Robin, I have never said what you said I did, so where the impression that 'however long the baby spends sucking at the breast it is totally and completely normal' comes from, I don't know.
I don't think that....babies need to take time out and sleep sometime
If a baby seems to take a long time at the breast, and we need to look at frequency as well as length of time per occasion, then the things we need to look at are:
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what are the mother's expectations? 'Long time' to some could simply be more than the '10 minutes a side' of old. So many babies take more time than this (or less in some cases) and making a prescriptive time is not helpful
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what is the baby actually doing there? Is he transferring milk effectively? Lots of ways to judge this
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is the mother sore/cracked and not getting any better?
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is this a temporary thing, connected with the baby's needs now? It's certainly very common in the very early days
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is the baby happy or (as sometimes happens) is he miserable no matter how long he feeds for?
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is the mother able to cope better if she goes with the flow, and would she be helped if someone else was around who was willing to hold the baby when the baby needs it?
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does the baby fight at the breast?
And there are other issues that I suggest make the black-and-white stance you attribute to me quite unfair.
I agree - the idea that however long a baby sucks we should accept it because it is normal does indeed cause mothers to stop. Support for breastfeeding can be very poor, and women are told to put up with sore nipples and a constantly miserable baby etc because somehow or other it's supposed to get fixed all by itself . L...o...n...g feeds which do not satisfy the baby need fixing.
You say, "For a baby to suck frequently for a few days to build up supply may be normal but to do so for weeks isn't."
On what evidence do you base this? You need to make a distinction between 'long' sucking and 'frequent sucking'. Long, unsatisfying feeds are not normal. Frequent feeds can well be normal, and if you look in some of the anthropological stuff about bf you'll see that in some societies babies feed on and off the breast all the time - every 15 minutes at some points in the day! Short bursts of sucking while the mother gets on with something else are normal for them. No one (except the anthropologist) is counting or watching the clock.
This would be very unusual in our society, and we do tend to space babies' feeds even unconsciously, making the most of some babies' ability to sleep alone and contentedly away from the breast, so for us, this is normal, but if a mother and her baby are ok with frequent feeds (usually short) then that's normal for them!
I did do a Medline search for those studies - must have missed them. Those interventions could be useful, as they are easy and cheap enough to do! My slight worry is that any intervention to help with sore nipples would have to be alongside checking position and attachment. I have come across many women who have been advised to use shields, creams, ointments whatever, without anyone who really knows what they are looking for checking their positioning.