Is Breastfeeding Hard? Or Are All The Odds Just Stacked Against You?

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

When I was about five months postpartum and exclusively breastfeeding my son I started having pain and discomfort while nursing, I found a lactation consultant who quickly showed me how I was incorrectly positioning my baby causing him to have a harder time drawing the milk down and emptying the breast. Once she showed me what to do I felt almost immediate relief and my son seemed more content too.

Even though I had just finished writing a chapter for my first book about the importance of breast milk for the development of the baby’s microbiota and immune system, I had no idea about the proper “mechanics” of breastfeeding. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone around me breastfeed and I didn’t have any other women around who could help. Fortunately, I could afford to pay for a lactation consultant with my husband’s health insurance, but many people don’t have that luxury, and I can imagine that if the pain had persisted enough, it could have been a deterrent to continued breastfeeding.

We don’t realize just how abnormal it is to arrive at adulthood and give birth to a baby having never once been in close proximity to a breastfeeding mother. Our ancestors would have spent hours upon hours around breastfeeding mothers and nursing babies, absorbing the knowledge and know-how of breastfeeding and baby care so that by the time a woman had a baby of her own, she would know exactly what to do.

Even as recently in our human history as pre-industrial Europe, a child would have grown up seeing her mother both working and rearing babies, and a girl would have learned to breastfeed by seeing it done repeatedly over many years. By the time she had her own children, she would be confident in her mothering skills. “Skills were absorbed by imitation and participation over many years,” writes the author Gabrielle Palmer in The Politics of Breastfeeding. With the advent of artificial milks, their intensive marketing, subsequent promotion by the medical establishment, and with women never having learned how to successfully breastfeed an infant, it’s no wonder that breastfeeding so easily fell by the wayside.

But since we are generations and generations deep into the cultural undermining of breastfeeding, most new mothers today are in the same boat I found myself in — having to hire another woman to help me continue breastfeeding successfully. Or, alternately, end breastfeeding early due to lack of knowledge and support. This is a highly unusual phenomenon of the modern Western world. “I recall some African friends falling about with laughter when I told them that women read books to learn how to breastfeed,” writes Palmer.

I think the reason this sounds comical to those living outside the Western world is because breastfeeding is such a fundamental biological process; just try to think of another biological process that has become so fraught and then framed as a personal choice that one might take it or leave it. I remember when I was working as a nutrition consultant years ago and I asked my pregnant client if she was going to breastfeed. “No,” she quickly replied.”Breastfeeding is not for everyone.” Imagine saying that about sleeping or eating.

How did this happen? For one, as I experienced myself, the cultural and familial know-how has largely vanished, making it so that women simply don’t know what to do when the baby arrives. And when those new mothers look and ask around, artificial feeding is normalized, and sometimes outright pushed.

Second, most OB-GYNs and pediatricians are not well-versed on the deep importance of breastfeeding. They might have the general understanding that breastmilk is best for the baby but it is more common than not for pediatricians to tell new parents that they should supplement with formula or switch altogether at the first hint of difficulty. And once formula is introduced, a mother’s milk supply will likely drop. Remember what the law of breastfeeding is: the more the demand, the more the mother makes.

Third, the intensive monitoring and weighing and measuring of newborn babies and the amounts of milk a mother is producing does more harm than good. All this really does is create anxiety in mothers, making them more vulnerable to the messaging from infant formula manufacturers and often their doctors. For a full-term, healthy infant and a healthy mom there really is no need for any kind of monitoring as long as the mother and baby are doing well.

And finally, and most importantly of all, when we separate mothers and babies, the production of breast milk falters. Mothers and babies in those early weeks and months are in a deep synchronous relationship, with the baby’s feedings informing the mother’s body on how much milk to produce, among the thousands of other interactive biological processes that are underway.

Breastfeeding is what is known as a highly conserved trait, meaning that since it is such a foundational aspect of mammalian evolution, there are very few women who cannot breastfeed. Of course there will be exceptions, but in general, if you have birthed a baby, you are equipped to breastfeed that baby. If a significant amount of women in a population are actually unable to breastfeed their babies then this is a medical crisis and should be treated as such.

So what is the actual number of women who cannot, for medical reasons, breastfeed? If you search the internet you will find numbers ranging anywhere from one to 15 percent but without data to back them up. I asked Bruce German, professor of food science and technology at UC Davis, who has been studying breastmilk for 25 years what the numbers are, and this was his response, “We don’t know and shouldn’t it be a priority to actually determine that number and treat it as the medical emergency that it represents!?”

What we do know is that the key factor for successful breastfeeding is closeness between the mother and baby, both day and night with very minimal (if any) separation in those early weeks and months; as well as on-going support from your family, friends, larger communities and culture to make this a reality.

Sadly, one of the very first things to happen to mothers and babies is separation and then closeness is repeatedly discouraged, particularly at night. This is the primary reason women feel like they “failed” at breastfeeding. If you are not breastfeeding both day and night on demand, your body is not getting the necessary cues from your baby to produce the correct amount of milk. To be clear, women are not failing at breastfeeding; most of the medical advice, and the culture at large is failing to support women and their ability to breastfeed. This is evidenced by that fact that only 25 percent of babies in the US are breastfeeding at six months, and (almost unbelievably) only one percent of babies in the UK are breastfeeding at six months.

And so at the risk of being repetitive, this is the distinction we must make: individual women are not to blame for being immersed in a culture and society so blatantly antagonist towards breastfeeding and the primal needs of mothers and babies. Once we mothers can see past the insidious division being sowed by infant formula manufacturers, and those in the medical field and cultural realms who are doing their bidding, we can get to supporting all women and all babies and their inherent right to breastfeeding and breast milk.