Many Moms May Have Been Taught to Breastfeed Incorrectly: Surprising New Research

By making the most of what baby brings to the table, Natural Breastfeeding allows you to use the behaviors built in by Mother Nature to help you successfully feed and nurture your newborn.

This article from Nancy Mohrbacher, IBCLC, FILCA was featured in Holistic Parenting magazine, Issue 9 (May/June 2015).  Nancy is a wealth of knowledge and a light to many breastfeeding mothers!

During the more than 30 years I’ve been helping breastfeeding families, it’s been thrilling to see the rise in U.S. breastfeeding rates. In the early 1980s, only about 50% of American women breastfed even once. Now nearly 80% of new mothers breastfeed.

But this picture is still far from rosy. The sad truth is that most women today are not meeting their breastfeeding goals. Three recent studies shed some light on the issues. Here’s what they found:

More than two thirds of women intending to breastfeed exclusively for three months didn’t get there.

The most common reasons women give up on breastfeeding are:

• latching problems
• worries about milk production
• nipple pain

During the first week after birth, 92% of nursing mothers reported significant breastfeeding challenges.

Sadly, most mothers who struggle with breastfeeding think the only solution is to try harder, but that’s frustrating and exhausting. Wouldn’t it be better instead to make breastfeeding easier? Rather than tackling every issue—latching struggles, milk supply, sore nipples–individually, why not use a single approach that addresses many challenges at once?

That is what a new approach called Natural Breastfeeding can do.

What is Natural Breastfeeding?

Let me back up a little and explain how this new approach came to be. By chance in 2008 I came across a U.K. study that rocked my world. It found that the breastfeeding positions we had been teaching new mothers for decades could actually be contributing to the ongoing epidemic of early problems. What did this study find? Human newborns’ innate responses are similar to those of other mammal species–including puppies, kittens, and piglets–that feed on their tummies. In other words, our babies are hardwired to be “tummy feeders.”

When I read that paper by Dr. Suzanne Colson (who calls her approach Biological Nurturing® or “laid-back breastfeeding”), my mind went first to the babies I’d seen in the breast crawl videos often shown in childbirth classes. The first breast crawl videos appeared in the late 1980s, when Swedish researchers found that when a newborn is laid tummy down on mother’s body, within the first hour something magical happens. Without any help, a healthy baby will crawl up the mother’s body, find the nipple, latch on, and begin breastfeeding. You can see this in action by doing an online search for “breast crawl.”

What Baby Brings to the Table

Not long ago, scientists believed that most newborn reflexes were useless leftovers from our tree-dwelling ancestors. But now we know better. We know these reflexes are key to early breastfeeding.

Every brand-new baby comes into the world with a whole repertoire of responses that are custom designed by Mother Nature to make baby an active breastfeeding partner. Baby is born with what’s needed so that–when conditions are right–breastfeeding and bonding happen easily and naturally. These responses work best when baby lies tummy down on mother with gravity anchoring baby there. I’d seen the breast crawl videos for years but somehow never made the mental connection between the babies’ tummy-down position and the ease with which they took the breast.

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by Sara Sites on July 9, 2015 on Mothering.com