is breastfeeding in reality sore but no health professionals admit this?

[fabmrsv]

apologies if this is mega inflammatory but i am trying to understand the truth re breastfeeding. all the health professionals tell me if i am doing it right it will not be sore yet all my friends say it was sore at least at the beginning? what are other peoples experiences of this? i have just started breastfeeding my newborn and really really want to succeed but despite being told i have latched him on correctly i am finding it quite painful. it does seem to be less so if i can really try and get the nipple in right to the top of my baby's mouth but when i try and do everything they have told me to do it is just proving impossible to do so and i can't work out how to get it further in. the hv and bf counsellor have looked and said he is latched on but whilst they are saying this i am in pain and my experiences so are that health professionals just dont' want to aknowledge that. i do feel at the end of my tether and would like to hear how other people have found breastfeeding and the 'truth' of it

thanks

I am still sore at 7 mths breastfeeding, most people seem to get better after a few weeks (my SIL always said 7 wks) and it certainly is nothing like as painful as when I started.

I think there is a degree of triteness the whole "breastfeeding should not be painful, if it is you are doing somthing wrong" thing. I guess some women are more sensitive in the breast/nipple area than others.

I did sometimes want to scream when friends said that breastfeeding never hurt them at all

hiya. well in my experience of breastfeeding it always hurt (sometimes excrutiatingly so) in the early days..but once id got a few weeks along the pain lessened, presumably as nipples toughened up and baby perfected their technique - sorry if tmi ! also, yes i am very fair with freckly skin and i have heard of the theory before about pale skinned mums having a harder time;no idea if there is any truth in that though.

Shitemum, I don't think Tink was biting so much either, just pressing hard because of how she had gotten used to drinking other drinks. It may be worth experimenting with other ways of giving her drinks (if you want to put a stop to it rather than the breastfeeding) to see if it makes a difference. Lessening the feeds could also be bit of a phase as he takes more interest in the things around him, as he realises that it's all there to stay he may settle back down again.

My daughter (3rd child) had tongue tie, so she wasn't latching on properly (but she was getting some milk) and breastfeeding was very painful. I knew the latch was wrong and the midwife saw the tongue tie when she was one day old. We had the tongue tie cut when she was 9 days old. However, even after the latch improved and the bruising/bleeding healed, I still had a painful let-down until she was about a month old. Since then, breastfeeding has been fine.

I think that HVs don't want to put people off by acknowledging that breastfeeding can be painful at first.

I've also heard of a couple of cases where tongue-tie wasn't diagnosed until around 5 months, so we were lucky that it was sorted out quickly. I wouldn't have carried on breastfeeding if it had carried on the way it was for the first 9 days.

thanks very much for all your advice. the good news is that already it is feeling much less painful most of the time. i think the latching is just the same as far as i can tell although maybe a bit better but i think it has just got easier over time.

i am giving him a formuala feed at night (usign the syringe finger feeding method). i know it would be better to just breast feed the whole time but this gives me a chance to recover for just now. does anybody know how "bad" it is to do this?

thanks