Breastfeeding Role Models: What Messages Are We Sending

Today is my sister’s birthday.  I vividly remember my mother breastfeeding Daire all those years ago.  She reassured me, as I sat quietly on the bed beside her, that “this is how you feed babies”.  The next three in line would be boys.  By the time our youngest brother arrived, we all understood that breastfeeding was a normal part of taking care of a baby.  For us girls, it was an expectation that when we grew up, that we would follow in mom’s footsteps and breastfeed our own babies. 

Fondly remembering those moments as a child, I wonder what will be the memories of some of the new generation of breastfeeding babies.  Will they remember idyllic feedings at their mother’s breasts? Or will they remember watching and listening to the gentle swishing sound of her pumping out her milk to feed them with a bottle?  Will they see their mother breastfeeding their siblings or see her hooked up to a strange machine? 

What is being modeled these days is not breastfeeding, but some sort of techno version of same.   Mothers often complain, but continue to dutifully pump because they are being told that it will increase their milk supply.  They get up in the middle of the night and are out of synch with their babies; they get up to pump to keep up with the ever increasing amounts of their milk they feel a need to put into bottles.  Their breastfeeding is being driven by measurements of how much they can express and how much their baby takes in a bottle.

Health care professionals regularly urge mothers to supplement with non-human milk, be it from other mammals or soybeans.  The lactation “experts” push back and recommend pumping as necessary in all cases.  Mothers are caught in the middle of this advice and will lose trust in their milk supply when they are focusing more on measured amounts of milk, human or otherwise, given in bottles.  Breastfeeding for them can feel confusing and overwhelming and  early weaning will be a real possibility.

This does not mean that there isn’t a time and place for pumping, such as work outside the home.  What is worrisome is that pumping is being touted as being almost equal to actual breastfeeding.   We all must relate to technology on a regular basis in modern life be it phones, PDA’s, computers, etc..   Although many of us are rather attached to same, we should not be having a relationship with our machines.  Our various gadgets , including pumps, are merely adjuncts to our experience of daily life. 

It is a sad commentary about breastfeeding these days that, for so many women, the attention and fanfare centers around the regimen of pumping.   This is most unfortunate because the magical alchemy is not merely in the liquid gold that is expressed, but in the relationship that exists between the mother and her unique baby as it breastfeeds. 

Mothers, and those in the Lactation community, need to remember that we teach by example. 

I long for the day when we can believe again in the bounty of our female bodies… They are designed to carry our babies for 9 months inside and continue to nourish and protect them long after birth through breastfeeding.