Antenatal class breastfeeding session - your views please!

[lizzytee]

Just curious.....if you went to antenatal classes, and there was a breastfeeding session, did you think it helped or hindered you in learning to feed your baby?

Neither i suppose as there was never any question of me not breastfeeding.
It was however good to know that the community MWs and HVs were so fantastically knowledgeable and supportive however.

There was a session, the mw demonstrated how to feed a Vtech teddy. I took it all on board, but in the event I didn't really do it her way, save for remembering "tummy to mummy, nose to nipple" when I first tried.

The most useful thing I got out of that, was to give bf 6 weeks to get right. Because when she said that I thought "6 weeks, I expected 6 minutes!", then she said what's 6 weeks out of your life. And put like that, I understood, and did have 6 weeks in mind.

the most useful thing in our bf-ing AN class was the picture the MW drew, which was supposed to be of a baby latched on but which actually looked like a baby dinosaur! it helped me to know what to look for when ds was first latching.

apart from that it was a bit shite, tbh. but i know other people who didn't have time/resources to find out the stuff for themselves found it more useful!

OPh that reminds me of the most useful thing i was told when various nitwits went on about how babies shoud be fed four hourly.

The midwife said 'And how often do you a grown woman, go four hours without a single thing to eat and drink?'

Really made me think.

Yeah, mine helped a bit with learning about attatchment and positioning.

How was the vtech teddy's latch then?

When I went to antenatal classes with dd1 about 11 years ago, they were still advising us all to give "ten minutes one side ten minutes the other."

Plus I think everyone was so shit scared of the whole childbirth thing they weren't really taking in all the breastfeeding info.

The NHS session I had was next to useless. Why don't they mention the problems you can have? Why was there no mention of BF-ing after a c-section, and some of the difficulties that can throw up? It was too rose-tinted, and when I did encounter problems I felt really unprepared and crappy about it.

We had a woman come and breastfeed her baby in the class. It actually put a few people off because it was a mixed class and the woman that came in felt more comfortable taking her top right off (it was a very young baby) and there were a few gobsmacked faces and a few people said afterwards that they hadn't realised that you had to get naked to do it!

Personally I don't think it made a difference to me either way as once ds was born I forgot everything from before. If I could have seen someone demonstrate it to me the day after he was born that would have been perfect but not very practical I guess.

Ours was hilariously atrocious. We started off being given a pic of various women breastfeeding and went round the room with everyone having to say warm and lovely things about the pictures.

We were shown how a breast works - using knitted breasts that looked like Christmas puddings (had dh in hysterics as he wondered who actually made these things for a living).

Then we all (including our dps) had to "breastfeed" a doll to get the position right.

No-one can tell you much until you have the bundle in your arms and you are at the business end of things....

I was just still in shock from all the birthing talk, I wasn't too worried about afters - if I had only known!!

The only person who was any good at giving me help was the BF councellor who came to our house and was able to help me when I was feeding DD

Our NHS one was useless. They told us what a good idea it was to breastfeed, invited us all to write any questions we had on a board, then ignored or brushed off any that concerned potential problems like low milk supply, thrush, mastitis etc. Then a couple of dolls were passed around the room and that was about it.

NCT class was better though.