Why my mum says her milk 'dried up' after few weeks?

[MiaMamma]

Hi, I just have one question - why women who had their babies in 70's and 80's say their milk supply dried up after few weeks?

My mum and her sister both say that they weren't able to bf after two weeks, they just 'didn't have any milk'? What did they do wrong then? They're both convinced they didn't do anything wrong, 'it just happened' but I'm sure it's not the case. I would like to explain them but I don't really know the reason myself.

Really at some of these stories.

Absolutely Tiktok. My mum now understands that her body didn't let her down, the medical professionals around her did and she's really pleased to have found that out. It has also re-inforced her growing confidence in her own "expertise" about ehr own body and her interaction with medical professionals about other health issues - she's no longer as willing to take their word as gospel or be fobbed off or patronised, which as you get older and have more health problems, is important.

My MIL says her children were allergic to her breast milk. This was late 50's / early 60's. Don't quite know what that was about or if anyone would be told this today.

My mum, in 60's didn't b/f any of us 3 siblings as she said it just wasn't presented as an option - and no one around her was doing it either. But we were all home births....(puzzled emoticon)

My mother says my elder brother was very sleepy and kept falling asleep at the breast. I've never heard of anyone these days who gave up bf because of that, so it may have been connected to the fact that she was doing 4 hourly feeds because that was what she'd been told.

I would love to have known what my grandmothers' experience was in the early 1940s - were they close enough to a time when everyone bf to have a good support network of older mothers around them, or were they at the height of the modernist faith in science and ignoring all that in favour of medical opinion?

I asked this question so I could explain my mum that it wasn't something what 'just happened' to women on those days, there's other reasons for that, it wasn't their fault and their body didn't let them down. Now I know how to explain it to her
Thank you.

And really really to read all those stories.

My sister's dd always fell asleep after a few minutes of feeding, and no 4-hourly schedules for her.

What an interesting thread. My mum bf all four of us on demand in the late 50s and 60s but only managed for about 6 weeks each time. From what she has told me I think much of it was down to the lack of support. We were probably thriving but she just didn't allow herself to believe it and believed that she wasn't producing enough milk. Not helped by her mil loudly declaring that she thought breastfeeding women were like huge milk-cows.

my mum's milked "dried up" when I was 12wo. She knows it's because her mum was making her feed me on a four-hourly schedule (my mum was 33 but v lacking in self-confidence around babies).

When she had my sister a couple of years later she "went through the motions" of bfing in hosp but her milk apparently never came in, bizarrely.

My MIL stopped bfing dp at 6wo because he "just wouldn't settle" and seemed so much more contented after a bottle .

Her mother got mastitis with her first baby and was told to keep bfing through it. Sadly, the baby got an infection in her mouth and died at 7wo . MIL's mother thought the infection was caused by the mastitis. I think it's more likely that the baby died because it was during the war and there were no antibiotics available to treat the baby's infection - they'd all gone for the war effort.

Oh, my Mom wanted to bf me, but I was given formula by the nurses, and then I refused the breast. She didn't blame herself, she blamed me .

When she had my sister, she said she wanted to bf. I think it was slightly more fashionable by then. The nurses asked if she'd bf before, and she said "yes", without getting into the details of how it hadn't worked. She got on fine with BF, but I'm pretty sure my sister was started on solids at 6 weeks or something comic like that.

It is an interesting (and very sad) thread.
My mother breastfed all of us,but sadi that the woman in the bed next to her was mistakenly given drugs to dry up her supply although she had wanted to breastfeed.

She just sadly accepted that an error had been made. Imagine the hooha nowadays!

I know quite a few women who trot out the old 'my milk dried up' line.
It's so tragic that women have been so disempowered as to have so little faith in their bodies and its ability to do this.

My mum only bf my 2 brothers for 1wk and myself for 2wks because her milk 'didn't come in'. We were born between 1965-1979. She was quite embarrassed when I bf ds1, but with ds2 is quite intrigued by it, and sticks her head in to watch!

MIL, however, had 9 children between 1961-1982, ans bf them all successfully. She is Italian, and her mum has told us stories of how she used to have one of her own children on one boob, and another local child on the other, and this was the norm.

It is terribly that many of our mothers were unable to bf because of the poor 'advice' and 'help' that they received, but unfortunately it does still happen.

My niece recently had a baby, and she stayed in the m/w unit for over a week to get help and become confident (she is v. young and quite nervous). When we visited them at home we asked why the time was up on the tv. She told us it was because she had to bf ds for 15mins every 4 hours. . We were both obviously shocked and I just sort of 'hmmmed' and explained to her how I'd fed my 2 - on demand. I didn't want to be preaching to her and filling her head with too much stuff, but just basically offered her an ear etc whenever she needed it. DP and I went away saying things like, 'what about when he's screaming for food after 2hrs', 'what about him wanting more than 15mins worth' etc. I went back to see her a couple of weeks later, she was still bf but suffering with mastitis, hardly surprising under the circumstances.

I meant to add on teh bottom of that post that I was very shocked at teh advice that she was given.

Obviously it is bad advice, but I had both my ds's in the same m/w unit, and I had fantastic help from everybody there. It is also one of these breastfeeding alliance places or whatever they're called, sorry I forget. But I think the point I'm trying to make is that IME of the unit the advice/care etc was great, and bf has been really good for me, no probs etc, v healthy boys, but she has, in the same place received the kind of 'help' that our mothers had.

OMG, this thread makes me feel desperately sad.

But the most shocking thing is that, despite extensive research that proves these feeding schedules to be completely wrong, HVs still perpetuate these myths today.

It would seem that out of all of us who posted about our mothers' bfing experiences, mine is the only one who had anything like a positive experience - and that was probably only because she must have been an excellent lactator IYSWIM, in spite of the 'advice' of that time.

My mum's grandmother must have been a good bfeeder too, because my mum and my aunt were born in a time of famine and poverty, and suffered malnutrition during their first few years, so there would not have been the money to buy any breastmilk-subsititute, even had the substitute been available.

I have heard say that the degree of ability to lactate (as opposed to the ability to breastfeed) may be genetic, which was why I was shocked that I had any problems, but if it is genetic then I have inherited my paternal grandmother's genes: she was completely unable to feed my father.

My mum says hers never came in with my older brother but she fed the rest of us fine (in the 70's). She b/fed my youngest brother until he was 15 months which was "not the done thing" in the early eighties.

I wouldnt bother trying to say anything to them though. No good can come of it, except that it might make them feel bad.

Well I'm a 41 yr old who got no milk coming in strange but true. Baby latched on everything perfect but he lost 26% of birth weight in first week he was about 1/2hour away from being in NICU when we went back in. I could express colostrum but nothing else ever ever happened, no other milk. And before you ask I had great great support whilst in and out of hospital. In the end i was just so relieved that DS1 had no ill side effects from the incredibly high sodium levels in his body. So just to say it does happen even in the 21st Century that mothers can't produce milk.

Highlander, it's not just HV's who are still perpetuating this schedule stuff. It's also a number of succesful childcare writers.

How odd Ali?!
There areundoubtedly a tiny percentage of women where it's just not happening.
Did they give you a reason for it??
At least he got the colostrum.

Well, as I said, for all her faults, MIL did breastfeed three children on a four-hour schedule.

So it works for some.

Nope they were just as puzzled as I was. Yep I had plenty of colostrum to express, so he got that for four weeks, did the same for ds2. Had some milk but still not enough. They did say it was very very rare, but as they both got the colostrum I didn't have any hangsup about it. Healthy babies who were gaining weight were far more important to me.

Strange eh???

There are a small % of women who really really don't make any milk, but they tend to have what are described as "tubular" breasts. At least that's what I'm told.

What does colstrum look like btw???
It's yellow is it?

Yes it does sometimes bbs - but by the look of it only for a minority and yet so many people to whom mothers look for advice, insist on recommending it for everyone, when it has been comprehensively shown to be generally unsuccessful. Just a quick look at the numbers would tell them that.

Happened to me with ds3. I think it was a combination of I didn't rest enough (how could I?), plus the effects of another section plus antib's- and being anaemic, and him being a lazy feeder.