the truth about breast feeding

[jenjingles]

hi to you all just thought i might add this to the thread for all new moms out there....my baby is 8weeks old and i am breast feeding, he is my third child and the most successful breast feeder!! but may i add that while i know how beneficial it is for baby and you and it is [rightfully so] encouraged what the books and midwives health visitors don't tell you is the other side of it!! when he was born iput him to the breast straight away and it was lovely,but then comes the anxiety that he's not getting enough while you wait for your milk to come in then the dreaded weigh in before you come home and they've lost wait and your horrified!1 i know all babys lose weight after birth but it doesn't reasssure you when your a bit wobbly and emotional, then came the sore nipples and the toe curling pain!! and the engorgement! and the worry over the fact that is he getting enough! so ladies if indeed your experiencing all this please don't despair its not you its natural and it does get easier eventually!!just thought i'd tell the truth to hopefully make you feel a bit better !

Great you are having a good bf experience, jeni

You say about not being told about the possible problems with breastfeeding....I don't agree that there is no advance info about this, as all the books do indeed include stuff about soreness, engorgement, early weight loss and so on. Any breastfeeding class worth its salt would cover a lot of this.

But what I think you are getting at is the way the emotional effect is not well-signposted, and women are taken aback by the power of their feelings when trying to get bf underway.

I agree with you about that - it hits some mothers like a truck, and they never really expected it to be as major an experience.

tiktok - some of the private NCT antenatal classes may well cover things like sore nipples, engorgement, mastitis etc, but i can well remember the NHS antenatal class i attended on bf-ing, when i asked about mastitis, the mw said blithely, "Oh, it's very rare, hardly anyone gets it." on my PN thread, about half of us who were bf-ing (so that's about 10 out of 20 people) had at least one bout of mastitis. so i don't think it's as rare as my mw liked to make out. also, the "If you're latched on properly, it won't hurt" thing. sorry, but that just wasn't the case, for me or for a lot of other mothers i know.

i was very lucky, in that the mw didn't weigh him at all (except for at birth, obviously) and the first time ds was weighed was at 10 days old when the hv had come round and he'd put on over 1lb!

the point i'm trying to make, is that yes, any good bf-ing book or class will tell you "the truth" about bf-ing, but a lot of women don't have access to this. what needs to happen is honest antenatal care, from the NHS across the board, and in all the Trusts. of course, it won't happen, cause of lack of funds, but i can dream!

i didn't get that level of detail in my NCT class.
i just read a book.

frankly I feel the same about the whole of being a mother, it's so much harder than you can ever have imagined!