I know that statistically most of you reading this while pregnant will want to breastfeed. And I know that most of you won’t reach your goals. That’s what the evidence says. Bizarrely, the research also tells us that antenatal breastfeeding education doesn’t help women fulfil their goals. But I see and hear women every day say “Why did nobody tell me…” about some aspect of breastfeeding or another, which is why the new Stockport Birth Services antenatal course programme includes a breastfeeding session. And even then I won’t have been able to say everything I want to.
I can’t overstate that for some women breastfeeding is hard. I don’t want to put you off, but there’s this idea out there that because breastfeeding is ‘natural’ it’s easy. Nothing could be further than the truth! Remember when you learned to walk? (Well, no, not unless you have hyperthymesia). But trust me – you fell down, got up, fell down, got up, fell down, got up then eventually cracked it and didn’t fall over again until you became a student and cracked open the White Lightening. So if you feel like you’re struggling and ‘failing’ then take heart – many of us have been there and there’s help available. If you can’t get to a group, or you’re not local this is a rather fab Facebook group who I see give excellent information (generally I’d say be careful of where you get your info from online as you don’t know their creds, but on this occasion you can trust the source)
First we need to unpick some of the misinformation out there. Yes your baby needs feeding again. Yes you are making enough milk. Yes it is normal. No your baby doesn’t need to wait 4 hours between feeds. No you don’t need to time a feed from one side for 20 minutes. This is one of the most important blogs you’ll read about breastfeeding and the obsession over the infant feeding intervals. Followed by this one about how long to feed for. I’ll also direct you here to here we question the idea of a ‘good baby‘ and how the idea of it is complicit in damaging the breastfeeding relationship.
However you feed your baby, responsive feeding is the key and all parents should be helped to understand what that means.
As a final note here, sometimes feeding worries continue through to the time to wean your baby onto solid food, and sometimes this comes from the mistaken belief that it will help you get some much-needed extra sleep. Here’s a look into it.
There’s literally thousands of blogs I could point you towards on this subject, but these are my favourites.