>I have gotten a lot of emails/posts regarding breastfeeding and
>guilt. Many women agreed with me and many did not. I am happy to
>have the conversation rolling and wanted to get some much needed
>advice from someone with a mind that is a bit more business oriented
>than mine.
>
>I want to start a new organization; one that focuses on infant
>nutrition. I want LCs and women with knowledge of ABM to work in
>conjunction with one another to offer sound advice to mothers of
>children under the age of 2.
Julia, I think in practice, this is what many breastfeeding
supporters/specialists actually do, to varying extents.
I know that my own work, and my students' learning, focuses on
enabling women to breastfeed and to support breastfeeding
individually and culturally/socially as being the normal,
physiological way to feed (not the 'best'!!) , trying to remove the
barriers that affect women's choices and their experiences, once
they have made their choice.
But women also ask us about introducing solids, they ask us about
using formula, and we're finding we have to have an informed voice on
both these things.
On formula, we have to tell them that we have no independent
evidence-based 'league table' of brands so we can't help much there -
though I have just peer reviewed an article for our specialist
journal that explains what the additional ingredients and processes
are in formula and spells out the lack of any evidence for some of
the health claims made by manufacturers. We can share this with
mothers.
Many of us already talk to mothers using formula about how to use it
with the least damage to the breastfeeding relationship.
I would like to see more, and clearer guidance and support to women
who use formula about following their baby's needs when giving a
bottle .
We should use what we know of attachment, and social development, to
explain the importance of (for example) not passing the bottle-fed
baby round to all-and-sundry to feed (to emulate the consistent carer
of breastfeeding), not force-feeding to get that extra half ounce in
(to emulate the baby-led aspect of breastfeeding), using the time
when you give your baby a bottle to look, love, talk and play (just
as happens naturally with bf), considering skin to skin when holding
the bottle fed baby.
I do this in my work, without ever suggesting that formula feeding is
without risks to health, or that it doesn't matter if they formula
feed. Of course it matters - not just to them and their baby but to
our whole society. Yet you * can* still bottle feed and mother your
baby in the way you want to mother him, but you might need to forget
the so-called 'advantages' of bottle feeding ('anyone can do it';
'the baby's no longer dependent on the mother'; 'you can see exactly
how much the baby's getting' and so on) and think of them as actually
quite serious *disadvantages* and change the way it's done.
I don't think we need a new organisation to do any of that. We can
do all this ourselves as breastfeeding supporters.
My concerns would also be that a new organisation would find it very
hard to get all the independent info it woud need to answer all the
questions about formula - and it could also be seen as a dilution of
support for breastfeeding. I would predict that infant formula
manufacturers would actually welcome a new organisation, and that
would be proof to me that it could be a very risky thing to set up.
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK
--
http://www.heatherwelford.co.uk
http://heatherwelford.posterous.com
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