity, diabetes, heart disease etc in any degree the money spent on eduction on breastfeeding will pay itself off in health savings.

The nature of how it is educated/promoted is valid... but trying to reach large numbers of women who are already being bombarded by pregnancy, birth and baby information is hard... they need the information before they give birth so they are prepared to try and feed and things to do to help it happen.

I think OP is right that the culture is Sweden sounds very positive and this would be the best way to encourage bf.

We need to be more comfortable about boobs, people!

I don't understand the idea that trying to advertise as much as formula companies is going to help people to breastfeed. If breast feeding is the best choice for many people in terms of health then the best thing that can be done is to try to educate people, not just new mums but all people (ideally at school age) about the benifits.