Protect, Promote and Support Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding.

How did the very foundation of life become such a triggering topic in the modern world?

Humans are mammals. The females of our species, like every other mammal, conceive, gestate, birth and lactate: it is a continuum.

For more than thirty years, supporting women to establish and maintain #breastfeeding so they can reach their goals has been central to my life. In 1984, I needed the wisdom and understanding of those who had breastfed to assist me in learning the skills of this natural process. Later, when my second and third babies came along, they brought their own challenges to overcome, building my knowledge base further.

Since 1992, I have been a volunteer breastfeeding counsellor and educator. The number of women I have met and supported on this journey must number in the thousands 😯 I have educated expectant parents, nurtured women in their postnatal period and guided them throughout their season of breastfeeding and early parenting.

In 2013, my own daughter gave birth and I was faced with a complex array of challenges to support her through as she and my granddaughter negotiated the early days. Today, she is breastfeeding her third child and has clocked up more breastfeeding experience than my own!

Yet every day in our parenting community, like some kind of groundhog day, we see the same lack of support, poor advice and inaccurate information jeopardising women achieving breastfeeding confidence. Rather than improving in my parenting lifetime, things seem to be worse. Additional barriers have been placed in front of them and support structures taken away.

I used to say, when my daughters were young, that they wouldn't need the same protection and promotion of breastfeeding, as the future world would be breastfeeding friendly after all our hard work. I was wrong.

Now I wonder: do I need to spend the next twenty or thirty years keeping my skills and knowledge up-to-date, so I can support my granddaughters to breastfeed their children when I am in my twilight years?

Mothers and babies deserve better than this.