As I recall, the original theory was that by gradually trimming the shield
away, you could get a baby who was "hooked" on it to wean away from it.  The
idea was that this would happen gradually enough that the baby wouldn't
realize it was "disappearing".  In actual practice, the babies were smarter
than we gave them credit for and would often balk at some point, and mom
couldn't reattach what had been cut off so she would often either start over
again with a new one or give up on nursing.  Then there was the concern that
the cut edges could cut into the skin of the breast or irritate baby's
mouth.  Another drawback was that once you had the tip cut off and were
working on the shank, mom's nipple could get "pinched" in what was left.
The suggestion was to make a small; vertical cut as well as the trimming
which unfortunately could result in more sharp edges.

 

I relied more on the approach to offer without the shield first, if baby was
getting too frustrated, go ahead and use it.  After baby had "taken the edge
off" his hunger and settled into more relaxed nursing, try to slip the
shield out and reattach baby quickly.  It often took a number of attempts
before this would work.  With patience and lots of skin-to-skin contact when
mother wasn't trying to get baby to nurse, most did wean from the shield,
each in their own time.  I have only had a couple that wound up using a
shield for many months.

 

Back when I was wearing both the RN and the LC hats, I was working as a
post-partum nurse one Saturday AM when I was informed I had a phone call.
It went something like this:

Me-Hello, this is Winnie.  How can I help you?

Caller-HE'S NURSING!!!

Me-Great.  Ummm. Can you tell me who this is?

It was a mom that had been working at getting baby off the shield and I
hadn't heard from for a couple weeks.  After no progress, he suddenly,
without anything apparently different happening, latched on and nursed like
a champ and continued to so for several more months.

 

Winnie

 

P.S. These were generally babies who had been started on a shield by one of
the nurses when they didn't know what else to use and it looked like a
solution to them since they didn't have to deal with the long range effects.
In other words, it worked as a quick fix or band-aid.


             ***********************************************

To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail
To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest)
To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet
All commands go to [log in to unmask]

The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html