Diane - I think you are absolutely right about the support mothers
get from seeing breastfeeding normalised.
My heart *sinks* at the idea of every mother having her own lactation
consultant - for a start, it is impossible for this to happen. Just
to take UK figures, with 600,000 babies born every year - if an LC
had a case load of, say, 250 a year (that would be 5 pg/new mothers
a week, or one new one a day), we'd need 2,400 of them.
I think we have about 150 and most of them already work in the health
service doing something else as well as bf support.
And even suppose we could somehow get another 2,350 trained and
employed to do nothing but bf support, nothing will change unless the
mother lives, sleeps and breathes in a society/family/culture that
values breastfeeding and values it enough to help it work when it
goes wrong.
That's why my hopes rest with bf peer support and bf support groups -
pioneered in the UK by LLL, but taken up and developed by other
organisations including the National Health Service.
You can train a whole bunch of peer supporters in just a few months.
They stay doing it for a year or so and then move on - that's fine,
because you can train up another bunch to make a rolling programme
so in any neighbourhood, there is somewhere to go and someone to talk
to which makes breastfeeding normal. When you have a lot of people
who have been peer supporters, you tip the cultural balance away from
formula feeding.
Of course as well as support for bf in a bf support group, you get
friendship networks, lonely mothers not being quite so lonely,
cultural and racial barriers being overcome, peer supporters going on
further with their education (I wish someone would do a study on this
and show how peer support can combat unemployment, poverty and
educational deprivation!), links between the health services and the
community...and it is all so very CHEAP!!!
The routine, everyday, casual and warm-hearted support for
breastfeeding that goes on with peer support will 'manage' 90 per
cent of breastfeeding questions. The remaining 10 per cent can be
referred elsewhere, to people like me or to a lactation consultant -
and then when I deal with them, I want to be able to refer back to
peer support for the longer-lasting normalisation after the more
difficult problem has resolved.
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK
--
http://www.heatherwelford.co.uk
***********************************************
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 email list is powered by LISTSERV (R).
There is only one LISTSERV. To learn more, visit:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|
