NHS FB campaign for breastfeeding

[Isit7yet]

So I'm well aware of all the virtues of breastfeeding but this feels like a first! Local NHS running a friendly BF campaign recently with women holding cards saying I breastfeed because..... And today's had "I love my children" . Am AIBU to want to message them and say how offensive that is to me? Surely that implies that to formula feeding is to not love your child enough?

grandmaswagsbag I'd rather the money was invested in better postnatal care.

but I can’t help but think that any ‘positive breastfeeding’ campaign is going to hurt people that really wanted to b/f and couldn’t. So how should it be done?

That’s the question they should be asking. I think focusing on the support available is a good thing. Right now it feels really like a telling off (and I breastfed so god knows how it feels tonwomen who want to and can’t) but when i was struggling the support was crap.

Personally I’d like to see women asked how they were thinking of feeding by midwives and support tailored from there. So a Mum who has expressed a wish to BF should be given sources of support and resources etc. Also discussion of the fact that it can hurt, it can be hard etc, and that if you want to carry on then x and y might help.

If a woman isnt sure, you can explain the benefits of each method, and point out sources of support for each.

If a woman wants to mix or bottle feed then again information given on how to do so safely.

Basically ‘have you thought about feeding? Any preferences? Any questions? OK that’s great, (gives appropriate support.)’

I’d also like to see more ‘stealth’ normalisation (extras breastfeeding in the background of TV programs for example.)

But it has to be support focused. On the individual level. You can run population wide ‘breast is great’ campaigns but you MUST support the individual Mum and baby.

They are using emotional blackmail to try to manipulate women into breastfeeding. If a woman's partner did this, it would be classed as emotional abuse. But as its the NHS doing it, its okay.

So instead of putting the money into supporting mums the NHS chose to spend it on paying somebody to run an Instagram account pushing the same formula shaming,patronising message everybody knows.

Yanbu

Personally for me I hated the first six weeks of breastfeeding and gritted my teeth through every feed- however I persevered and ended up really enjoying it and the reason I kept going was because of love - I wouldn't say to a formula feeder I love my baby more than you do (or think this) obviously but that was my main motivation for continuing breast feeding - that campaign is focusing on women's personal reasons for breastfeeding.

Promoting breast feeding is always gonna piss someone off

That’s quite different to saying the reason you breastfeed is because you love your children. And you have the good sense to not plaster that over SM!

The reason anyone breastfeeds, for however long, is probably a combination of circumstances which are personal to them and their baby, but also maybe to their upbringing, their support network, a touch of good luck etc etc. It’s just stupid to invite women to reduce this to an Instagram-friendly soundbite and then plastering that over SM. It’s too big and complicated an issue for that. But then, I hate SM anyway, so maybe I’m not the one to ask!

Promoting breast feeding is always gonna piss someone off

Probably, but promoting formula feeding would also piss someone off. That’s why I said it’s a divisive issue and maybe the NHS shouldn’t feed into that divisiveness. Medical fact, rather than instagram emotional crap for a start. I bet some doctors would cringe at this campaign.

They are designing a solution for a different problem to the one that exists.

Everyone I know wanted to BF. For some it just clicked. Great. But for the majority of us, where it didn't, support was abysmal. I had access to a single support group once a week for 2 hours. No way could I guarantee I'd get to that every week with an awake hungry baby ready to try and latch. And what about the seventy thousand feeds between each session where I didn't have anyone to help?

And to @makingtime and others who don't see how you could take personal offence - for me, BFing was a case of proving I wasn't a completely shit mum because at least I could do this for my baby, even if I didn't feel I loved her. Imagine that being your mindset, and then not being able to do it, and then seeing a smug little picture saying 'I breastfeed because I love my baby'. It would have been very very hard to see. It's not a given that brand new mums love their babies, any amount of threads on Mumsnet testify to this, and a message that draws a direct line between breastfeeding and love could do a lot of damage to a mum who is already doubting her fitness as a parent.

In general I'm not very tolerant of trigger warnings etc. But I think new mums are a different case, you are so vulnerable and just cannot prepare emotionally, so any public health intervention should really weigh up the risks as well as the hypothetical benefits - and I think this thread has shown that those risks do exist.

@mancmummy1414 couldn't have put that better myself.