I am on vacation in New Orleans for the weekend, but it's raining and cold and my dh has a cough, so that's my excuse for playing on my laptop instead of sightseeing this afternoon.

I wanted to second the very impt comment someone made with regard to slogans. Most everyone has heard the message that breast is best.  But what happens in reality is that women without good early assistance find that breastfeeding is difficult and they quit when they can't find help.  So some of these "happy" slogans create a bit of cynicism and perhaps even backlash if you are one of the women who needed help and didn't get it.

Breastfeeding is natural in the same way birth is, but both work better with skilled helpers and peer support.  Both tend to get easier to work through with increasing experience.  I have lots of video interviews with bfg moms saying things like:  "How do people get through these kinds of things on their own? " or "My prenatal classes never prepared me for this"  or "People told me the beginning part was hard, but no one told me it would be this hard."   It's difficult for the bfg advocacy community to know how to deal with this issue, because keeping a positive tone and not focusing on the negative is the way most of us have traditionally pitched bfg in our prenatal classes.  

 I got lucky with my first daughter;  she taught me how to breastfed.  My third was a 45 min long from start to finish home birth and if I'd have had her first I don't know that I ever would have tried to breastfeed another baby.  She was a bit injured from the quick birth, and had a partial tongue-tie, and only my devotion to the experience that I'd had with my first two children helped me persist.  If a mother gets this type experience her first time out, she is (according to the literature) very unlikely to ever attempt to bfeed again.  So we have to be realistic and honestly admit that not everybody has an easy time.  This is why the movement to improve birth practices is impt.  We need better birthing environments to improve the odds that the baby will be in good shape following delivery.  This enhances the chance that the instinctive processes that facilitate bfg will operate unimpeded.  However, all too often I see women who are very challenged to breastfeed, and many have not had sufficient help to succeed.  There is still a delivery system failure with regard to the management of bfg problems.  Women talk to each other about these experiences, and one of the things that they tell each other is that bfg is hard.  I think a very impt. message that we should be trying to communicate in our slogans is: " Not only is bfg good for you and your baby, we're here to help you through the learning phase so you can make it to the fun part."  Then we have to make sure that last bit is true.

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