Breastfeeding is a learned behavior. It isn’t instinctive as many women are led to believe. Do some women have zero problems with nursing? Sure. But most need some help. Even gorillas and chimpanzees, who have never seen other apes caring for their babies are unable to nurse successfully.
Women don’t need to be told TO breastfeed. Women need to be taught ABOUT breastfeeding, and so do their doctors and support staff. We need to be taught a new idea of what is “normal”, both in terms of infant behavior and in weight gain.
After all, if the average baby is still formula fed, is it any surprise that breastfed babies don’t measure up to “normal”?
Most women I speak to still believe common myths about breastfeeding, the most common of which is this one:
If my baby keeps crying and nursing constantly, I must not have enough milk.
This is the thing I hear most from mothers who are trying to breastfeed, or who have tried and were unsuccessful. It is probably the biggest misconception out there.
I feel that if doctors and nurses in Canada make one change to their pro-breastfeeding campaign, it should be to teach this word:
CLUSTERFEEDING.
Even I, with all my obsessive pre-baby research, didn’t run into the term but my doctor explained it to me on day-three, when my baby-who-couldn’t-latch was screaming CONSTANTLY.
“Clusterfeeding” is an extremely common and normal newborn behavior. When the baby goes through a growth spurt (like, say, when he is trying to regain his birth weight or when he is 6 or 8 weeks old) he starts nursing constantly in order to increase his mother’s supply. That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have enough – it just means the baby is anticipating an increase in his own future needs. The baby will cry whenever off the breast, and nurse frantically when placed to the breast.
This tends to be when a breastfeeding mother who doesn’t have the right support will think “maybe I’m not making enough milk” and give him formula. The formula, being made of more complicated proteins, takes longer to digest. The baby sleeps for several hours, and the mother thinks “I was right! I’m not making enough milk!” and continues to offer the formula on occasion. Meanwhile, the clusterfeeding/constantly-on-the-breast thing doesn’t happen and her supply decreases, and now she is dependent on the formula.
Apparently formula companies have relied on this phenomenon in order to hook new customers, and just having a sample of formula in the house decreases a breastfeeding mother’s chance of success.
I was lucky. My doctor said that this is totally normal, that it is good for my milk supply, and essentially to suck it up and just let him nurse as much as he wants. This was a hard order to follow because my baby’s latch was terrible and it hurt terribly but it sure gave me lots of opportunity to work on his latch, and within a week or two the pain was gone.
Basically, on many accounts, I was lucky.
I was lucky that my mother had breastfed before me and didn’t try to undermine my efforts with “maybe he needs a bottle”.
I was lucky that my husband was 100% behind breastfeeding, and probably would have taken my mother out of the room for a little talk if she HAD suggested a bottle.
I was lucky that my OB GYN knew the word “cluster feeding” and was able to explain it to me.
I was lucky that the nurses I worked with told me that a newborn could be fed from a small cup, rather than a bottle.
I was lucky that I knew the importance of avoiding a bottle until my baby had a good latch.
I was lucky that my public health nurse had faith in my milk production, and was able to give me reliable ways to judge whether my milk was, or was not, the problem.
I was lucky. That is my secret.
But these things shouldn’t be luck.
If Canada wants women to breastfeed, they need to start seriously educating people in more than just “breast is best”. We don’t need guilt. We need realistic expectations. We need education. We need practical solutions.
We need HELP.
What help did you receive or wish you had received when your baby was born?
This is the final post of an original 3-part series for World Moms Blog from our “breast is best” advocate and mother of one, Carol @IfByYes.
The image used in this post is credited to Guttorm Flatabo. It holds a Flickr Creative Commons attribution license.
I always run into conversations and have to take a step back and see if me spreading my positive experience with breastfeeding doesn’t come off as bullying or judgmental. I’ve come to realize that that’s all I can do because the guilt is within someone’s heart and can play tricks on their psyche and emotions.
Great post! I will track back to the other two since I seemed to have missed them!
Thanks!
All three of my boys seemed to cluster feed for the first four to six months of their lives, but it was most intense around dinner time each night. I jokingly say I sat on the sofa and fed constantly this whole time. All three thrived and my boobs adapted, I knew what was happening and gave myself over to the process. Breastmilk is amazing stuff – changing daily and with room temperature to either be more liquid for thirst or richer on cooler days for warmth, changing according to the needs of our babies as they grow and change. Yes, support. Yes, correct information.
Great series Carol. 🙂
I loved The Womanly Art Of Breastfeeding for telling me that milk is “living tissue”, since it has white blood cells and other living components. That helped it seem VERY different from formula in my mind.
Our hospital was great, as far as breastfeeding was concerned. There were no formula samples or salesladies around, as I’ve heard happens in other places. No one ever questioned if the baby was getting enough milk. I wasn’t told about cluster feeding (though I can see it in retrospect), but the nurses assured us constantly that as long as baby was making plenty of diapers then there was no problem.
But for me, I think the single biggest factor was community support. I was really lucky to be breastfeeding in a country that is more supportive of it. Almost every where you go has nursing rooms where you can nurse in private, clean facilities. The few times I needed to nurse on the train or in public, no one gave us a second glance and certainly no one ever said anything. My husband nursed until he was three; his mother nursed until she was four. No one in his family ever thought it was weird or gross, even when the babies were bigger.
Sounds like you were super lucky, too!
I was one of those “unlucky” moms that despite my own research and my almost desperate wish to breastfeed was “sabotaged” by the “she’s too small, she needs formula brigade” 🙁
I almost wish I could have another baby just to be able to experience breastfeeding as nature intended! I SO wish someone had known about clusterfeeding when my babies were born. Looking back, that’s really why I gave up … I thought my babies were starving! 🙁
Thanks SO MUCH for everything you have taught me. Thanks to you I’ll be able to support my daughter one day. Thanks to you, at least my daughter and future grandkids have a better chance of succeeding where I feel I failed.
Simona,
I love this: “Thanks to you I’ll be able to support my daughter one day.”
Thank you, too, Carol, this series on breastfeeding and getting started was very interesting and important!!
Jen 🙂
Thank you Carol for this series. I thought it was lovely!
I do think a lot of moms who don’t breastfeed feel an internal guilt and they should not. We all need to make the best decision at a given time in space and then live with it.
I was lucky to know the word “cluster feed” but not is the definition you gave. The term was used as a way to help your baby sleep at the night. The idea was to “cluster feed” or feed often in the evening in order to fill baby’s stomach so he/she would sleep at night.
With my first daughter, I didn’t understand feed on demand. Another thing I learned with my second. I thought we needed to be on some sort of rigid schedule so I spent a lot of time holding and rocking and shushing my baby. Eventually, everything even out. With my second, I feed on demand. I didn’t check the clock to see when the last feed was. And she slept well and was more content from the start.
Thanks for your story. I am sure it will help many mothers today and in the future!
Apparently there is a book called Babywise which promotes scheduled feeding, even for breastfed babies, and this book has been associated with babies being brought to pediatricians suffering from dehydration and malnutrition. It breaks my heart – all mothers want is to do the best for their babies, and what are they supposed to do when accepted literature gives them wrong information?
I wish, I had more support all around when I tried to breastfeed my three kids. All three suffered from a lactose sensitivity/intolerance, instead of letting me know I can help by not eating dairy myself my pediatrician’s partner who I had to see at the time, put them straight on a special formula. I’m glad, I breastfeed them at least for a little while in the beginning.
Tsk. What are mothers supposed to do when their own doctors undermine them? And then the medical community just tries to make mothers feel guilty for not breastfeeding. It isn’t right.
My mother was sure that I had a milk protein allergy when I was a baby, and her doctor assured her that I didn’t. When I was home recently she showed me a pamphlet that she had taken from the pharmacy all about milk protein allergies in babies – describing my exact symptoms. She felt vindicated, but also frustrated with her doctor of the time.
This is absolutely correct, about support, correct information and learning rather than judging and guilting. I do believe in natural circumstances breastfeeding is instinctual, but not many of us live in natural circumstances…anyway, I was lucky as well because while I studied breastfeeding before I became pregnant and considered myself a lactivist, I went the extra mile to become a breastfeeding counselor during my pregnancy and I kinda feel like a ton more moms should receive that training so we can support each other better. Learning books and books worth of information about breastfeeding to some seems silly because a lot of people assume it’s simple and you should just be able to do it…it will work or it won’t work… the baby will take to the breast, the breast will produce enough milk, or they will not. I guess actually a lot of people think it is about luck, when it is actually about preparedness and a certain level of health.
After I did my training and had my baby, I found that every doctor and nurse I talked to didn’t have proper, accurate information about breastfeeding. Many, many doctors really don’t know what they should (to offer advice about breastfeeding) and many nurses I’ve seen promote breastfeeding but certainly have gone about it with rigidity, no compassion, understanding or practical advice. Yes, I have seen many frustrated women who stopped breastfeeding because their doctors or support systems failed them by giving them incorrect advice. I tell moms they didn’t fail, the system failed them…
I don’t know about the natural circumstances, because I’ve known women who had natural births and still had babies with bad latches, and women who had c-sections who breastfed with zero problems, but I definitely agree that there are way too many doctors out there with bad info.
I am the only mother I know who was told that you can give babies expressed milk from a cup, rather than a bottle, for example.
I don’t mean to say natural circumstances as in natural birth…actually, something more holistic like an actual natural culture/society…few people live lives that are not constantly busy, dangerous, out of tune with nature and we’re mostly not living in supportive communities so we’re usually not in contact with a long-line of breasfeeding support and knowledge that is natural to human nature(and other animals) but is not so for modern women.
So to get into that mindset on your own is no small feat, but I believe once you’re in that mindset there is an intuitive knowing, provided there are no biological reasons for difficulty. Stress can be a very big factor and if you have a problem with eating well or drinking enough water or mental health issues or any number of other issues, it can be difficult to deal with your everyday issues on top of slowing down enough to feel the subtle intuition to breastfeeding. I was fortunate with my first child that she latched on so easily and I never had to do anything, except to calm my mind at times and get used to it. With my second daughter it wasn’t that easy.