Breastfeeding Made Simple , livre ebook

“I recommend this groundbreaking book to all my clients.”
—Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC
“I fell in love with this book; every page is a jewel. It simply ‘delivers’ what every mother needs—the natural laws to build a breastfeeding relationship. Understanding the first forty days has changed the way I talk to new parents and teach breastfeeding supporters. Finally, here is a book that talks about breastfeeding without all the rules. This book lives in my bag to share with everyone!”
—Carrie Finger, BFA, IBCLC, LCCE, lactation program director at Aviva Institute

Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books
Copyright © 2010 by Nancy Mohrbacher and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett
New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com
All Rights Reserved
Acquired by Tesilya Hanauer; Cover design by Amy Shoup; Edited by Elisabeth Beller
epub ISBN: 9781608821754
Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as:
Mohrbacher, Nancy.
Breastfeeding made simple : seven natural laws for nursing mothers / Nancy Mohrbacher and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett ; foreword by Jack Newman. -- 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57224-861-8 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-57224-862-5 (pdf ebook)
1. Breastfeeding. I. Kendall-Tackett, Kathleen A. II. Title.
RJ216.M5697 2010
649’.33--dc22
2010034325
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
• Breastfeeding: The Biological Norm for Mothers and Babies • How to Use This Book
Part I: The Laws
Chapter 1: Your Baby's Birth
Law 1: Babies and Mothers Are Hardwired to Breastfeed
• Your Baby's Hardwiring • Are Mothers Hardwired, Too? • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 2: The Power of Touch: Why Holding Your Baby Matters
Law 2: Mother's Body Is Baby's Natural Habitat
• The Habitat of the Human Newborn • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 3: Getting Comfortable: The Heart of Successful Breastfeeding
Law 3: Better Feel and Flow Happen in the Comfort Zone
• What Every Mother Needs to Know About Comfortable Breastfeeding • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 4: The First Week of Breastfeeding
Law 4: More Breastfeeding at First Means More Milk Later
• A Baby's Transition after Birth • Breastfeeding Basics • How to Know When Breastfeeding Is Going Well • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 5: How Your Baby Sets Your Milk Production
Law 5: Every Breastfeeding Couple Has Its Own Rhythm
• The Adjustment Period • Breastfeeding Norms • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 6: Meeting Your Long-Term Breastfeeding Goals
Law 6: More Milk Out Equals More Milk Made
• The Reward Period • How Milk Production Works • What Is Full Milk Production? • What Everyone Thinks Affects Milk Production (But Doesn't) • Meeting Your Long-Term Goals • Starting Solid Foods • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 7: Weaning Comfortably and Happily
Law 7: Children Wean Naturally
• A Weaning Overview • Weaning Basics • The Role of Solid Foods • When the System Breaks Down • Summary
Chapter 8: What Interferes with the Laws
• The Role of History and Culture • Summary
Part II: Applying the Laws
Chapter 9: Daily Life with Your Breastfeeding Baby
• Reentering the World with Your Breastfeeding Baby • Away from Your Baby • Lifestyle Issues • Expressing and Storing Milk • Medications and Contraception
Chapter 10: Common Breastfeeding Challenges
• Mother-Related Challenges • Baby-Related Challenges
Chapter 11: Special Situations: Physical or Health Issues
• Special Situations: Mother • Special Situations: Baby • When You Need to Temporarily Stop Breastfeeding • Alternatives to Feeding at the Breast • Pumping to Establish Full Milk Production • How to Wean from Pumping
Epilogue: You're on Your Way
Resources
• Finding Local Sources of Help • Websites of Interest • Recommended Books and DVDs
References
Foreword
How did breastfeeding become so unnecessarily complicated? As the years go by, I am often astounded by how we manage to add new wrinkles of complexity to something that should be easy, natural, and uncomplicated. Of course, breastfeeding itself has not become more complex than it was, say, two hundred years ago. Rather, it is the way we think about breastfeeding that has changed.
As a pediatrician working in southern Africa in the early 1980s, I was amazed at how naturally mothers breastfed their babies. They just put the baby to the breast, with no fuss or bother, no diagrams of how the baby should latch on, no concern about how many minutes the baby nursed on each side, no obsession with how many hours between feedings, no anxiety that the baby had fed only six times a day or fourteen times a day instead of the standard North American eight to twelve times; and no one thought that breastfeeding might not work. And again, to my amazement, it almost always did work.
The very fact that I was amazed, of course, speaks volumes about what I, brought up and trained as a pediatrician in North America, experienced in my life and professional training. These African mothers, the vast majority of whom had never read a book on breastfeeding, who never attended a prenatal class, who probably couldn’t imagine what a lactation consultant would do, seemed to exhibit no more anxiety about how they were breastfeeding than about how they were breathing. Of course, breastfeeding was not always problem free in southern Africa either (just as breathing is not always problem free, if you have asthma, for example), but mothers lived in a culture where breastfeeding was normal, and if mothers did run into problems, they had women all around them (their own mothers, sisters, friends) who had breastfed and who usually knew how to get them through it. In fact, the mothers who seemed to have the most problems were those who were the best educated (in the modern sense) and the most Westernized.
However, this basic, ingrained knowledge of how to breastfeed and care for babies was being lost even in southern Africa by the 1980s, when I was there. More and more mothers were having difficulty with “not enough milk,” something that older physicians told me they had never heard of. More were using formula supplements, when their own mothers apparently hadn’t needed them years before. Part of the problem was the increasing availability of formula and the allure that formula has for poor people (“I can afford to give my baby formula”), even if they couldn’t afford it. An equally important part was the greater availability of Western medicine.
Now, Western medicine has accomplished some pretty marvelous things. Our ability to save the lives of babies born as early as twenty-five weeks or even earlier is nothing less than miraculous and was unheard of even fifty years ago (though the long-term results may not always be as wonderful as we would like). Our ability to treat many kinds of cancer that were previously almost always fatal is another. One thing that Western medicine has not done, however, is produce artificial milk that is the same as human milk. Despite marketing strategies to convince us otherwise, what are commonly called formulas are actually very different from mother’s milk.
What happened? Why did women in North America and other affluent areas of the world abandon breastfeeding? By the early 1970s only about a quarter of all mothers in North America even started out breastfeeding, and most of them stopped within a few weeks. There were many reasons for this, including the fact that women were returning to outside work shortly after giving birth, as maternity leave was and is virtually nonexistent in the United States. But equally if not more important was that Western medicine had decided that what human beings made in a factory was better than what had served humanity well for hundreds of thousands of generations. (Many more women are now breastfeeding in the United States even though maternity leave is still very short, demonstrating that it is not just outside work that determines breastfeeding rates). How many mothers have come to our breastfeeding clinic, accompanied by their own mothers who told me, “I wanted to breastfeed, but the doctor told me that formula was better”? And this, in the 1960s and 1970s, when formulas weren’t as good as they are now (and they’re still not up to scratch today and won’t be in 2020, either).
When formulas first started to become popular, in the early part of the twentieth century, they were very complicated to make up. Indeed, they were called “formulas” because you took one part of this, another part of that, yet another part of something else, and you had to be very careful to mix the quantities according to the age and size of the baby and their reaction to this milk, which was different than the human milk babies’ bodies are designed to eat. Furthermore, the immune-­deficient, artificially fed baby had to be protected from foreign bacteria, so complicated instructions on how to sterilize the formula and the bottles and the teats were needed. Physicians often worked hand in hand with the formula manufacturers to encourage formula use because they suddenly had a new reason for patients to come in. Nursing mothers would never have gone, in those days, to see a physician (almost always a man) to ask about breastfeeding issues. They would ask their mothers or sisters. But here was a whole new set of patients, new mothers, who needed to see a doctor to find out how to feed their babies. And with that came information about how to take care of their babies.