Nikki writes:

>
>     Many mothers who come to me for lactation help are waking their healthy,
>term babies on some sort of 2 or 3 hour schedule. In my experience, babies
>that are aroused from deep sleep don't feed well. They latch poorly and are
>not very responsive. Imagine someone waking you at 2 AM and shoving a
>sandwich in your face!


Here, too. The stories mothers tell about how their babies were
'encouraged to take the breast' - eeek!  They have their feet
jiggled, the soles of their feet are flicked,  they are stripped of
clothing, they have their heads grabbed and pushed....all of this may
seem to be done with no aggression or forcefulness to the HP
suggesting it or actually doing it, but mothers find it distressing
and often the babies do....or else they just 'shut down' and become
more difficult to wake.

>     These mothers are doing it because some hospital staff has impressed upon
>them that the baby MUST feed every 2 or 3 hours.



><snip>



>Most newborns will cluster feed, and eat a
>whole bunch of times in 2 or 3 hours, then sleep for a longer interval. The
>baby is programed to eat when it needs to eat; this is a fundamental survival
>skill. Problems arise when outsiders tamper with this mechanism.


Absolutely. Watch what happens physiologically, and then just let it
happen....seems very hard to do in in an institutional setting, and
of course there are issues when labour has been medicated, and the
baby is affected by this....but leaping in and affecting the mother's
confidence and the baby's physiological needs (which are *not* for
great slugs of formula) can have long-lasting effects.

All this sorta interference is done by health professionals who are
supportive of bf, who want the mother to succeed, and who really,
really want to get mother and baby together. This is not enough...the
support has to be based on understanding, and confidence in bf.

I heard an interesting study the other day, one carried out locally
by a midwife team who were collecting stats from their colleagues and
from mothers about bf support in the hospital, with a view to seeing
how many lightyears away they were from being Baby Friendly.

They were puzzled by a major discrepancy - midwives were recording
high levels of skin to skin contact, but mothers were not. They
discovered the  reason was that to the midwives, skin to skin contact
meant no more than delivering the baby on to the mother's abdomen,
whereas mothers interpreted it to mean having skin to skin contact at
all other times.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK

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