Susan writes:

"If a mom really wants a  rubber nipple habituated baby to go to a bare
breast she will need to take away the bottle, cup feed and do skin to skin
until the cows come home."

Absolutely!  I'd only add, until the cows come home and go out again and
come home once more....

This is so basic, so logical, and (in theory) so easy to do....and it
*works* in these situations where the baby really seems to dislike the
breast (probably because of a history of being totally messed about in the
early days).

But boy, is it *hard* for some mothers to do.

They think (or people around them tell them) they are 'spoling' the baby,
that the baby will 'get used to being held'  (duh, yeh!!! ) and that
somehow this little person is being very unreasonable in needing a lot of
comfort and security .

This has to be something to do with the way many of us have had difficulty
in getting our own emotional needs met as babies, and accepted as true
needs, unconditionally. We now find it hard, as a species in the
industrialised West, to offer that unconditional time and patience to our
own babies.

This is not rocket science. Many of the century's psychoanalysts and
children's therapists have explained it, though rarely (as far as I know)
in relation to correcting bf that's gone wrong.

In this society, we're  *so scared*  our babies will have bottomless needs
we cannot meet, that we pretend these needs are not there, or decide
they're unreasonable and 'too much'....

Isn't it sad?

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK

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