It WAS very childish of me, but I got a dig in at some Formula companies today......

[VeniVidiVickiQV]

Got sent a market research survey today asking me my opinions on formula milk.

So i gave them.....

Exactly PinkTulips! If I had been told this I wouldn't have got myself into such a state and pestered all the bf counsellors or my MW! If it was a problem with positioning or latching or thrush or any of those things, then it wouldn't just settle down, but it does. I hate it when people think they can explain everything, and then when they can't it's all your fault!

Re the info issue. There is no easy answer. More support for bf mums, better training for MWs and HVs, that's all you can do, because you can give information until you are blue in face, but it's nothing without support.

I agree, PT....sometimes it really does just go if you give it time. I can think of one mum who I was in touch with over months, and nothing worked. But it did get better by itself, after a long time.

I really don't like telling mothers 'just persevere' as too many clueless people say this, and miss the chance to really make it better.

I do share with them that in my experience, unexplained pain really does get better eventually. I think it may be because the baby's mouth just gets bigger :)

thank you tik-tok, it's nice to hear that from a real expert!

tiktok - I wish you had been my HV!

PinkTulips, yes I did and it was a disappointment tbh as I thought that having bf before I'd be ok. But it did settle down a bit quicker and I wasn't as stressed about it because I knew that it was nothing I was doing wrong - and believe me, ds certainly opened his mouth wide! He does have slight tongue-tie but this never affected his feeding.

Pinktulips and Rhubarb - What? You mean you didn't toughen up your nipples with a scrubbing brush whilst you were pregnant in preparation for breastfeeding? As per the 1930's Mothering book my MIL has in possession.

pmsl!!!

at least i'm expecting it this time, frightened the life out of me with dd, and poor dp was at a loss of how to help or reassure, he knew i'd kill him if he suggested formula but he couldn't stand seeing me in agony. daytime i could cope with, it was the period from 1am to 6am when things seemed really hopeless and i could have used someonetelling me things would get better.

rofl beatie, my mom told me to do that! thank god i haven't listened to her since i was a teenager!

True Chloe, I guess like most things it's best to keep an open mind :)

QUOTE born berry, the pain wasn't thrush with me either, and the cracked nipples wern't due to bad positioning, the nipple was at the back of the throat like it should have been. END QUOTE

So can you explain how a nipple can become cracked without the friction of something rubbing against it? - QUOTE TIK TOK - She's not cracked or bleeding (which has to be positioning) END QUOTE. Unless a counsellor has xray vision, can see into babes mouth and observe exactly what is happening it is impossible to say your nipple was in the right place in babes mouth, if it was cracking simply could not physically occur.

I also read a group just for counsellors and between them all I am still yet to see a case of breast pain they have not managed to identify :)

born berry, why are you so determined to say i was just doing it wrong? the pain resolved itself in the end so it obviously wasn't a positioning problem or infection. i could tell how far into her mouth my nipple was by comparing the size of her mouth to the amount of breast she had in there! not rocket science!

also, when she was feeding i didn't feel pressure on my nipple, more on the area around it. as far as i can tell the cracking was due to my nipple being wet fo so many hours of the day and cracking as it dried out, then the problem being aggravated by her sucking. i suffer from extemely cracked lips as well which bleed alot of the time, and theres definitely no pressure or friction on them! every womans body is differant and while generalities can be applied they are not hard and fast rules. it is extermely ignorant of you to suggest that you can diagnose bad positioning in my dd simply by reading a few posts on the net, when doctors and nurses who actually examined me could find no cause for my discomfort. it's attitudes like yours that dishearten so many women going through similar experiances to the point of giving up bf.

Rhubarb,you point out (quite rightly) that women need to have the less appealing aspects of b/feeding pointed out to them.
I agree.
I was staggered at how brutal and visceral the whole process of giving birth and feeding a baby was.
I felt overwhelmed by blood and gore and milk and piss and shit (and that was just me.)

However,all the things you list as being negative can be overcome or are simply not valid reasons.Restictive? Inconvenient? How so??.Furthermore, the adverse effects of giving formula are there for life.

Yes,breastfeeding can hurt.It was bloody agony for me for weeks and God knows,I saw everyone and read everything I could on the subject.
It would never have occured to me to give up however. Simply non negotiable in my case,although I can well understand and sympathise with women who do.

How about this to make you all laugh?!
At a mother and baby group last week,a tiny baby started to cry so the mother started pulling her t shirt up to feed him which must have taken ooh..... 10 seconds.
Another woman looking on commented
'You see that's the advantage of bottle feeding.No delay,you can just stick it straight in their mouths.'

I promise I am not making it up.

I've looked everywhere for a copy of 'The Ecologist' today with no luck.

TikTok,are there noises within the profession about the immorality of all the formula company freebies?
I would give such a mouthful to someone presuming to advise me if she was using a Cow&Shite mousemat.

PT - I think BB is wrong to be so sure about what happened to you.

But:

Cracking on the nipples is almost always caused by compression (or friction). Cracked lips are (mostly) caused by dry skin. There are bound to be individual variations and tolerance to compression/friction is going to vary too. You just can't tell by looking on the outside where the nipple is placed on the inside, so judging this way doesn't help - the baby does draw the breast/nipple in and stretches it somewhat.

If you ever had a flat top to your nipple on finishing a feed, then this would be sign of compression - the nipple would have been pressed up against the roof of the mouth.

I think it's interesting you felt soreness (and presumably started cracking) at the side....makes me think your baby's mouth/jaw/tongue was just not the best 'fit' for your breast/nipple. As time passed, this got easier.

However, I am speculating here. As I say, there is a lot we don't know about soreness. I think I was wrong to say cracked/bleeding has to be positioning...although it certainly appears to be in the vast majority of cases.

I had a mother who became cracked and bleeding when her baby started on solid foods. His saliva changed, and her nipple skin just 'broke out' - she was already an allergic person, and could not eat certain foods, but she was giving them to her baby and the traces of it affected her skin in that way.

Yes, moondog, there are occasional discussions in health visitor and midwifery journals about 'gifts' (gifts? Who's paying for them? Mothers who buy the formula!!) . But enough of their members and readers are not bothered for it not to make any difference.

In units and clinics which have a breastfeeding policy or who are trying to become Baby Friendly, you'll usually see there is something that prevents the display of posters and the stuff like post-its, but I don't recall seeing any policy that banned the actual receipt of gifts from formula companies.

Personally, I can't understand why any health professional would not see how inappropriate it is to get this stuff.

BornBerry, I am sure that 90% of breastpain can be identified and helped. But to infer that we are not doing it right because of persisting pain, well that is just patronising, sorry. No wonder women give up if they are being told, time after time, that they are doing something wrong. You cannot explain absolutely everything, why can't you just accept that?

Moondog - ok, apart from the pain issue. As I've already stated, I couldn't feed in public as my let-down was too fast and strong, it would choke the baby who would pull away and I was then in control of a mini hosepipe! I haven't found any technique to stop a strong let-down.

Not every woman finds expressing easy. If you want to go out, have an evening to yourself, whatever, you need to express. The literature make this sound very easy and list a host of products for doing this, however ime expressing really isn't that easy at all! I used formula for the times I went out (bad mummy!).

Mastitis can be severe. I got flu like symptoms with mine and the pain was like nothing else I'd experienced! Dh had to latch dd on for me and hold her there whilst I writhed around. I couldn't even hold dd I was so weak and dizzy. Yes, there are steps you can take to avoid it, but again, the literature tends to just skip over mastitis and they make it out to be something the mother is doing wrong anyway. I've spent many a night desperately massaging a lump in my breast trying to get a duct unblocked.

All in all I found bf to be messy and stressful and inconvenient. I know there are some mums who find it wonderful and easy and I'm pleased for them, I wish it were like that for all of us!

I don't want to put off mums by bf horror stories, but I do think they should have just a little more info about every aspect of it, so that they are forewarned and forearmed. As I said, the problem is not so much getting mums to start bf, it's getting them to carry on. And Bornberry's views won't help new mums that's for sure, it'll just make them feel useless and insecure.

are you serious moondog? did anyone point out to her the preparation time of a bottle or were you all just standing there with your jaws on the ground?

i have to defend rhubarb on the restrictive and inconvenient issue though. i also didn't feed in public as my dd was an extremely messy and difficult feeder. she was easily distracted and took a long time to get latched on during which time i'd be wrestling with her and my boob trying to get the 2 in roughly the same area! she also had a habit of sucking for a minute and then latching off, at which point i would promptly spray whoever was directly in front of me in the face with milk! maybe i'm considered too conservative but i found all this a bit much in a public place and didn't enjoy putting myself on show so didn't do it. if i had had one of those babies that could feed quietly and discreetly i might have done it but that wasn't the case!

also i demand fed for the year i breast fed and although after 6-7 months she could go a few hours without a feed, up til that time i could sometimes be feeding every hour or more. not condusive(sp?) to leaving her with anyone for longer than that.

What you say is fair enough Rhu,apart from the last bit re BB making mothers feel 'useless and secure'.

TT,in light of recent and massive public interest in provenance of food and revulsion at the ethics of big business,do you (honestly now) foresee a time when the tide will turn re public acceptance of formula?

Yes I am PT! Unbelievable eh?

Some people may never feel confident about feeding in public.Again,fair enough.
I just never assumed that people were actually looking at me or cared about what I was doing.

It has been my observation that the kinds of problems with pain, positioning, latching, establishing supply are fairly common
however, the reason they tend to loom so large in the memory is that - in general - we bf for such a relatively short time in this country. If you feed for six weeks, two weeks of pain/discomfort loom really large. If you bf for years then those memories of the two weeks at the beginning are outweighed in every way by the months (years) of happy feeding. And frankly, even if you do remember the grim bit at the beginning, or the episode of mastitis or whatever, it's worth it when set against all the extra hours of sleep because the night feeds were done in bed, all the comfort provided to ill babies and toddlers and all the rest of it. You get a different perpective if you are a long term bfeeder is what I am saying I think

I had the mysterious pain thing with DD first time round. (Pretty sure i had the same second time around but then developed thrush and mastitis so i cant be 100% on that).

I happen to think, my very own personal POV is that my LO's - both of them - mouths were just rather small. So they were "nipple" feeding for the first few weeks. The pain settled "on its own" after a few weeks. But, i suspect that it was due to their mouths having grown a bit.

I may be way off the mark but i couldnt think of anything else. I had 2 mws and 2 hvs help with DS's latch and his mouth physically wouldnt open wide enough.

Who knows.

Glad to see this thread is still going, thought i might have killed it with lactating wives.....

Rhubarb & PT I didnt say you were doing it wrong? nor would I ever tell a mum she was doing something "wrong" I'm confused once again (seems ot happen a lot on this board) how pointing out that 99% of time breast pain can be resolved is inferring the above? Isn't this more likely that women will seek help knowing someone can help ?!

Which literature skips over mastitis and says mothers are doing something wrong? The link I left (which Im guessing you havent read) explains mastitis. Blocked ducts can be another indicator of the breast not being drained effectively.

It's also not safe to assume that because something righted itself it wasnt positioning/attachment. Many mums and babes just work things out together over time :)

I did think it was worth it otherwise I would have stopped. I bf dd for 4 months, ds for 8.

Moondog, I think BB should try a little understanding and sympathy, even if she hasn't experienced this kind of pain for herself, it doesn't make it any the less real and no matter how many times she tries, there really isn't an explanation for it sometimes. I should know, I had a team of MWs checking me out with dd (they came up with the light coloured nipples, small aeroles theories - some even blamed my small boobs and excess let-down) and a host of bf counsellors, all agreed that the baby opened her mouth fine, we did not have thrush, positioning was fine, latching was fine. I was made to feel useless and could easily have given up at that point.

I think my nipples were just sensitive actually. but I think it is often the combination of nipple and mouth which just needs to settle down as QV says.
my mum said that she bf four of us with not too many probs but with me she thought a bt of her nipple was going to fall off
she also said - and I found this quite helpful - that your nipple/breast might hurt because you are using it in a new way. Like when you go for a bike ride and give yourself bum ache/saddle soreness but it settles down as your body adjusts. It certainly made a lot of sense to me at the time

your right Harpiscord, i do remember more good than bad, and as i've said i'll be bf-ing my next baby, but i do remember those first weeks vividly. i don't mean to come across as saying bf-ing was all bad, i do however think women should be given more positive support and advice when they are struggling and it's not a smooth ride, and even warned in advance it might not be so easy, rather than the 'you must be doing it wrong' line.

BB, the literature is in the pregnancy books you get given for free by the NHS, which is really the only book a lot of women bother to look at.