>over the years I've come to realize that the
>moms who come to meetings prenatally have LOTS less trouble after baby is
>born. Instead of trying to repair all the train wrecks during the hospital
>stay and immediately after, I say go for PREVENTION. Get these pregnant
>women to group support meetings!
I think Step Ten matters more than any of the other steps. I love these 2
hospital stories:
* A friend of mine delivered at an excellent, really top-notch, birth
center. During the 6 month reunion, hers was the only baby who nursed, the
mothers asked her about her strange way of carrying the baby (called a
sling), and the nurses were amazed that her baby had had nothing but her
milk yet. She felt that the difference between her and the other mothers
was her involvement, beginning prenatally, in a mother-to-mother group.
* Michael Woolridge spoke at a conference once about a hospital that did
everything wrong - all babies supplemented; no rooming-in; widely-spaced,
timed feeds. Yet a month or so post-discharge the vast majority were
breastfeeding successfully. It was, he said, a newly-Westernized hospital
in a breastfeeding culture.
If we do it all right, but bring them from and send them back into a
bottle-feeding world, their long-term success is much less likely, I
imagine, than if we do everything wrong but direct them, before and after,
into a world of other breastfeeding mothers.
And Step Ten is surely the cheapest step of all, since most of us already
have those groups in town!
--
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC Ithaca, NY
www.wiessinger.baka.com
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