“If a multinational company developed a product that was a nutritionally balanced and delicious food, a wonder drug that both prevented and treated disease, cost almost nothing to produce and could be delivered in quantities controlled by the consumers’ needs, the very announcement of their find would send their shares rocketing to the top of the stock market. The scientists who developed the product would win prizes, and the wealth and influence of everyone involved would increase dramatically. Women have been producing such a miraculous substance, breast milk, since the beginning of human existence.” Gabrielle Palmer
Not knowing where to turn, a new breastfeeding mother consults books, the most common source for breastfeeding information in this country, but all too often her questions go unanswered. Friends know little on the subject, and some are opposed to the whole idea of home nursing. Finally, frazzled by the rigors of the delivery and by lack of sleep and unable to deal with an abscessed nipple or a child who refuses to take the breast, new moms turn to bottle feeding out of sheer desperation simply because no one has told them beforehand that the problems they are facing are common and easily solvable.
(We insert this video because it shows how easy and loving breastfeeding is. Also that you can always find a 'Lactation Consultant' in your area. There are many Breastfeeding videos to show you "How" to breastfeed.)
What holds women back from breastfeeding today?
Because a large number of women in this country were told by their doctors not to breastfeed from the 1940s through the 1980s, many new mothers receive little encouragement at home from mothers and grandmothers. Senior generations often look on breastfeeding, as one client of mine describes her mother’s words, as “a hippie thing.” As recently as 2006 a woman filed a complaint against a commercial airline because she had been asked to exit the airplane when she refused to stop breastfeeding her child.
Because family elders were sold a bill of goods by baby-food manufacturers when they did their own parenting, these “advisers” often insist that infants are better nourished with “scientifically balanced” formula and that prolonged breastfeeding can lead to infant malnutrition and serious medical problems for both mother and child. Many fathers, equally untutored in the subtleties of breastfeeding, are all too ready to cave in to these prejudices.
How can breastfeeding prevent common and deadly diseases in your child?
Because the many nourishing substances in human milk build powerful defense systems in a child’s body, he or she is able to fend off many crippling and some killing diseases. Science has learned that human milk contains antibodies that produce an antibiotic effect on infection, pouncing invading germs and dissolving them quickly.
Inner Ear Infections - common
As a rule, infants are prone to upper respiratory ailments such as colds and runny noses. These problems cause the middle ear to fill with fluids, which can easily become infected, causing fever, malaise, and the terrible pain of earache. The antibiotic ingredients in breast milk provide a strong line of protection against these unpleasant episodes.
Obesity - deadly
Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital recently conducted a study of a mother’s milk protein known as adiponectin. Many of them believe the presence of this substance in human milk explains the association between breastfeeding and the apparent reduced risk of obesity in adults. Adiponectin is manufactured by fat cells and helps control the way in which the body assimilates sugars and lipids in the bloodstream. High levels of adiponectin are associated with less disease and a more stable weight.
In 1996 the American Academy of Pediatrics summarized its position on breastfeeding:
“The benefits of breastfeeding are so numerous that the Academy strongly encourages the practice during the first six to twelve months of life. Human milk is nutritionally superior to formulas for the content of fats, cholesterol, and proteins; all substitute-feeding options differ markedly from it. There is evidence that human milk confers protection against infection from other diseases.”
This statement is from the World Health Organization (WHO), currently a staunch supporter of breastfeeding and proper childhood nutrition:
“Breastfeeding is an unequalled way of providing ideal food for the healthy growth and development of infants; it is also an integral part of the reproductive process with important implications for the health of mothers. A recent review of evidence has shown that, on a population basis, exclusive breastfeeding for six months is the optimal way of feeding infants. Thereafter infants should receive complementary foods with continued breastfeeding up to two years of age or beyond.” (emphasis mine)
The WHO goes on to say:
“Breast milk is the natural first food for babies; it provides all the energy and nutrients that the infant needs for the first months of life, and it continues to provide up to half or more of a child’s nutritional needs during the second half of the first year, and up to one third during the second year of life.”
“Breast milk promotes sensory and cognitive development, and protects the infant against infectious and chronic diseases. Exclusive breastfeeding reduces infant mortality due to common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea or pneumonia, and helps for a quicker recovery during illness. Breastfeeding contributes to the health and wellbeing of mothers; it helps to space children, reduces the risk of ovarian cancer and breast cancer, increases family and national resources, is a secure way of feeding, and is safe for the environment.”
“First, formula, at its best, only replaces most nutritional components of breast milk. Breast milk changes with the time of the day, the duration of suckling and the age of the child. In addition, breast milk carries passive factors that fight disease, and when breastfed, the infant gets active living cells from the mother that help combat disease.”
Breastfeeding mothers recover more quickly physically from childbirth
Breastfeeding contributes substantially to maternal health in the weeks following childbirth. This widely recognized benefit is due to the fact that the mechanism of breastfeeding helps the mother’s uterus contract more rapidly than it would if she was not nursing from the breast. The effect of these contractions reduces blood loss in the new mother, lessens the chance of developing infection, and aids in healing. Many childcare professionals actually consider these uterine contractions, helped along by breastfeeding, to be the final stage of labor.
On a psychological level
A breastfeeding mother tends to feel extremely positive about herself and her infant. These emotions are inspired not simply by pride of motherhood. Instead, they are caused by physical stimulation produced by two hormones, which are prevalent in mother’s milk: - Prolactin, which encourages relaxation and affection and which fights stress, and oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, which helps mothers bond to their children and to just plain feel good about themselves, their life, and the world around them. Besides producing euphoric states in many nursing mothers, breastfeeding is a specific against post-delivery letdown and, in many cases, postpartum depression. Bottle-feeding commercial baby formula provides neither of these joy-inducing hormones.
The Importance of Bonding and Breastfeeding to the Family
All too often public health agencies advocate for breastfeeding on purely medical grounds: Breastfeeding reduces colds in a child. It provides natural immunities. It builds a well-formed palate and bite.
Yet while these claims are true, somewhere in their reports these agencies fail to spell out the intensely powerful emotional impact that breastfeeding produces in mother and child. In Western society, the decision about breast or bottle is still seen very much as a personal choice based on convenience.
The potential stress of living with a child with recurrent illnesses, or the loss of the unique bond that comes from breastfeeding, are often omitted from the decision-making process.
This bond that I refer to begins at the moment skin-to-skin contact is made between a nursing mother’s body and the child’s. It seems nothing could be more intimate than the nursing position itself: the child is pressed tightly against the mother’s warm torso; its little mouth is latched onto an erect but pliable nipple as it sucks a warm, delicious substance that only enhances the child’s sense of safety and well-being. We have only to imagine the smoothness of skin against skin; the aromas emitted by bodies; the presence of a loving father nearby, holding the nursing mother in a warm embrace as she brings love and nurturance to their child. Here is a united trio of lovers and beloved.
Bonding means: - a mother anticipates her infant’s needs and responds before the infant gives any detectable signs of being in need.
Bonding, the connection of mother and child is an instinctual function, directed from and through the mid-brain, the emotional center, following the same form in all societies. It is like breathing and will manifest if allowed to do so. Only a natural birth allows bonding to take place. It’s hard to agree on what constitutes a natural birth, but for the purpose of this paper, bonding or attachment, needs to proceed from an undisturbed birth, simply with a minimum of interference. Bonding is an intuitive, extrasensory kind of relationship between a mother and child. It is a felt-sense, a knowing, not in language or the intellect. It bypasses the intellectual mind. The mother senses the infant’s need to evacuate the same way she senses her own need to evacuate. Bonding is biological and biochemical. Bonded persons connect on intuitive levels, through the mid-brain and from the heart. It is qualitatively different than a connection from the intellect. A bonded relationship has its center of operations is in the mid-brain, the seat of the emotional center.
Throughout all our writing, talks, articles and Blogs we have sung the praises of the remarkable partnership that can take shape between a mother and a child in utero, at birth, and beyond, and which is referred to simply as bonding. Here, bonding occurs via the route of nursing. The fact of the matter is that of all the elements in the bonding process, none brings mother and child closer together than this act. When a baby is hungry, a nursing mother is there with the breast immediately, without the need to fumble with bottles and cooked formula. Such instant gratification increases a child’s mood and sense of control over the surrounding environment, which sends the message that the world is a good and safe place; the world will provide and nurture— don’t worry.
The insistence that children be fed according to a rigid hourly schedule day and night rather than on demand seems cold and hard in light of breastfeeding’s affirmative benefits. Certainly, it appears to be of no help in bolstering a hungry newborn’s trust of its parents, who appear to withhold food on an arbitrary basis and who deny a child the calming body comforts that come with skin-on-skin, mouth-to-nipple contact.
As we know, on a somatic level the elements of touch, smell, and warm temperature trigger the flow of the hormone oxytocin in the mother’s bloodstream. Via breastfeeding, this hormone then passes into the child. Here, oxytocin begins to weave a complex, magical spell on both parties, increasing the mother’s sense of protection for her infant, reducing stress, speeding up the mother’s healing, lowering blood pressure and adrenalin levels in her blood, generating a pleasant sedative effect in mother and child alike, and triggering thunderous bursts of love and affection between mother and child.
Meanwhile, while oxytocin performs its wonders, the other principal birth chemical, the “mothering hormone” prolactin, kicks in around the end of the first week after birth. Prolactin goes to work immediately manufacturing milk, and ensuring that this milk is perfectly balanced with the child’s needs.
On the emotional level, prolactin stimulates a mother’s maternal instincts, relaxing her, promoting sound sleep, and causing her to bond more intimately with the newborn. The baby’s continual sucking stimulates further prolactin release, which makes more milk, which is then sucked up again, which then generates still more milk—the entire process turns the breasts into a perpetual milk-making machine that can be shut down only if the mother or the infant should have health problems or until the infant weans. All this interior hormonal activity is the mechanism that drives the suckling impulse and gives it such an emotional power as well as a physiological boost.
The Father’s Role and Nursing the World
When mothers look back at their breastfeeding years, many consider them to be a very special time in their lives—but it is important to remember that the father plays his part in the process as well, encouraging and nurturing the mother in her natural child rearing ventures. This is especially true if the father gives his unconditional support to the process of breastfeeding, doing all he can to help his wife in her endeavors to feed and otherwise help their child.
Indeed, a picture of partners and child is this:
The mother feeds the child (figuratively and literally) and the father simultaneously feeds the mother in a perfectly balanced and unending rondo. All three then spread the joy of this harmonious union to other members of the family, to their friends and neighbors, and, in some indefinable way, to strangers they have not yet met—for joy, like its dark counter force of despair, anger, and depression is infectious. Every man, woman, and child it touches is enriched and made glad.
Just as seeing a newborn baby with its mother will spontaneously brings a smile to your face, it is critical to realize that though breastfeeding keeps mother, father, and child healthy, bonded, and affectionate, there is another unsung and difficult-to-measure benefit to society at large.
Common sense tells us that men and women who have passed their infancy and childhood in vibrant mental and emotional health, bonded to both parents, and secure in the physical and emotional love of those around them will grow up to be well-adjusted, productive adults. A sound mind and sound body grow only if these patterns are set for children in their earliest days. This is how we help to create tolerant, creative, and caring human beings who will people and lead the world of tomorrow.
Breastfeeding, then, is one major way in which parents can help to fix the world.
