Calling those who have stopped or been tempted to stop b/f before they wanted to...

[twinklemegan]

I have recently posted about this on another thread but I am now curious... has anyone out there given up/been tempted to give up breastfeeding because of the unrealistic way it is sometimes promoted?
eg b/f should be pain free and enjoyable;
any formula (even if desperate) inevitably leading to the end of b/f;
MWs not being allowed to recommend nipple shields even if woman is in excrutiating pain and scared of feeding;
assumptions that every woman has the support to be able to feed baby 24/7 if needed...
you get the idea.
Is it time to inject a bit of reality into the b/f literature and would this help some women to continue with at least some b/f??
Discuss!
PS I'm quite new on MN and I don't want to offend anyone - please be gentle with me!!

Message withdrawn

Also tiktok, baby not latching and parents worrying about baby in the first few days when baby doesn't latch sometimes get panicked into giving formula. I know this also happens in hospitals where the staff panick and then give formula, sometimes unnecessarily.

Like you say it's very difficult because parents often won't know exactly how to tell whether baby is ok or not.

Lethargy isn't always there, though....some on-the-way-to-being-dehydrated babies are unsettled and miserable rather than lethargic, and some babies thought to be 'good' because they sleep 'well' can be on the way to it, too.

Sorry to complpicated things! I don't want people to think that just because their baby is not lethargic everything is ok!

I'm not a medic, and anyone concerned about their baby's feeding needs to get someone to check - if they talk about fontanelles and nothing else, then ask someone else!!

complpicated???

complicate

Good point tiktok. My son never showed any sign of having a sunken fontenelle, but he screamed for hours on end and was miserable. There is absolutely no way I could have been sure whether he was dehydrated or not, as he was not lethargic or sleepy, quite the opposite, he was hyperactive. He was just an unhappy babe until he was finally able to latch and suck. Those were unhappy hours for my baby and I

This has scared me Tiktok. My DS fed very little in the first few days. As I said before, he had difficulty sucking as he was full of mucus. After that, because I was finding it so agonisingly painful, I myself was restricting feeding to a point. Because he was slightly jaundiced I was told to make sure he never went more than 5 hours without a feed (or was it 3? can't remember). In my traumatised post-birth state I interpreted this as it being OK to leave him x hours - as I was dreading feeding him, I didn't usually wake him up to feed if it had been less than that. And he did loads and loads of sleeping, and was very unsettled and cried loads. OMG - maybe I was making him dehydrated? But he's fine now, so perhaps it's best not to dwell too much on that.

Twinkle, you weren't making him dehydrated.

Clinical dehydration is quite a long way into the process of ineffective feeding - babies can certainly be somewhat underfed in the first days, but very few of them, thankfully, go on to be dehydrated...they start to feed more effectively and everything turns out well

You'll see I was careful to talk about being-on-the-way-to-dehydration....if things don't change when this is happening, then yes, the baby could become dehydrated. But mostly, things do change and they don't.

Sounds as if your baby had a few difficult days (as you did) but you knew that already! He's fine now, he overcame it, he was no worse than a lot of babies who have a sticky start and then go on to bloom and thrive - just like yours

Sorry to bring the topic of dehydration up twinkle, didn't mean to bring up bad memoried It gave me some nightmares at the time and I am now convinced also, having read what tiktok says and other sources I have read since, that not all babies get dehydrated after birth. Which is good news !

Tiktok, one more question. Are newborns ok on just a few drops of colostrum for the first few days after birth ? This is what my NCT ante-natal lady said at the time. My milk didn't come in until day 4, so just wondering if other babies in a similar situation are usually ok just on a few spoons of colostrum ?

memoried = memories

Difficult to say, yellow....the average feed of colostrum on the first day is only 7 ml, apparently, or just over a teaspoon, and it does seem as if most babies are conveniently not designed to take large volumes at any one time until the milk comes in some days later. When babies and mothers are kept together (skin to skin, or just close) the babies, typically, feed quite often though they may not actually transfer large amounts at first.

Most babies probably can manage fine on just a few drops - there is a lot of anecdotal stuff about babies being found after earthquakes, several days old, and still ok, and all this means (as I see it) is the human body is wonderful at adapting when it has to!

But I think it's pretty certain this is not the physiological norm, and that's what we should be supporting. So if the baby isn't managing to latch too well, hand-expressed colostrum is a sensible, easy and supportive intervention.

Thanks tiktok. I want to know this stuff simply beacuse so many of the new mums I speak to say that they were "forced" into formula feeding on day one in the hospital, etc, some came home and never managed to get bf going due to the formula feeding (baby wouldn't latch at all once he had had a few bottles of formula) plus lack of support to understnad what is "normal" feeding behaviour for a newborn, etc.

Gosh Yellowrose - is that still going on? I thought that they were getting more enlightened about that at least. They were actually pretty pro b/f at my hospital, even if they were all singing from different hymn sheets.

Sadly twinkle, I know several quite young women who gave birth in my part of London recently, both had to stay for extended periods due to c-sections and both were told to supplement with formula. When they asked why, they were simply told "baby is crying, he is hungry, your milk hasn't come in".

Doesn't give much confidence to a new mum does it ?

Of course I was not a witness to these hospital conversations, but I believe the women who have told me their stories. They are upset. I am convinced that the practice still goes on just by talking to new mums in London.

Of course not so much now in those hospitals that are pushing for Baby Friendly status.

Sorry, I should clarify and say that the stories are from 2 separate women I know who gave birth in different hospitals.

Hi Yellowrose

Sorry if this is long, but I think its important to give an example of how BF can be doomed from the start by poor NHS treatment. .

Basically my DS was whisked away from me shortly after returning to the PN Ward by an useless, uncaring midwife who despite that he was small (two weeks early) and his heart had stopped during the labour, thought the best thing would be to put him in a car seat on the reception desk for about 6 hours. Unfed and unchanged. I was in a mess and couldn't move out of bed but new that it was important to get him on the breast asap. He literally had 30 seconds and then I was told to get some sleep. My DS was out for the count and I had to actually buzz several times to get him back. I was overwelmed and slightly traumatisied so didn't question this. I was given a side room and began to askfor help.My DS wouldn't latch on. I asked for more help.Basically a midwife would come in bump him on my breast and leave again. By the end of day one he had nothing. I was told that I couldn't have a breastoump and was handed a thimble and told to express colstrum into it. This took about and hour to get about 20 mils. The midwives would then syringe that into his mount. This continued, for another day or so. Eventually I broke down and along came this amazing midwife. She examined DS and found he was very dehydrated and would have been too weak to feed, even if he new how. his fontanelle was sunken, his mouth was totally dry, he was very drousy and constantlly startelling with every movement. I was heartbroken and distraught beyond belief. This is what she did...

• Immedietly got me a breastpump.
• Convinced me to allow her to cupfeed DS some formula (the state he was in there was no convincing). This totally brought him back from the brink, I could see him improve drastically with every feed - his colour, demeanor etc.
• Setup a 4 hour feed schedule in which he was given set amounts of expressed milk & formula (until my milk took over completly) and given a 15 minute 'try' on the breast before this was given. If he had woken and wanted to feed, obviousl he would of been, but my DS had to be woken for feeds and we didn't let him go for more than 4 hours until things improved.

This continued for a few more days. I stayed in hospital until I could BF. It was all writen down. The conficting/poor advice stopped. Then, in the middle of the night on day 4, unassisted DS and I had our first feed! By the next day he was feeding well I was managing to feed him well and we went home. My confidence was very shaken and I still needed allot of support. It probably took me 6 weeks to trust the process. I am still BF at 20 months.

tiger - I feel so sad reading your experience, but thanks for sharing it.

How awful for you. I have never heard of a newborn being put into a car seat in hospital, how primitive and nasty. God, what were they thinking separating mum and baby for so long ?

But thank goodness for the experienced, kind mw who helped you. How wonderful that you are still at it after 20 months !

You know what, I was so in love with the mw who helped me with DS's birth , I asked her for a photo so I can show my DS when he is older ! The woman is such an angel !

So to respond to the OP 1st post...

So from my experience,a bit of formula SAVED BF for me. As did timed feeds instead of demand feeding - the was no demand until my DS was about 5 days old. It was hard to establish - to the point of being very, very distressing and depsite all the mountains of leaflets I had read - was totally unprepared for this. It wasn't enjoyable all the time until DS was about 6 weeks and I had worked out how to position us both etc etc and my shaken confidence made it an anxious process. I actually had moments of envying a bottle feeding friend for a short time, that she wan't going through this. After all that it was/is great though and I don't regret what I went through to be able to do it. Not one bit. so, yes - huge amounts of reality need to be injected into the advice we are given

Thanks Tigertum. Sorry to hear you had such a bad time but glad it worked out in the end.

Message withdrawn

Pitchounette - from my understanding of what I have read, I don't think it makes any difference whether a new born is fed colostrum or breastmilk by cup or syringe (tiktok, correct me if I am wrong please !)

You can use whichever you and baby find easiest. The reason bottlefeeding isn't recommended at this early stage is so that baby doesn't get confused and can learn to latch and suck from the nipple.

Also there isn't masses of colostrum, so if you express it into a machine or a bottle, it will all stick to the sides and baby will get little of it. It is much easier to express into a cup.

I am amazed that there was such a debate in your hospital about what WHO recommend, pretty irrelevant when all they had to do was to make sure baby got some colostrum or breastmilk.

While I disagree with some of the things the OP has said I agree with some of the points about preparing people for problems. I do remember hating the mums on the BF video I watched when ds1 was tiny - they were so smug - and I've always loathed euphemisms about 'early difficulties' and so on, when what I had was agonising pain.

It's very difficult to strike a balance between making sure people seek help if there's pain, and making them not see themselves as the one odd unusual case BF isn't working for if there is pain. Normalizing the experience of needing expert help would be good, IMO - by which I don't mean saying that's the usual experience, but it's within the normal range.

BUT - it's incredibly hard to get people to really listen before they've given birth, when to be brutally honest an awful lot of (especially first-time) pregnant women are most taken up with thinking about labour, names, prams and nurseries. Even if we are already expecting that there might be BF problems, you hear far more from other sources about these causing outright failure than you do about them being fixed. Also, I don't think we expect, till we know more about BF, to have to do our own research and our own digging and pushing and struggling to get expert advice on what is basically a baby-related health problem. That's arguably the most important message to get across: "You won't be able to trust the mainstream health professionals you encounter to solve BF problems even if these are very common problems and have solutions. For the best chance of success, bypass and ignore them and find a BF counsellor, read your own books, etc." But even if you say that, you sound like a mad BF obsessive. After all, it seems so odd for that to be the case.

Re leaflets and so on - it's all very well saying everyone's persuaded of the benefits of BF, but doesn't some of that come from the leaflets that some people want to see replaced with ones detailing the problems? I'd agree that it would be good to see more detail out there, but there's only so much money, and it's a hard balance to strike.

One thing that it's easy to think as you have your first babies is that things are changing significantly and fast re attitudes to BF and so on, when really they aren't, particularly. What's happening rather is that when we have our first babies we quickly learn a lot about BF, we're suddenly on the alert for anything baby-related in the news, including BF, and we have the impression of a world changing with respect to BF when most of what we're noticing has always been there but we haven't seen it. Similarly I think it's easy, once you've moved past the stage of initially learning and deciding about BF, to think well that's that agreed then, we all know BF's best, and feel that really there's not as much need for that sort of information. But I think sometimes we're projecting our own state of knowledge, and rate of change, onto society in general, if that makes sense. I read a while ago that at no point this century have doctors ever told mums formula is better - does anyone know if that's right? I can't remember where that's from. And I know from reading my own mum's Dr Spock book from the 1960s (and she was no hippy parent, far from it) that the advice at least in there re BF was quite sensible, including feeding on demand. I think things change a lot more slowly than it can seem to us when we're in the middle of changing a lot ourselves, and also we shouldn't always necessarily trust what even our parents say about their own generation, as there can be a bit of rewriting of history there too, which can make it seem as if now is very different when perhaps it really isn't that much.

Anyway - I do agree with some of the OP, as I say, re normalizing some of the problems of early BF - but I think it's a very very difficult balance to strike with limited resources, and nothing like as easy as it seems to get that message across. Getting some of the basic info across over and over again might seem unnecessary to most people here with an internetty bent, but we're a drop in the ocean of people out there starting out as parents.

I should add - those mums in the video seemed smug, I wouldn't say now or even really have said then that they actually were. But I was in great pain and really needed to hear someone acknowledge that reality. So I'd said "it's hurting like hell", I'd want to hear not so much "It shouldn't hurt if positioning's right - get that checked." (however helpful that might seem to be) but rather something like "It can be absolute agony can't it? Poor you - get that positioning checked." I.e., not so much a contradiction to start with as an acknowledgement that however much pain and agony shouldn't be happening in an ideal world, they were happening to me.

As it happened, with my second baby, it took about four weeks on average (averaged over two breasts!) to get painfree feeding, and that was with me working very hard at it and getting BF counsellor help twice in the first week (after which I could feel it was improving, but it still took the time). So I can't honestly see what else I could have done to avoid that pain. I knew what a good position should be like but it took weeks of hard work, applying loads of advice and tips, to get that consistently happening (and ds2 did a fair bit of growing in that time which I can't help wondering might have helped too). So the ubiquity of the "it shouldn't hurt if the latch is right" message does frustrate me rather - sometimes it can seem a bit like "labour shouldn't hurt if you've got the baby out properly" - i.e. true eventually but not acknowledging that the process (of getting the latch right) is also important and can be painful, and that pain can be a very normal step on the way to success. Maybe "it won't hurt when the latch is right and has been right for a while" is a better way of putting it - and of course I expect it does appear that way in lots of places, but the first way of putting it is very common too.

"Could everyone have the services of a breastfeeding counsellor - no There are not enough of us!

All the volunteer breastfeeding organisations are working to capacity as it is. If even a tenth of the 450,000 mothers who start to breastfeed every year contacted a bfc in the first week for personal, face to face help, we would be totally overwhelmed."

On this point, then why is it all volunteer work? If the government wants to increase our lower than average breastfeeding statistics, why not make this an essential part of a maternity ward? If there's enough demand for her to have a full day's work, wouldn't the NHS think this an appropriate allocation of resources, and shouldn't we be making that clear? Rather than thinking in terms of 450,000 women needing a counsellor, I would say that from my own experience on a maternity ward, the number of women sharing one counsellor - no one spends all day with a mother, the baby would be exhausted - would enable the women who needed her to see her within the few days before discharge (especially as a lot of women with problems are the ones with small babies/c-sections/etc, who tend to stay in longer.)

macneil. it would be great if the NHS could direct resources towards training and employing more bfcs, and there would certainly be enough work for them. But even if all the bfcs wanted to work in this way (and many don't - most, like me, have a day job, and most, like me, enjoy working across the whole spectrum, not just with new parents) there would still not be enough of us. If everyone who wanted a breastfeeding counsellor in hospital was enabled to see one, at any time, you are talking about a massive number of counsellors needed, far, far more than the existing total of about 500 bfcs (those trained by one of the 4 vol orgs to this level) and there are whole areas of the UK where there are hardly any or none at all - and that includes some major cities as well as rural areas.

The answer is for the NHS to make sure that their existing hospital and community staff - the many thousands of midwives, health visitors and health care assistants - know about breastfeeding, and can integrate good care for it with the routine care given to every mother. It takes a little more time to support bf well than to support it badly, but only a little more.

I don't think 450,000 women a year need a counsellor, by the way! My calculations were based on bfcs giving face to face help to a notional 10th, ie 45,000, and that would still overwhelm existing bfc resources - which will always be part-time, largely voluntary and very patchy geographically.

It's a great vote of confidence that bfcs could make that much of a difference, but it ain't gonna happen, not never

The sad reality is bf just isn't on the Govt's or NHS trusts' priority list.

They may say it is, but we all know that this is far from being true. It seems that the vast majority of NHS trusts are bankrupt (or very near to it) and just trying to keep their heads above water. It has been reported on the news that just in the last few months the no. of trusts who have declared that they are sub-zero in balancing their budgets. Many are closing down their maternity units or threatening to do so.

I just can not see when or how bf is ever going to be a priority in the UK.

In the meantime, all we can do is get as much support as we can from friends and family, this website and others and just muddle through with bf. And I mean "muddle through" because it seems to me that most people I know did just have to rely on their own sources of help to get bf going, I am including myself in that list. It really isn't easy and it's not going to get easier for bf mums

That is why MN and other sources like this are so invaluable.