Daily Mail -"My beautiful baby was starving to death, until I defied the 'breast is best' bullies"

[theUrbanDryad]

i'm not sure what to think here...on the one hand it raises very valid points, but the headline is so inflammatory....

what do you think?

OI - Or rather breastfeeding can be hard work particularly in the early days and here are some numbers to call. When it is easy it is very easy and so many women say they wish they'd had a bit more help.

Libby Purves's book How Not To Be a Perfect Mother is pretty honest about how painful and maddening breastfeeding can be at first.

Agree with Orm and UD. I felt quite a failure at bfing cos it bluddy well hurt (and still does from time to time) whereas all the books and leaflets spout the "if it hurts you're not doing it right" line. Just not true! As for bfing bullies, there is quite a bit of pressure IME but it's not from individual people directly, it's a drip drip of leaflets, posters, books and my own head telling me that breastmilk has got to be the right thing for DS. Which it is but then it does set you up to beat yourself up when it's harder than you expected.

Please don't perpetuate the myth that breastfeeding is bound to hurt.

If it hurts, then very often the baby can be helped to get more comfortably attached and positioned.

This is not the same as saying 'you aren't doing it right' - that's a blaming statement, and no one should use it to women.

Sometimes, the baby has a tongue tie which interferes with feeding. This is rare, however, though it should always be checked for when a mother is sore and attention to positining and attachment make no difference.

If someone is breastfeeding and it hurts, then she needs help. How useless and unkind to say it hurts everyone and there is nothing to be done..... And how untrue.

tiktok is dead right. it doesn't hurt in most cases where there is a proper latch, which of course comes with practice. if a woman has pain 6 weeks after birth, it will not be for no apparent reason, there will be an underlying cause (thrush, mastitis, some other medical issue, or a bad latch or baby with tongue tie, etc).

it is just not biologically logical that bf should always hurt. if that were the case most women throughout history would have suffered excruciating pain feeding their babies/toddlers for an average of 3 - 4 years and the historical records tell us nothing of the kind.

of course most women do get very sore nipples, i remember my nipples becoming very sensitive to touch in the first few weeks even though i was careful with my latch and positioning and used lansinoh all the time. that is normal and it passes as the nipples get used to being constantly sucked on and/or baby spaces out his feeds.

Well I am bf ny 5 week old and, yet again am on the brink of giving up. This time its due to thrush. It had completely cleared, but already it is starting to show up again causing my baby more pain and anguish.

I do feel that there is a certain amount of bullying, though I am not really sure if that is the correct word for it. Am desperately trying to keep up with the bf.

AND i would re-inforce that there is certainly no "support" it is really for yourself to try and "dig out" the answers for yourself.

I had never even heard of oral thrush until it was mentioned on MN, and I the MW/HV certainly never mentioned it.

Poor you, Pinnions. I hope it resolves itself. I don't know anything about the condition but I best someone on MN will.

I think when people associate pain and bf, they assume the pain will be in the breasts/nipples. In my case, the pain I had was from my uterus contracting with every suck which was so bad, I routinely popped paracetamol before commencing a feed in the first few weeks. That's where the pain comes in, IMHO.

I do think that bf hurts during the first few days, but then disappears.

And I can tell you, along with many other mums in our mn postnatal group that it DEFINITELY hurts when you have thrush and/or mastitus!

And yes it does hurt when your uterus is contracting, but doesn't it feel great!

I suppose the point about the blood stains was that the breast is best brigade think mothers who FF probably also routinely stab their babies. FF, stabbing...same thing.

I went to school with a Sarah Oliver .

yellowrose and tiktok - I have bfed 3 kids for a total of 7.5 years and I'm sorry but each time it hurt to start with. Nothing to do with the latch - I had that down to a fine art after number 1. It simply does because a baby is fastening it's gums around one of the most sensitive part of the body. If you put your finger in a baby's mouth you can feel just how hard they suck. And it hurts. Not for long, it passes, but it still hurts for a while. I've not known a single mother who hasn't had some pain to start with which may or may not have put her off bfing. It isn't unkind to say this, much more unkind to tell her she's not doing it right. With no 1 I spent ages latching and unlatching DS#1 trying to get it right. It still hurt and I was in tears because no matter how many times the MW showed me and helped me it was still painful. I thought it was my fault.

For me the pain is not an issue - I accepted that it would hurt (and ignored the professionals who said it shouldn't). The issue was that I don't think ds was getting enough milk even though he was fed around the clock. Even at 4 mths plus he would not go more than 2-3 hours without a feed and when he was fed he did not seem satisfied. Yet each time I asked about it I was told not to worry, that he was regulating how much he took and that he was the best judge of how much he needed. FFS! He was on the top centile for height, but only on the 50th for weight. Stupidly, through guilt and martyrdom I continued to feed him til he was nearly 8 mths, though at least by that time he was having solids.

Another painful bfeeder here.

1st time - presumed latch problem but no-one could identify it.

2nd time - it just hurt. Everything else was fine, baby thriving etc.

I'm not sure, yellowrose, that it biologically ought to be painless. I thought about this myself, and IMO there's no evolutionary pressure for BF to be painless, because until very recently (iin evolutionary terms) if you didn't BF your baby would starve, so presumably everyone would have just got on with it.

I also think that more recently (in historical times), there wouldn't have been all that much interest in whether bf was painful - people weren't bothered by women suffering labour pain, even believing that it was good for them.

So if women were struggling with painful bf, it might not have been recorded.

Interesting plummymummy: my 2 were frequent feeders and tall skinny babies.... and I saw (and still see) this as totally normal and the babies as completely healthy.

That may just be the natural way of things for your ds, and by not feeding him up to be plump and letting him grow his own way, you've given him a fabulous start in life.

That's true Welliemum - it would be breast-feed or starve in the past. And I don't suppose we do see how painful women might have found it in the historical record - we don't hear a lot about women's personal experiences in the historical record full stop. And the fact it isn't there might just be because it was such a normal thing it wasnt worth recording? I was told to put cabbage leaves on my breasts to help ease soreness - surely such a low-tech solution is an old response to an old problem?.

D'you think she chucked formula at them?

plummy, of course the baby's gums will create pain if they are clamped on your finger.

The gums should be not be doing this to the breast or the nipple.

I am sorry you felt pain despite what you felt was a good latch - I know this can happen sometimes, but I can honestly say that if I see a mother in pain because of sore nipples, and I include the ones who have been told the positioning and attachment is fine, I can almost always help her to feed without pain, or with considerably less pain, and so can most fully-trained breastfeeding counsellors and other people who know what to look for and just as importantly, know how to suggest changes to the mother.

As I say, it's only 'almost' always that this positive change happens - there's a lot we don't know about sore nipples, and some women have persistent pain despite what looks like a fine attachment. You may have been in this category.

On other occasions, tongue tie can cause pain, but this usually should be spotted by anyone who looks for it. There may be some hard to spot tongue ties, even so.

Fio - in the article she 'defies' the bullies by feeding formula.

emergency c section and dischararged after 48 hours - surely not common practice and possibly a contributing factor to her not getting breastfeeding established?

Oh the Daily Bloody Mail

Wankers

Maybe the pain of bf is why rich women used to get a wetnurse in for their children. It wasn't worth their while getting it investigated since they didn't have to tolerate it.