…Contemplating the Core Elements of a Modern Breastfeeding Lifestyle

I have been noticing an alarming trend among the mothers calling me for lactation support. Almost all of them are actively supplementing their breastfeeding. Of great concern to me is that they are using more and more formula and reporting they feel pressured into doing so by their pediatricians.  Driven by concerns over weights and measures, these mothers have no confidence in their own milk and are finding little support for exclusive breastfeeding from the medical establishment.

I caution you to remember the old adage…actions speak louder than words.  I have yet to meet or hear of a pediatrician in my tri-state area who blatantly discourages breastfeeding to consumers who are planning on breastfeeding their babies.  But they are wolves in sheeps clothing.  While paying lip service to breastfeeding, they manage formula feeding. 

This problem often starts in the hospital.  One of the loop holes of the 10 Steps for Baby Friendly Hospitals is that formula can be offered when medically indicated.  Tired after labor and left largely on their own with a new baby, the parents are often scared into supplementing for “health reasons”.  Under the guise of a medical need for formula : ”your milk is not in yet” “your baby seems very hungry” “you need your rest” “your baby is dehydrated” “your baby has lost too much weight”…The dye is cast.

Once parents succumb to the pressure, their baby’s patterns of digestion and state will have changed.  They quickly notice that after supplements, especially of formula, that their baby sleeps much of the time between feedings.  Their expectation of what a successful breastfeeding session looks like has thus been altered.

When they resume exclusive breastfeeding, after days of supplementation, they may find their baby is fretful or awake after a feeding.  This may prompt them to pump to check if they have enough milk; they often get negligible results since they have just breastfed.  If a breastfeeding session has been skipped, they may pump a larger amount the first time, but the amounts will drop and/or plateau if pumping is done in lieu of breastfeeding during the early days of developing a milk supply.

I was thrilled a while back to see a thread on this topic going back and forth among my friends on Twitter.  Sadly, it does seem that you may have to defend your decision to breastfeed every step of the way.  Tara, on Growing Up Green outlines 5 strategies that can help counteract medical misinformation and questionable support.

Doctors express, no pun intended, their shock and awe when exclusively breastfed babies grow as well or better than their formula-fed peers.  If the growth patterns are different, they assume it is a problem with the mother’s milk or her baby’s digestion of her milk and immediately suggest formula.  

It is disappointing to me that fewer pediatricians these days even suggest pumping and giving extra human milk when the only issue is weight gain.  When they do include adding extra EBM after breastfeeding as part of their care plan, they often recommend amounts that ensure the need to make up the difference with formula. 

 A local doctor used her trump card, or so she thought, on one of my moms by telling her it would damage her baby’s brain because her daughter had gained only 4 oz in about 5 days. She tried to instill guilt and scare her into using formula when her baby was gaining too slowly for her taste.  Brain cells by the ounce?

It appears that this reliance on weights alone for assessing the health of newborns has gone global. Danielle from Born.In.Japan.net wrote of a similar experience in recent months. She did not mention supplementation in her post, but shared feeling that the doctor wanted her baby to “fit in a box”.

So many babies are now being double-fed that no one really knows what is a normal growth pattern.  We are mixing gene pools and methods of feeding and are expecting standardized outcomes.

An important breastfeeding survival strategy must be for us all to question this one-size-fits-all model of management.  The emphasis should always be on achieving a conscious breastfeeding connection that is optimized to be pain-free. 

As long as there is evidence of steady growth, even if it is slow, there should be no reason to be concerned if your baby isn’t the “fattest baby on the block”.

What year is this? I thought it was 2008, not 1984!
Big Brother, or more likely Little Brother, is watching. 

I thought I lived in America, the land of the free and free speech.  It is very hard to believe that in this day and age, selective censorship is still being applied to Breastfeeding.  Facebook has yet again, banned photos of breastfeeding mothers on their own pages within the site.

Some of us can remember the fight for equality that has been waged over these past 4 or 5 decades in the Western world.  We women have struggled for autonomy over our bodies in matters of health and pleasure, and for equal opportunities in education and in the work force. 

Cultural, economic and legislative changes have resulted through the efforts of women gathering in numbers and demanding to be treated with fairness in all aspects of life.

Today thousands of facebook friends will be changing their profile to a breastfeeding photo in protest of this policy which returns in cycles to infringe upon the rights of breastfeeding mothers. 

A “nurse-in” is being staged outside FaceBook corporate headquarters in Northern California where, ironically, the right to breastfeed in public is protected by law.  It is patently ridiculous that photos of same within the somewhat closed environment of Facebook would be deemed obscene.

We are supposed to breastfeed because we are mammals. By definition, the breasts or mammary glands, are a part of our anatomy designed to provide the ideal nourishment for our human babies after their birth.  Breastfeeding continues the maturation and development which began in the womb.

There were no safe artificial baby milk formulas until the 20′th century; it is only in the past 40+ years that they have been available in such abundance. The formula manufacturers have planted the idea that breastfeeding is a choice rather than a right.  They have marketed their product with such skill that many seem to forget that human milk is for human babies.

Mothers and their breastfeeding babies have been featured in high art throughout the history of mankind.  These photos that have been banned are not sexual in nature nor are they deviant or violent like many others that one can easily find on many social networking sites.

Whomever it is that is behind this censorship, must either have Breastfeeding Envy or a severe case of Breastfeeding Amnesia if they had been lucky enough to have been breastfed!

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If you are on facebook, change your profile to a breastfeeding photo or image.  Join the Breastfeeding is not Obscene Facebook Group

If the management of Facebook feel uncomfortable viewing photos of breastfeeding, they should just not LOOK!

Bring this issue to the forefront, pun intended. Stand up and be counted!

What do you think? Your comments are welcome and will inspire further discussion. The anger and outrage we feel must go viral.

News flash today from AP released by ABC News:  the FDA says the amounts of Melamine thus far found in U.S. formula are within safety limits.  On Friday, the FDA  approved 1 part per million as an acceptable level.

Infant formula in the States has been scrutinized in the wake of the Melanine contamination of Chinese formula.  The big three manufacturers who produce about 90% of the formula for the United States have all found contaminated samples.

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Nestle’s Good Start Supreme Infant Formula with Iron had two positive tests for melamine on one sample; Mead Johnson’s Infant Formula Powder, Enfamil LIPIL with Iron had three positive tests on one sample for cyanuric acid.

Separately, a third major formula maker, Abbott Laboratories, told the AP that in-house tests had detected trace levels of melamine in its infant formula.

Apparently, there are legal uses of Melamine by the food industry.  It can be used in some food packaging and cleaning solutions used on food processing equipment where it may find its way into food or formula.

Justin Pritchard reported that the amount expected to be present as a result of processing is approximately 15 parts per billion.   This was 1/10′th of what they actually found in the infant formula. 

He interviewed Dr.Stephen Sundlof, FDA’s director of food safety, who spoke of the guidelines and elaborated further..

“The levels were so low … that they do not cause a health risk to infants,” Sundlof said. “Parents using infant formula should continue using U.S.-manufactured infant formula. Switching away from one of these infant formulas to alternate diets or homemade formulas could result in infants not receiving the complete nutrition required for proper growth and development.”

Alternate diets? Did he mean breastfeeding? Can’t tell because it was not mentioned at all, either in terms of an alternative choice or to reduce risk until there are more studies.

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I know that formula is not going away anytime soon.  To protect those babies who are not being breastfed, we must demand that it be manufactured and handled with rigorous attention to its safety profile.   

According Mr. Prichard’s report, the contamination in the formula samples did not appear to be intentional.  That it would happen by accident is bad enough, but given that there are unscrupulous characters in our midst, that is not beyond the realm of possibility. 

There is something really wrong with science that exists to protect commercial interests over the health and well-being of the individual citizens.  Why would the FDA set the level higher than the amounts already found in U.S. formula?  Why not attempt to eliminate the source of contamination and set up a standard of zero tolerance for Melamine?

The FDA seems to be dropping the ball here with the implication that formula is the only option for infant feeding.  This would be a perfect opportunity to encourage the renaissance of breastfeeding in this country and around the world. 

Let’s take a page from the activists who have gotten BPA out of infant bottles by raising consumer awareness and making it a bottom line issue.

We need to call for the elimination of the use of Melamine near anything that could leach into the food supply of both humans and animals. 

Breastfeeding or not…We need to rally around this issue.  Your thoughts?

Babies have been worn in one form or another by their mother or another member of their “tribe” since the dawn of time.  Queen Victoria is often credited with having endorsed the use of prams which were vehicles to transport babies around without the need for them to be carried.  To this day, the use of carriages and strollers has become common place in the modern world. 

One of the main concepts of Conscious Breastfeeding is that babies need to be held and carried throughout much of their waking day.  This regulates their digestive rhythms and allows them to be in close, loving contact with their family and caretakers. 

Babies that lay around on their backs tend to have more issues with gas and reflux. They often fuss and cry to be picked up as if they intuitively knew that being carried will make them feel better and engage more fully with their world.

In her ground breaking work, The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff noted that babies of the Stone Age community she studied for 2-1/2 years were carried all the time for the first two years of their lives.  She believed that this led to a well-adjusted and happy society.  голые эротичные девочки

This week, November 12-18, 2008, marks the first International BabyWearing Week.  The theme has been Celebrating Babywearing. 

Motrin created a video to tap into this inaugural event clearly without any real awareness of the subject matter.  This ad is condescending and offensive in its tone.  It implies that mothers, or anyone who carries babies, are succumbing to fads and just making a fashion statement which will invariably cause them pain.  The person who wrote the copy completely missed the point of babywearing.   

In fact, a well chosen carrier puts far less strain on the adult body.  Babywearing allows the weight to be distributed evenly and is far less likely to cause injury and pain than lugging the large ticket items and equipment sold to convey babies up and down stairs in an urban environment. 

BabyWearing makes sense for so many reasons.  Now we can add one more…no need for Motrin.

Thanks to Katja Presnal who has compiled this video response.  Join with these mothers in voicing your concern and displeasure over this poorly timed and insulting ad. 

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?  порно смотреть онлайн изнасилование стриптиз на столе

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.