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?

5 days in hospital post emcs to get feeding going and ds would only latch on one boob. Bf ing expert came to house and gradually use pump and got him to have both sides. After dd born Fed straight away and home next day. Does depend where you are unfortunately, am so glad one midwife made sure we could do it before leaving hospital. (or evil mil and her dirty faggy hands would have been shoving a bottle In before u could say sma! )

Myths like you don't know how much they're getting really annoy me. Ermloads of yellow poo came out so milk went in and he put a pound on this week!

Newbluecoat- I can beat that. Had DD Thursday evening by c section, home Saturday morning! I couldn't even get out of bed myself.

The support you get really is a postcode lottery. I was determined to BF DD who was determined not to latch on. Fortunately the midwives at the hospital (Barnsley) were massively supportive, and many of them had BF their own children so knew exactly what I was going through. I was kept in hospital for 5 days until both they and I were satisfied that DD could latch on properly.

I know lots of people who just find the idea of BF yucky and shudder at the idea of it. It is these people that we need to educate that it is natural and should be the default option.

I honestly think that people need to be given an honest heads up as to what breast feeding will be like. As one poster put it they tend to feed pretty much constantly in the early days, but everyone is so petrified people won't try it at all that we are told, "it's so easy", "if you're doing it right it shouldn't hurt" and that problems are rare. For me I felt that no one was honest about the frequency of feeding or just how emotionally demanding it is. This resulted in me not being prepared for how hard it is, and thinking that I was doing it all wrong as she was feeding so often, and I nearly gave up but just persevered and it did become so much easier when I stopped putting pressure on myself and allow myself to at least consider mixed feeding as an option. I then went on to feed her til 18 months.

I think they should stop treating us like morons and stop with all this paternalistic crap. It just puts more pressure on new mums at a vulnerable time. I was always going to breast feed anyway, and I think if you're deadset on not, all this promotion/incentivising is not going to make any difference, or cause people to door for the right reasons. We all know breast is best, we just don't need it shoved down our throats at every given opportunity.

I found the Breast Is Best campaign made it infinitely harder for me.

Coming at it from an uneducated point of view, I had what I perceive now to be a fairly healthy view that it's something you just did as a matter of course. There was nothing beautiful, magical or special about it, but it was something you could usually kind of get on with, a bit like brushing your teeth.

I breastfed DD for the first few weeks and got on fine - tired, but OK.

Then my HV came along with a Breast is Best DVD and insisted I watch it to encourage me to continue. Up to then I'd had no psychological issue with it at all - I preferred to keep my boobs covered because I'm shy and get cold easily, but up to then I'd assumed there was no issue with that.

If I hadn't bothered watching an hour's worth of DVD telling me how 'special' breastfeeding was supposed to make me feel, how the position that had worked for me with a C-section scar was completely wrong and I ought to be holding DD differently, and how I should be proudly breastfeeding everywhere I could to make it visible and show everyone how special and magical and experience it was, I probably would have managed fine. However, having an hour of propaganda lobbed down my throat made me immensely self-conscious. I'd been doing it wrong for ages. Every time I felt it was annoying or painful (or I really needed the loo and wished I could put it off for a minute), I felt worse because I ought to be feeling a 'magical bond'. How awful a person I must be to not be feeling splendid like the 20 women interviewed on the DVD.

I consulted the HV (mistake 2) who decided that all this keeping covered business was getting in the way and I should be proudly whipping my boobs out whenever DD fancied a feed. My breastfeeding stance was scrutinised, I got massively self-conscious about breastfeeding publicly (the 'put it away' brigade were easier to handle than the women who congratulated me on my 'making a stance' and told me what a special moment I must be enjoying - aaargh!)

I couldn't hack it at all. By the fourth month the only feed I could deal with was the night feed, in the dark, where I could happily keep myself warm, covered and in a position that was halfway comfortable for me and DD. I gradually phased it out. DD was fine and remains incredibly healthy; I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders (it had, my boobs shrank back to something like a normal size and my back was relieved!)

If I ever have another DC, I hope I can ignore the pressure and just see it as a toothbrushing sort of thing; maybe that'll help me carry on longer. I like to think of myself as something more than a pair of breasts - it hacks me off when men don't, and it hacked me off that the Breast is Best-ers didn't seem to either!

I was taling to DM on the phone last night and mentioned that DS (7m) had been feeding for over an hour. She had attempted to BF in the depths of the formula generation but had been thwarted by mastitis and received zero support through it, and treated as an oddity fo trying it. Feeding was something you did in the privacy of your bedroom. The culture that she knows of feeding a baby is alien and counter-productive to sucessful breast feeding (quick bottle on schedule and put baby to bed).

When that's the level of family support, you need an external support network.

You can't win on sharing personal experience, as you're criticised for being abnormally rose tinted, or telling horror stories. Women need a realistic view and to know what is normal discomfort that will resolve itself or damaging and needs assistance.

British modesty and low self esteem on feeding in public doesn't help. There is a lot of feeding going on, but it's subtle so people aren't aware of it being a normal part of the background.

Formula still has the image of being more convenient: anyone can feed baby so mummy can be independent/ have a rest, you know what baby's consumed, baby sleeps longer, and I think that culture needs breaking. I love the convinience that I don't have to plan feeds and preparing a feed is just adjusting a top and unclipping a bra. DH is not going to get up at silly o'clock to feed a baby when he has work whatever the method, and I have no desire to leave a baby for a prolonged period while they are young enough to need day feeds- the intervals between feeding are sufficient to let me attend appointments and fitness classes and that's fine by me.

I think school is the best place to encourage a change of culture where it's not divisive or sensitive. That way peopl will have postitive ideas about BFinf in their head before being pregnant.

I love the idea of changing the health message to 'Breast is Normal'.

I feel far away from this as my dcs are older now. After a traumatic birth with dc1, all I was told was that Breast feeding was easy and natural. It really really wasn't. I was held to 'ransom' in the hospital where they said I couldn't leave until I had successfully fed with BF or Formula. Having been a home birth transfer anyway, I was desperate to get out - so I gave formula.

I will always kick myself that in the days after, no mw or Hv even suggested that it would be possible to try again, that my milk may not even have come in yet. I had FF written on my notes and that was that. I had tremendous guilt that I'd 'failed'. It makes me angry now to think I could have got there.

With dc2 I was desperately ill with failing kidneys and a swollen spleen. I had diarrhoea for 2 months. Not great for BF.

I think let's just make it 'Breast is Normal' and stop pushing with all the angst. I may gave even got there myself if I hadn't panicked.

flatpackhamster Tue 12-Nov-13 20:10:30
"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"

I think it's more the opposite: the herd mentality is far more strongly developed in Sweden and far less subject to class division, so once breastfeeding is established as a normal choice then people will take it for granted that that is what they're going to be doing. Like wearing denim jackets and showing dinner guests your bedroom and various other quaint and bizarre customs that people follow for no other reason than that it is the norm. You don't need to slag other people off as lazy and ignorant because most people will take for granted that once we have decided on the right way everybody will be following it.

Disclaimer: not intending to state that bf'ing is in any way quaint or bizarre or like wearing a denim jacket. I am well aware of the health benefits.

Just that while I still lived in Sweden, in a sense I didn't need to be because I just did what everybody else did.

I can't believe I'm even bothering to contribute as I swore off BFing threads yesterday. But I just have to get this out.

I reckon that the government just need to ban formula advertising.

"Formula still has the image of being more convenient: anyone can feed baby so mummy can be independent/ have a rest, you know what baby's consumed, baby sleeps longer, and I think that culture needs breaking."

That culture will NOT be broken.

Not in the UK where 98% of babies drink formula, and where bottles, mums with bottles, babies with bottles, magazine adverts, internet formula 'mums clubs', 'feeding advice lines' run by formula companies, promotion to health professionals, formula adverts in midwifery magazines, formula adverts on tv, formula sponsorship on tv, formula adverts in broadsheet newspapers, tabloid newspapers..... and on and on and on, are EVERYWHERE.

I find it hilarious when people say that breastfeeding promotion is 'shoved down their throat'. Because really, apart from through NHS health promotion, you could live in some parts of the UK for YEARS and not be aware that babies could be fed any other way than with a bottle.

It's fairly straightforward in the UK - there's a pretty striking class gradient when it comes to feeding your baby. Also a pretty striking class gradient when it comes to a healthy weaning diet, childhood obesity, and parental involvement in a child's education. OK, there will always be some people who buck the trend, but otherwise infant feeding choices will reflect the other nutritional choices, lifestyle choices, and priorities typical of the social group to which the parent belongs.

Countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, all of which have better breastfeeding rates than the UK, are also far more equal societies, and people's lifestyle choices and eating habits are far less reflective of their social class.

breastfeedingandsocialmobility

here is why Sweden fairs much better at breastfeeding.

We have such a long legacy of ff . Mum in the 60s was told she didn't have enough milk . Those were the days of strict 4 hourly feeds so many babies were screaming with hunger .
She kept commenting "feeding again?" with ds1. Luckily i had friends who bf so i knew it was ok. I only called the helpline once when i had a day of nonstop feeding and they were lovely.
Mum now says she wishes she had lived in a different era because she would have loved to have given it a proper go.
Health professionals have a lot to answer to.

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

Who the hell wouldn't even realise it was an option?! People aren't stupid.

Oh Christ, do Swedish people show each other their bedrooms when they go for dinner?

Can you imagine how much more stress that puts on getting ready?

Not only do you have to get the dinner and get the downstairs tidy you have to make sure the upstairs looks OK too?

Shee- ut. There are good things about not living in Sweden then.

The articles are really interesting, and the point about swedish people doing the same thing as each other. It is true people show you their bedroom, all very odd! They say "it was lovely to see how you live" which I think translates to "thanks for letting us have a nosy around your home" I do not show guests my bedroom as it is the only room in the house where I don't tidy before guests come becuase it is where we sleep and they have no reason to look in my bedroom

I am happy to hear that the breast is best information has helped some people but it is a shame it has negatively effected other people.

You are allowed to stay in hospital for as long as you want when you have a baby, most 1st time mums stay 3/4 days even with a regular birth. We went home after a day as I wanted to be at home. Whilst in hospital the baby sleeps in bed with the parents (no fish tank) and you are encouraged to do constant skin to skin. I couldn't be doing with all the lieing down so I used to pop ds naked in my top with no bra on and then sit and chat to people or do simple tasks, I think my friends and family thought that I thought I was a mummy kangaroo.

I think that it is possibly the swedes desire to all do the same thing that makes bf rates so high. Every one has the same pram, babies nearly all wear stripes like a little baby uniform, I know 5 babies called Axel, it is very very rare to meet a baby with a name outside the top 100 top 10 I would imagine it would be logical that all mums breastfeed if they possibly can.