Gail--
You have hit the nail right on the head!! I, too, try to educate the moms as
well as the nursing staff about the slick advertising plans that formula
companies use to get their name out to the unsuspecting public.
Two other things that I add to what you tell your patients:
1). pumps made by companies whose life depends on the success of their
product tend to work better than pumps made by those companies who make baby
foods, bottles, etc, who just jumped on the bandwagon.
2). Babies are not born knowing HOW to feed, either at the breast or from a
bottle. Their suck drive is instinctive, and parents read that signal as
hunger so that they know when to teach the baby how to feed (this is
evidenced by the fact that the milk does not surge until day 3-5 after
delivery). When we see the signals, our job is to give the baby access to its
feeding method, the breast, so it can perfect its technique before the milk
surges.
The way a bottle works, the baby "learns" to take very large meals
(think about how much colostrum there is compared to how much formula an
unsuspecting newborn consumes from a bottle usually 1-3 ounces). The
unknowing baby is force-fed large amounts of formula from a bottle that is
not only gravity-driven, but held in place so the baby cannot get away when
it has had enough. This is a ploy by the formula manufactureres to get your
baby used to a large volume, which you then must purchase to keep your baby
satisfied.
We need to educate these parents!!!! but also the nursing staff, who
repeatedly tell moms that crying means your baby is hungry and "see, he was
hungry" when he takes up to 2 ounces of formula from a bottle at the age of
less than 24 hours. I explain that it was not that the baby was hungry, but
that he did not know how to bottle-feed and so was overfed!!
Kathy Rubin in NJ
IBCLC, RN, BC (Maternal/Infant), APN, C (Family Nurse Practitioner)
PhD student hopng to study lactation issues someday
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