Nursing Your Kids

In the comments of my post about pumping exclusively Katharine wrote, Exclusive pumping because you don’t want to sit still and breastfeed sounds mechanical and icky to me.

Caro followed up by writing, Katharine, I bet that one woman’s relaxing is another woman’s icky.

These are both excellent points. When I first read about exclusive pumping (note: for some reason I can’t help but write pumpkin instead of pumping-and yes I just corrected that- every single freaking time I write it) I assumed women did it because they had to. It never occurred to me that someone who didn’t want to physically nurse their baby would actually go to all of the trouble of pumping. And pumpking (see!!!) is trouble. There’s equipment to wash, there’s milk to store, parts to assemble and disassemble, and then there’s the actual part where you have to hope the letdown reflex will kick in and hope you’re pumping enough. When you’re pumpking (ugh, I can’t make it stop- I may have to switch to the verb expressing) exclusively every ounce counts much more than if you’re just expressing occasionally.

It seems strange to me that someone (once all latch problems are under control) would rather hook up to a machine than hook up to a baby, especially for those middle of the night feedings. But strange to me isn’t necessarily strange to someone else. Like caro said, one woman’s relaxing is another woman’s icky.

A recent article in Babble about expressing exclusively brought some interesting points.

“I don’t think there’s any question” breast milk is superior to formula, said Dr. Ruth Lawrence, a professor of pediatrics and expert on breastfeeding at the University of Rochester. “I would opt for breast milk in a bottle rather than no breast milk at all.”

Still, she said, drinking pumped breast milk from a bottle differs considerably from nursing. “Babies who suckle at the breast — that’s the physiological way to feed. The baby doesn’t get the same kind of activity — tongue, mouth, swallow — when it is feeding from the bottle.” And, she added, “it’s been shown that the die is cast for obesity in the first year of life, and we tend to overfeed babies when we bottle feed them.”

For the two months I was expressing for Sam I remember that everyone who tried to bottle feed him, especially his grandmothers, tried to insist that he finish what was in the bottle whether he wanted it or not. I’m sure that this would have been the case whether it was formula or breastmilk, but that desire to see a baby finish a bottle is completely different than letting a baby nurse until he or she is finished. I’m sure that bottle fed babies are over fed, which is why they created a growth chart for breastfed babies. Even so, I don’t know that this is the best point for a breastfeeding advocate to make. So many women are turned off by experiences with pushy and rude lactation consultants that this point, that you’re basically setting your kid up for obesity by bottle feeding them isn’t going to make them feel any better about their decision to breastfeed, no matter what form the breastfeeding takes.

The balance of foremilk and hindmilk that helps nursing babies first satisfy their hunger, then feel full is missing when pumped milk mixes in a bottle. And psychologically there can be more pressure to finish a bottle when expressed breast milk represents so much work for the mother.

Yes! They call it liquid gold. It’s painful to see it go to waste.

Dr. Lawrence worries that most women aren’t getting the proper support when they set out to nurse their babies, and that some women find the idea so distasteful they don’t try. “Some women do it because they can’t envision the baby suckling at their breast. I suspect it has to do with our whole modern attitude about the breast. It’s become such a sex object.”

Wanting to physically separate yourself from your baby because you view your breasts as sex objects, not a temporary source of nourishment, is something that I find icky. Yes, breasts are sexual, but the inability to put that aside for the brief time period that a child needs them for food just seems cold to me.

All the women I spoke with would agree on one thing: mothers who wish to breastfeed would benefit from better support and information. Inconsistent, inconsiderate nurses and lactation consultants, doctors who either push formula or ignore mothers’ requests for help with nursing, and rigid hospital policies regarding babies’ weight need to change. As Dr. Lawrence points out, babies have been losing weight in the days after birth since the beginning of the human race: it’s a feature, not a bug. By fetishing weights and measures, the modern healthcare establishment borrows from the formula industry while paying lip service to breastfeeding — a recipe of mixed messages that sets mothers up to fail.

It’s hard to feel confident in your decision to breastfeed when your baby just keeps losing weight. At his first appointment with his pro-breastfeeding pediatrician, when Sam had lost more than 10% of his birth weight and my milk had yet to come in, he was weighed both before and after I nursed him. He actually LOST weight in between. I felt like a failure. When his pediatrician recommended supplementing with formula with a dropper until my milk came in I felt like more of a failure. But I’d read enough to know that it was normal and I continued to nurse him every two hours whether he seemed interested or not. A meeting with a good lactation consultant, a kind lactation consultant who was patient and thorough and sweet to me and my baby helped ease my mind two days later. And by then my milk had come in, only I didn’t really know it because Sam was nursing so often I didn’t really become engorged. I could have been set up to fail just as easily as thousands of other women who give up nursing in the first few days. But I wasn’t. I was well-informed and had a good support system including a pediatrician who reminded me for the entire first year of his life that breastfed babies just don’t weigh as much as formula fed babies and that I shouldn’t put too much stock into the percentile charts as long as Sam was healthy and growing.

Whatever the reason for expressing milk instead of nursing, I still think it’s a worthwhile pursuit. And while I don’t necessarily understand the women who prefer expressing for sexual reasons, or just don’t feel like sitting down with a baby who nurses on and off all day long, I still think they’ve made a good choice. Breastmilk is best.