"Breastfeeding advice unhelpful"- BMJ

[EauRouge]

Here. (Think this is what was being hinted at yesterday)

I agree that breastfeeding support in this country is totally lacking but I don't see how changing the advice will help- how about providing more and better support?

'The gold standard' is a daft phrase, not found in any of the research, official guidance or wherever, as far as I know, and I wish HCPs would not use it! I agree - it makes it sound mythical and magical, and as HCPs' practice is one of many reasons why mothers who want to bf excl for that length of time don't do it, it lets the HCPs off the hook :)

I do think more antenatal education would help. Particularly about the potential pitfalls of BFing - not to put people off, but to make it clear that feeding around the clock/unputdownable baby/growth spurts can and do happen without anything being wrong.

It would have positively helped me to know that all of the things I encountered with DS1 were within the range of normal behaviour in a young baby.
As it was I mix-fed from 6 weeks and stopped altogether before 6 months. I don't have major issues around this as I know that I did all I could at the time, but my expectation about what BFing would be like made me not have the confidence to just keep going.

I think about this alot because I think if somebody like me found it hard (some lifeexperience, HCP, 'well informed' - or so I thought, very motivated - never occured to me that I would not BF my baby, good support by DH) then I can see how it would be hard to keep going in more difficult circumstances.

Re targets: there are none. Look at 'Reasons to be proud' on the Breastfeeding Network site - I loved that .

"Gold standard" - what a desperate choice of words, lol. But I really do think BFing official advice always came out sounding either very annoying, very patronising, misleading/untruthful or all three. The best advice I had was from fellow mums who had done it recently (ie their kids were one to three years older), what worked for them and what didn't, and realising that there were different ways of achieving the same goal. And definitely avoiding any advice that tells you to use cabbage leaves. (Those of you who have heard it will know what I mean......but if you found the leaves helpful, that's fine, I'm just saying that they shouldn't tell everyone they MUST use them!)

Granted that it might not be intended as a target for individual women. However your average high achieving, goal-driving women will read an ideal recommendation and see a target! And if they don't achieve that target they feel like they've failed themselves and their baby. TBH I don't know how we can get around that.

There seems to be an assumption that once women are 'educated' to accept that feeding every two or three hours night and day is normal they will adjust their expectations and cope just fine, as if expectations are the only problem. I already had bad insomnia and anxiety issues around sleep pre-delivery, so the early weeks of BFing were hell. Mercifully DS went three hours between feeds right from the start and dropped down to two feeds a night unusually early, but all the "oh its perfectly normal for them to feed every two hours for yonks and yonks - get over it" stuff on Mumsnet was so hard to read in the early weeks when I genuinely wasn't coping. I honestly couldn't have fed every two hours for several weeks without developing PND, and having had depression in the past I would FF in a heartbeat rather than risk that. BFing is just bloody hard for some mothers and in some situations and I wish we could just be a little kinder.

Somewherewest, the thing is, when people post, as they often do, about their own situation where they are worried that frequent feeding means they haven't got enough milk or there is something wrong with their milk, or their baby will become 'spoilt', the response often is 'this is normal' often followed by suggestions of how to make coping with normality easier. I don't think any of this is meant unkindly, or even phrased in an unkind manner and have never seen 'get over it' !

You were reading this at a bad time, when you were not coping well - nothing wrong with those responses, but you were taking them the 'wrong' way. This is a downside of talkboards - you might reply to a poster but you cannot account for the reaction of the many 100s/1000s of others who might be reading it and interpreting it very personally. It's the same as any other written information - it can't be personalised to every individual, and I think you are being a tad unfair to people who post on mumsnet, to be honest :(

Plus, there is very little sense in telling mothers what to expect when their mothers and partners and the partner's mothers are all telling them something must be wrong because babies back in their day didn't cry, slept peacefully all night, did fine on formula, etc., and making thoughtless suggestions like 'let me hold the baby while you get on with the housework dear', or looking askance at a mother whose house looks like a tip a few weeks into motherhood.

It is very important that people in general and not just mothers should know what is normal for a breastfed baby, including most importantly that feeding will be much more frequent, and that they will cry more. In other words, a redefinition of normal would benefit all. The expectations of the mother's wider circle are a huge part of the problem.