Being ‘paid to breastfeed’ - your thoughts?

[SarahMumsnet]

The BBC's reporting this morning that new mothers living in some areas of Derbyshire and south Yorkshire are to be given vouchers for shops including Matalan, Mothercare and John Lewis if they breastfeed their babies. These will be given out as part of a study by the University of Sheffield, aimed at discovering whether “financial incentives” will increase the uptake of breastfeeding in parts of the country where rates are low; mothers will receive vouchers worth up to £120 if they breastfeed until six weeks, and another £80-worth if they continue to the six-month mark.

The scheme, according the senior researcher on the project, is intended "as a way of acknowledging both the value of breastfeeding to babies, mothers and society, and the effort involved in breastfeeding. Offering financial incentives ... might increase the numbers of babies being breastfed, and complement on-going support for breastfeeding provided by the NHS, local authorities and charities."

We've been asked by the beeb what Mumsnetters make of the idea; what's your reaction?

Personally as a midwife I'd like to see the money would be ploughed into extra support for mums going through problems. And education, for everyone. Additional classes for mums to be, refresher courses for mums having second/third babies etc. Extra education for midwives and other professionals too. More lactation consultants readily available.

Sigh. If only.

At our trust we have a assistant practitioner who goes out and helps mums with feeding issues in between midwife visits if needed. She also goes along to groups. The AP's are BFI trained.

Ledkr, there are some pretty poor HCPs out there when it comes to communication....:(

When this scheme is evaluated, the effect on women in the target area who did not get the vouchers will be (or ought to be) looked at.

But just as my non-walking relative does not resent the low-price gym offer to her walking friends, I'd really hope the same lack of resentment would be shown by people who would never be able to breastfeed...that would include women like you who have had breasts removed, it would include women who know they aren't ever going to be mothers because of other surgery or conditions affecting fertility, it would include women whose child-bearing is behind them, it would include adoptive and foster mothers, it would include men, for goodness sake.

Surely a bit of common sense will be shown, with no one accusing the scheme of 'discriminaton' on these grounds....?

And the award for empathy goes to minifingers.

I would say more but my post would be deleted for breaking talk guidelines.

Todays news, along with the report last week that the NHS pays £700 to insure each birth incase of negligence have just made me more angry than I was before...

Could they not find the £900 per birth and instead invest it in better maternity services and pre and post natal support, including more breast feeding support????

Absolutely ridiculous!

Tiktok not cons as such but a bit more honesty about the fact it's hard and it's normal for things not to just work but that many mothers need some or masses of support.

Nothing I heard from the NHS or NCT mentioned the challenges and so when things didn't just work and DD never latched on and I had to express/mix feed for the first 6 weeks before giving up expressing and ff exclusively it was a big shock. Given I felt like I'd been hit by a truck anyway it was a big old emotional mess. Midwives coming for fifteen minutes shoving my boobs in her mouth and then going 'she's really not interested is she' didn't help. The NCT breastfeeding helpline never called me back either.

My cousin formula fed, among her friends breast feeding was seen as hippyish and "bitty". I think a financial incentive would have helped some of them to give it a go and maybe help to change attitudes.

I can't see how they could police it though. I would suspect most would take the money and just pretend to be breast feeding.

Tricky this one. Agreed that something should be done to try to improve breastfeeding rates among this demographic - it's striking that middle-class mothers are so much more likely to breastfeed, and to continue for longer. Don't know if this is the right way to change things, but it might work - and it is only a pilot, so why not? We know these mothers aren't flush, so these vouchers might be a greater incentive to them than they would be to some of the middle-class newspaper columnists banging on about lactivism and the breastapo in the papers today...

I've EBF my 4.5 month old baby so far, and I've found it really hard - at 2 weeks I was in tears all the time and dreaded every single feed. I couldn't have coped without the support I got from NCT counsellors, NHS counsellors, friends, relatives and my DH. And I certainly couldn't have coped if I had another child to look after, or if I had to go back to work quickly. If breastfeeding weren't the norm amongst my friends I might not have got beyond 3 days.

To those people saying the money would be better spent on midwives, I'm dubious. 1/2 the midwives I met (out of at least a dozen) gave me what I now know was poor advice on breastfeeding. I got much better advice from breastfeeding specialists.

I can't say I can know what would motivate someone who is on a very low income with no family support to BF, I doubt £200 is enough though.

I think everyone thinks more and better support will help those who want to BF to BF for longer. There's an interesting debate around is that the best place to spend money or should we be trying to persuade those who don't want to BF to BF (as this study is doing)? What are the population scale benefits of each approach? And how long term are those effects? It's a complicated problem made worse by the emotions involved (would PND decrease or increase if there was more BFing mothers?)?

If the UK wants to see an increase in breast feeding rates then they should look towards countries such as Norway. I don't think financial incentives will play a big role in getting women to breastfeed if that was not their initial intention.

To breastfeed you need support: from family and from the bigger clinical network. The most critical time I feel is after delivery in hospital and immediately after. The money should really be ploughed into extra staff and bf support.

I agree with many people that have posted...breastfeeding is a choice. Ultimately to have a healthy happy baby you need a healthy happy mum.

although I agree with the vast majority of posters here, I do think the la leche response is well pitched. can't find it to link as has popped up on my fb page....

Apologies in advance for the rant...

Some of us desperately wanted to BF our babies and tried abso-bloody-lutely everything to make it work. I was severely anaemic with ds1 and my milk didn't come in. I pumped four times a day and BF him to try to get my supply to come in, but ds1 was admitted on day 7 with weight loss >14% of his body weight and dehydration, and had to have a nasogastric tube fitted. I still tried to pump and increase supply but it wasn't happening and I gave in to formula on advice from the midwives. I was full of maternal hormones post-birth and was devastated that I couldn't feed my baby. With dd2 it went better and my milk came in, then I had to have emergency surgery after 10 days for retained placenta, still managed to BF but then got sick and developed an infection. So dd2 ended up FF too.

As well as the upset at being unable to feed my babies, formula costs a bloody fortune. There is your incentive for mums to BF! BF is free - formula costs £10 for a tin, which lasts less than a week. So the government is suggesting giving vouchers to mums who BF, and those of us who tried our darnedest and couldn't get diddly squat and have to break the bank buying formula too??! Talk about adding insult to injury.

DAFT DAFT DAFT!!!!! Rant over. Thank you.

Bad idea. I longed to breast feed but neither of my babies latched on properly and the hospital was far quicker than I was to give up as they were worried about FTT. I'd have felt that our noses were rubbed in this failure if we then missed out on other things too.

And who is policing this? I can imagine it's ripe for fraud.

"this type of pressure is alarming as it in some ways removes that choice"

How does it remove choice? Someone please explain. I just don't get this argument.

the llll response is so far only on their breastfeeding matters fb page

Did I post on here already? Can't remember..

Anyway, I think what we need is real life women, at our ante-natal classes, actually demonstrating breastfeeding. So you can see how it works, how it works with a bigger baby, how you dress for it etc. We could be hiring mums as 'breast-feeding models'. Our real problem here is that we don't SEE enough breastfeeding. Change that, and I bet the rates would go up.

The fact is that the people who genuinely cannot breastfeed are in the minority, yet the people who do breastfeed are also in the minority. This scheme is targeting the missing majority - those who could breastfeed, but don't.

Surely it is right to try and change that?

I'm not saying that it is their fault, just like it is not your fault if you tried, but could not, breastfeed. But if you genuinely cannot, then there is nothing that can be done. But this is no reason not to help those who could breastfeed, surely?

Whether the scheme will actually work remains to be seen. Personally I think that there should be more support available and more honest information beforehand. Society, family and peer pressure also have a lot to answer for.

in 21st century modern UK,is bottle feeding so utterly abhorrent and dangerous that we need to BRIBE mothers to breastfeed?

I think not. And btw showing that dreadful Mother on Channel 5 news with the haircut from hell is no incentive or encouragement to anyone.

Yes, it is right to try and change it...but not like this. They are approaching it from the wrong angle.

We did more support BEFORE we give birth, we need facts, demonstrations...I had only ever seen my mother and one friend BF by the time I became a mum at 26. Shocking really.

We need more support IN THE HOSPITAL. I left four hours after birth. Baby had not even woken up in all that time, never mind latched on. My 'advice' from the MW was 'do you know how to get him to latch?' on my way out the door. In my pethidine high state, I nodded. He lost weight, surprise surprise and had to be topped up.

We need PROPER CHECKS for tongue/lip tie etc. My boy had an undiagnosed lip tie, which he broke himself at ten months by headbutting the wall. We had finished BF at eight months, and NONE of the HCPs had noticed that his top lip didn't fan out at all while BF.

LittleBearPad ...your experience was awful, no doubt about it. Certainly any antenatal prep needs to acknowledge that things can go pear-shaped. Just to say that the NCT bf line should have called you back - but as an occasional on the line, I know all calls are returned. It is monitored and surveyed. However, sometimes call-backs fail - sometimes the recording gets a glitch and we can't hear the number correctly, sometimes the mother does not pick up the call and we cannot persist (she may have decided she does not want to talk to us), sometimes there is some other tech error outside our control. I think last time the survey was done, over 95 per cent of messages were returned.

Well I am in 2 minds about the bf incentive trial - and it is just a trial to see if it makes any difference. The vouchers will have been donated so is not costing the nhs anything, its targeted at women who would not normally consider bf-ing (not the ones who want to but lack support) and bf rates in some areas are quite frankly piss poor (eg only 11% of women in Merthyr Tydfil even try to bf, let alone reach their bf goals). It would actually be easy to monitor as presumably feedback sessions will be part of the trial participation (which is voluntary). I don't think there is anything to lose here for anyone?

There are 2 strands here - encouraging women to bf in the first place and then helping them keep going once they have started. I think as a trial its worth a shot - the women they are targeting don't care about "breast is best" (which is not an nhs message) - they are adhering to their own social norms and the aim of the trial is to give them some financial incentive to step out of their norm.

And I agree with Tiktok and happydaze, especially that breastfeeding women are a minority.

I would like to see an tax on formula companies which is then passed to the nhs to fund further breastfeeding support. A tax that cannot be passed on to the base price of formula (I am not here for realistic ideas )

I would like to see breastfeeding adverts instead of formula ones on the tv. I would like to see huge bf billboards outside of tesco instead of sma follow on milk. I would like to see women breastfeeding in soaps. Then maybe bf would be seen as normal and these incentives/trials might not be needed but the govt keeps cutting the funding for breastfeeding support and promotion, and England is already seeing a direct decline in breastfeeding rates so this is never going to happen and so nhs trusts have to think outside of the box and collaborate on schemes like this.

sorry for the scrambles post but it turns out I am a bit more opinionated than I realised :)

amothersplace - what an unkind and irrelevant remark....do you really think breastfeeding mothers ought to worry about the look of their hair in order to encourage other mothers to do it? No, of course you don't. You just wanted to make a nasty comment.

I haven't read the thread but this would have finished me off nearly 19 years ago. I desperately wanted to b/f ds. After two bouts of mastitis, a breast abscess, (I carried on for two weeks with a tube inserted in my breast to drain pus into a bag so I could continue feeding) and probably, now I know more about it, thrush of the inner breast, notwithstanding cracked and bleeding nipples, this would have finished me off completely and made me feel more of a failure than I felt already.

When my ds was about 2.5 and saw the dentist the dentist commented that he had a very unusually shaped palate. I researched more - it would have got in the way of successful breastfeeding - as indeed would have my tendency to cystic breast disease. Not a single midwife, health visitor or trained professional was able to help or provide me with any solace expect the mantra that "all women can breastfeed - it's all about the latch". A lot of it is but not all.

I headed into a PND as a result - God knows where I'd have ended up if I'd FAILED to get the vouchers that could have been spent on my ds as well as FAILED to feed him and FAILED as a mother.

THIS IS THE MOST STUPID PROPOSAL I HAVE EVER HEARD AND THOSE RESPONSIBLE SHOULD BE STRUNG UP. THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS AND ANYONE WHO KNOWS ME ON MNET KNOWS I'M NOT A SWEARER.

FUCKING, FUCKING, FUCKING WRONG.

I would have LOVED to BF my LO but she wouldn't latch on properly, none of the MWs in hospital or MW I have seen post-birth have been able to help me hence why I am now FF. This just makes mums like myself feel even more guilty about not being able to BF.

How to feed your baby is a personal choice. What ever you choose is right as long as you are both happy.

Mothers should want to BF because they want to, not for the financial gain.

I would love to see who's great idea this was!!!!!!!!!!

All this money they are obviously putting aside for this should be ploughed into Maternity services. Support more people to become midwives, train more midwives to help with BF.

I was kept in hospital for 3 days after having DD due to tearing but the original plan was for me to go home 6 hours after giving birth if all was ok. I cannot imagine how I would have last the 1 week I BF without that hospital stay, and speaking to other mums who kept me going that long.

I was heartbroken I couldn't feed longer.

And I fed DD successfully for 9 months - because she didn't have a funny shaped palate.

prettyprudence, you say "the women they are targeting don't care about "breast is best" (which is not an nhs message) - they are adhering to their own social norms and the aim of the trial is to give them some financial incentive to step out of their norm"

Totally agree. No bf campaign has used 'breast is best' for many years. Bf campaigns have completely missed whole swathes of women - they are unaffected by them. Far from feeling they're 'having breastfeeding shoved down our throats', they ignore the messages, they almost don't hear them, because the social norm is that breastfeeding hardly exists....and that is a lot more powerful than any campaign.