Breast feeding

On Monday I heard part of a program on the World Service about this topic: it was concerned about problems that cause mothers not to breast-feed. One contributor, commenting on the issue of babies not getting enough, which mothers fear, said that if you looked at babies of seriously undernourished mothers in Third World situations when breast-fed they looked healthy and happy "babies take what they need". It seemed like in a couple of sentences she had destroyed my basic hypothesis. You could imagine this caused me furiously to think!

The result of this thinking of course put things in perspective. She was not talking from a position of having worked with such mothers and babies as far as I could tell, and of course said nothing about the growth and development of these babies. Looking healthy and happy is an essential survival strategy for a new baby as various researchers have confirmed (see Hrdy, 1999). The survival strategy put forward in my hypothesis was not to put on weight and so become a burden. The whole point of weighing babies during their first year is to check they are putting on weight and growing appropriately. I think of the baby adopted by the nun (Loudon, 1993; see chapter 10) grossly underweight at 10 months old but still able to attract her commitment by his appearance and behaviour. He was only fed enough to keep him alive not to grow and develop as he would normally have done but still had the energy to survive. Once taken out of that situation and fed properly he obviously rapidly made up the lost ground. I can imagine a similar scenario of an underweight baby surviving a serious drought and rapidly catching up once the rains came. The comment did reassure me about one query in my mind when working on my hypothesis which was whether her mother's milk would tend to dry up under seriously adverse conditions and so availability of milk would be the regulatory factor. My guess was that it would not have and this seems to be correct.

In discussing the various, essentially mythic or neurotic, problems with breast-feeding -- can be painful, difficult, there will not be enough milk etc they were confirming all the time what I said about the essential problem, babies are no longer part of peoples everyday experience. Many new mothers in the Western world may hardly have held a baby before; I remember a friend talking of how nervous she had felt when she took her new baby home, responsible all alone for this fragile being. Babies are not actually that fragile. I can compare her situation with the female chimpanzee, reared alone, who did not know how to carry her infant correctly on her back because she had never seen it done. Shown a film of females carrying infants she immediately put her hand over her shoulder to adjust the position of her own. Quite a lot of the problem is that we are more and more distanced from the natural physicality of our being in Western society; the use of the term "touchy/feely" with pejorative overtones, as was common when I was working in management training, says it all.

But the piece I wanted to add to the discussion concerns the shadow cast on breast-feeding now by being breast-fed then. I had a client who talked about having given up breast-feeding her child because it was so difficult and when I related to this to her having been breast-fed by her appalling abusive mother she was so overcome with nausea at the thought that she had to terminate that session. Of course that was an extreme example but it indicates that a present difficulty for a mother who wishes to breast-feed her child and finds it hard may be caused by her own experience at the breast of a mother under stress. Checking with her own mother, or if this is not possible working at the issue with a councillor or psychotherapist might clear the difficulty. Sat 12th August.