Breast feeding

My daughter is breast-feeding her new baby, who is 1 week old today. Breast-feeding is protrayed as a bonding and wonderful experience. While this is true, there are aspects to breast-feeding, partucularly in the early weeks, that can be difficult and cause not so nice outcomes. Although these difficulties can be overcome, without good support from family, friends and midwives it can be easy to give up on the whole process and resort to bottles.

The baby had no trouble latching onto the breast and establishing a good sucking motion. Once the milk started coming in, my daughter found that she could feed the baby very well with her left breast. The right breast gave her a lot of pain and became extremely hard and sore to the touch. The nipple was sore and had a couple of blisters on the side. L became depressed over her difficulties with feeding and worried that she would not be able to give the baby enough milk from one breast only, and felt she was failing her baby if she gave up breast-feeding.

Fortunately, the midwife came round to do the foot print of the baby. L talked to her about her problems. The midwife was supportive and gave some excellent advice about massaging the breast to soften it up before expressing the milk with a breast pump. This is to be done each time the baby feeds on the other breast. Any milk can be either frozen or kept in the fridge. After a couple of days, L can try feeding on that breast and see how she gets on with it.

So far, it is working. L has expressed 3 small bottles of milk and has a much softer breast. A lot of the pain has subsided and she was talking about trying the baby on the brease this evening. She is also using nipple shields while feeding and they are helping the soreness and cracks in the nipples heal.

So all is tending towards a positive outcome after a few sessions of tears and lack of confidence in her ability to carry on.