How you are feeding your baby is one of the first questions you get to consider as a parent. We know that answer is complicated by sooooo many things, including your family, personal health history, cultural preferences & biases, employment, childcare situation, etc. Even if you have all these things working in your favor, sometimes challenges can still arise for people that want to feed their baby their own milk. As doulas, we know that the personal decisions you make about feeding your baby are yours to make, and as with all things, we’ll talk to you about ALL the factors to help you come to your own decision about what is right for your family.
As a first time parent I personally don’t feel like I did enough to prepare myself for breastfeeding. Yes, there are many skills and ideas that are helpful to know even exist before you meet your baby. In a very uncharacteristic-of-me move, I basically read a few things and thought, “Meh, how hard can it be?” Bwahahahahahahaha…enter my oldest child with tongue ties & a partially retained placenta that wasn’t caught for WEEKS and somehow I became a medical marvel for not being septic and still actually producing any milk at all with a tennis ball sized chunk of placenta hanging out for 7 weeks causing me to continually bleed. Whew, ok, apologies for dumping that there, but seriously, learning about feeding your baby is a great gift you can give yourself, no matter how you choose and/or are able to do it.
Resources to Know for Feeding Your Baby
Feeding your baby is something that many people take for granted, and we really wish they wouldn’t. We’ve seen so many people struggle yes with feeding issues, but also with mental health issues because of the expectations they had for the experience of feeding their babies not meet the reality at all. The truth is that breastfeeding/chest-feeding/body-feeding can be challenging. Knowing some resources to help you with the practical skills and who to listen to when it comes to actually helpful evidence-based advice laced with ZERO shame can be one of the biggest challenges. We know, because we’ve been there. Below are a couple of our favorite people to learn from about feeding babies: Dr. Amy Brown & Dr. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett
Learn and practice all you can when it comes to feeding your baby. Know that if you have extra milk or are looking to feed your baby human milk, there are peer to peer milk sharing groups like Eats on Feets that you can contact. (We also can sometimes help with that too.) Human milk is amazing stuff, full of all kinds of living bacteria & things that you can’t really ever duplicate in synthetic form. That is not to say that formula is evil in any way, only that human milk is the ideal food for your baby. There is ZERO shame in using formula, my children most definitely had it and I’m sooo glad it exists AND that we are hopefully on the tail end of this shortage due to the pandemic. I always just hope that people are being taught the safe way to prepare powdered infant formula! The point is this: learn what you can and prepare to give yourself the time and space to practice the skills required for feeding your baby. Those are skills that both you AND your baby need to learn, so even if this is your 5th child, your baby is still new here. With time and patience, I promise you’ll get it all figured out just in time for your baby to have a growth spurt and the process of re-learning to start all over again. Developing your resource list of where and who to turn to when you have questions now will pay off dividends in the sleep deprived and sometimes frustrating times with a newborn.
