#346 | Your Breastfeeding Fears, Alleviated

Pregnant women often carry fears about breastfeeding long before their babies arrive — fears of pain, low supply, clogged ducts, or not knowing when to feed. After all, if breastfeeding is so natural, why do we keep hearing how hard it is? In this episode, Cynthia asks Trisha to address the most common concerns from the women in our community. We discuss why these fears are so prevalent, what’s actually normal, and how much of breastfeeding success depends on preparation, support, and confidence—not just luck. 

If you are worried whether your body will make enough milk, how to know if your baby’s latch is correct, or whether your milk will “come in” at all, this conversation will leave you informed, grounded, and far more at ease about what’s to come. You, along with your baby, can absolutely know breastfeeding success. 

Watch this episode in full video format on YouTube.

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Transcript

I'm Cynthia Overgard, birth educator, advocate for informed consent, and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Show. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

All right, Trisha, I'm going to ask a lot of you today, hope you're I hope you're on fire. Ready to provide information? Okay? We put out a question on Instagram asking women their biggest breastfeeding fears, and like sometimes, a dozen women said one single thing, so they're all worried about the same huge pile of things. So for this episode, Trisha, I'm hoping you can respond to many of them, but it's going to have to be a little bit of a quickie style, or else we're only going to get to two. Or I'm sure you have so much information for each thing that we're going to have to keep it kind of quick. You think I'm pretty good at that, but I mean, the good news is I'm really happy that people are expressing their fears around breastfeeding, because just like women fear giving birth, and women are willing to take a childbirth education course and learn about birth so that they can try to alleviate some of their fears, or go into it feeling unafraid of what is very natural and normal for their body. The same thing needs to happen with breastfeeding, and I can tell you this, if you do not learn about breastfeeding before breastfeeding, your chances of it not going the way you want are much greater, right? It really does take getting some education, and we do have these deep rooted, deep seated fears around breastfeeding that can be so alleviated just by understanding a little bit about how it works and how to kind of get off to the right start with breastfeeding, because like with birth, we are working uphill against society who just doesn't support breastfeeding, doesn't really create the environment to support breastfeeding and instills so many fears in us that work against our natural inclinations to make it work. Yeah, I'd love to make a comment about that, because when I was pregnant with Alex, I remember a co worker, and you might remember this story, but I remember one of my best friends at MasterCard said, Are you going to try to try to breastfeed? And I was so bothered. I felt so stressed at hearing a question like that, because and I responded accordingly. I said, No, I'm going to breastfeed. And in my mind, I was thinking, obviously, this is the most natural thing in the world, and it's going to go fine. And I don't want to even hear a hint of a possibility that it might not go fine, because just the very fear made me feel anxious. So I guess what I'm saying is I never would have imagined getting education, because I wanted so much to just trust in how natural it is. However, all through history, women sat around with their breasts out, breastfeeding with each other, relatives, friends, and we don't see breastfeeding at all typically, before we start breastfeeding ourselves. See, that's exactly right. We didn't need education before because you were educated constantly by your sisters, your friends, your mothers, your aunts, your whoever you were watching women in the village breastfeed. It was just the norm to grow up watching it, to be part of it, to be witness to it to see what mothers did when a baby was crying or fussing or refusing the breast. And now you see none of that. So you do actually need education. And your point is correct that it is a very natural thing. And many women go into this thinking, well, if breastfeeding is so natural, why do I even need to be prepared? I'm just going to give it a go. And so many women say, I'm just going to give it a go and see if give it a go and see if it works, and be although it is extremely natural, it is the most natural thing you could possibly do after your baby is born.

It is a learned behavior. It is a learned process. You don't just know how to perfectly latch your baby on. Your baby has very strong instincts, and you have very strong instincts, but those instincts are what get you started, and then you sort of have to refine and work on the process through learned behavior, and that's the part that we're not seeing. Nobody's getting that opportunity to learn how to breastfeed because they're not watching anybody breastfeed? Yeah, I think the biggest problem I personally had was that, in retrospect, I can say everything went perfectly, but I thought 10 Things weren't going right. I thought that it wasn't normal that my baby latched on about every hour of the day. I thought it wasn't normal that my baby would nurse sometimes for just a couple of minutes at a time. I thought I had low milk supply, when we now can pretty much ascertain I definitely didn't, if anything, I had over supply, even though it didn't look like it and it didn't feel like it, but I kept getting mastitis, and I very likely did, but my baby was getting enough, and I was so sure he wasn't. I was constantly anxious about it not going well. I just can't even believe no one even suggested I contact an ibclc. It didn't even cross my mind. And I just wish I had that session for someone to say, it's going perfectly, you're doing fine, because now I know I just lived with a ton of anxiety that definitely didn't help. I also didn't know when I started pumping that you get so little with a pump, and I had one breast.

That gave me almost nothing, and that scared me and made me reconfirm my negative belief that I had low supply. I just I was nervous for months and months and months. It really was not an easy journey, especially because in my family, like we have very big babies at birth, but then we get very, very small after birth and kind of stay small for a long time. So that didn't help things either. So if anything, not only to get education beforehand, to establish a good lash, but to know when you actually have one, right? Well, the benefit of getting education prenatally, about breastfeeding is that so much of what makes breastfeeding work easily happens in those first few days, in the first two weeks, and most women aren't even seeking support with lactation until many weeks down the line. So if you can go into it knowing the range of what's normal, and then what's a little bit outside the range of normal, then it's a lot easier to identify if you need help sooner. And the sooner you intervene in breastfeeding, the much more likely you are to successfully, comfortably, easily, happily breastfeed for the long haul. So breastfeeding isn't always easy. People really need to understand that it is not like a simple thing. There are a lot of twists and turns to it, and part of why it can be so complicated is because of the external noise in society that people are constantly being inundated with that throw them off course. So I always tell mothers the first rule of breastfeeding is that there are literally no rules. Like there are no rules you must follow. You must have some guide posts to kind of understand what's normal and what's not, and then you have to kind of follow your instincts and adjust and adapt on the fly based on what your baby is indicating they need. So when we are trying to conform to rules in society, or we hear all that pressure and that noise of like, Oh, your baby shouldn't need to eat that often, or how many times a day is your baby's going to feed? Or why is your baby so cranky? Or your baby should be sleeping longer, or if you hold your baby all the time, they're going to become spoiled. Like all these things are major roadblocks to successful breastfeeding, which then lead women to go into breastfeeding thinking that they are probably going to have a hard time with it, and they create a lot of fear around it because they see that most of the people around them have struggled with it or couldn't do it, or didn't have enough milk, or it hurt too much, or they didn't get enough sleep, or it was just too restrictive of their lifestyle. You know what this reminds me of? We did an episode in 2020 with a marriage therapist, Maggie O'Connor, remember that one and love that one? One thing she said that has stuck with me over the years is she said, in her world as a marriage counselor, she said, I wish if I could tell couples one thing, not to just come to me when they're on the brink of divorce. But what if you actually entered your relationship and had some kind of counselor, some kind of support to help you with communication or finding some little issues. This was her perspective, but I could imagine it, because she's always getting people when they're in crisis and they're fed up with each other and they're on the brink and they're blaming each other, and it's kind of like with breastfeeding, I bet, from your perspective, Trisha, you just must wish you could have gotten to most of these women a little earlier, rather than when they're in a crisis. And with breastfeeding, it's such a serious thing, because women in a crisis can't even go a few hours. I mean, they their baby needs to eat, so they're going to give up on it, or resort, resort to formula, which may not be necessary. And then you have some re teaching to do for these women, and you have to re establish their emotional trust in the process as well. Absolutely. I mean, women who come to see me 346, weeks down the line, they might require six to eight weeks of help and support to sort of get their breastfeeding back on track. And women who take a prenatal, you know, breastfeeding education course, or they kind of get the information in advance of starting their breastfeeding journey. I may not see them at all, or I might see them once, just to confirm that everything is okay. Well let's start getting into these fears that women have. And again, I know you're confident that you're good with quickies, but I also know the amount of knowledge that you have with all of these and it is not going to be easy. Here's what's hard about here's what's hard about answering breastfeeding questions. Is it is extremely individual, and one piece of breastfeeding advice can actually work opposite in a different woman. So sometimes when I start explaining, you know, giving an answer to a situation, then I kind of have to keep going and going and going because it's like, well, unless this is the case, or unless your baby is tongue tied, then this doesn't apply. Well, remember, as you go through these with me, that you are addressing the fear. So let's see if that helps you to feel a little less pressure about knowing any back these are pregnant women, and in some cases, they've already breastfed before. Like one of them that I didn't put on this list was, I'm afraid it won't go as perfectly as it did the first two times. So like, we're going to worry about everything, even when we already have a history of it going perfectly. But the most common one by far was painful and poor latch. So what do you want to say to women who are fearing a painful latch? Let's start with that.

Well, yeah, you should fear a painful latch, because a painful latch is not a good latch. Pain is our body's way of telling us that something is wrong. If you are enduring serious nipple discomfort during breastfeeding, it needs to be addressed. It needs to be fixed. It is not normal, and you and you you don't want to endure that, because your baby's actually not going to feed very well if the latch is painful. So fearing it, you know, I guess most women describe breastfeeding as painful, but that's just because they're not getting the right guidance on how to get a baby comfortably latched. A well latching baby, it's not painful. It's normal for it to be mildly to moderately uncomfortable, to experience discomfort in the first couple of weeks, mild to moderate that means like, yeah, you know, I don't love that feeling, but it resolves throughout the first minute or so of the feed, and then the remainder of the feed is comfortable. If you are sitting there with your toes curled and cringing and dreading the next feeding, then there is a latch problem, and you have to get that addressed. So I guess you know, normal to fear it, but also it's your guide. It's your guide to say that you need help and it doesn't need to feel that way. So you don't need to fear it, because there's a solution, and that solution is to get the right support and figure out why it feels that way, make the correction and then go on to breastfeed without any discomfort for the long haul. So as to the women who said they fear a poor latch, I know your response is obviously going to be to go get support, but I guess the question I'd like you to answer is, how can a woman know if she has a poor latch, her pain, oh, a poor life will necessarily hurt. Yes, your that's why pain is your guide to latch. So we shouldn't fear pain. We shouldn't kind of embrace it, because it's like, okay if it hurts, I know I gotta fix this. Okay? Because breastfeeding shouldn't hurt outside of that initial period of time where it's a little bit uncomfortable in the first couple weeks. Okay, yes, I remember that. Okay, all right. The next one is this woman is afraid about how to know when to breastfeed.

Yeah, okay, great. Forget the clock. Forget the clock. You have to learn to read your baby. Babies have an extremely reliable and good communication system around feeding. If you are willing to learn their language and relinquish the external This is where women get into so much trouble. They don't know how to feed they don't know when to feed the baby, because in their head, they're saying, What if I feed the baby too much? What if you know the baby's constantly on me, or what if I don't feed the baby enough?

But if you understand your baby's feeding cues, you will always know when to feed your baby. And if you keep your baby close to you and in contact with you, especially in the beginning, because we're really learning in those first two weeks, if you keep your baby skin to skin with you, you will never miss a feeding cue. If you swaddle your baby and put a pacifier in their mouth and put them in another room for hours at a time, you might miss some feeding cues. But if you are with your baby and present with them, your baby will tell you, and those feeding cues are pretty clear. Basically, if your baby's awake, you feed them. If your baby's licking their lips, you feed them. If they're crying, you feed them. If they're rooting, you feed them if their hands are growing in their mouth, you feed them. Newborn babies sleep constantly, so if they're awake, you feed them. For me, when in doubt, I offered the breast totally, absolutely. It's like the breast is never not the answer. It's always okay. Just offer the breasts if they don't want it, they won't take it, or they might take it for just a minute and then move on, and that's okay, okay. And very high on the list, again, from our responses, was cracked nipples. Cracked nipples are never normal. So yes, you can fear them, but also they are that guidepost again, that tells you that something needs to be addressed within the latch. So cracked nipples happen from a baby that's compressing the nipple during feeding. And if your baby's compressing the nipple during feeding, they are latched on not deep enough or too shallow, or maybe there's something going on orally with the baby that needs to be addressed. Oftentimes, crack most of the time, cracked nipples are simply resolved by positional changes. Getting a little bit of support and help on teaching your baby how to latch more deeply. If your baby's latching right onto the nipple tip, which babies seem to love to do, you're going to get a crack nipple, and you don't need to have a cracked nipple.

Okay, this one says having no time or freedom, totally understandable. But welcome to motherhood, no matter how that's right, your baby. And I would argue that outside of the beginning, which is intense, and it's a lot of work really, breastfeeding in the first two weeks is just full time around the clock, and really it's pretty intense in the first six weeks, but it's the most intense in the first two to three weeks, and then every week thereafter it gets easier. But I would argue that you actually have more time and freedom if you're exclusively breastfeeding your baby than any other method of feeding. Because when you're exclusively breastfeeding your baby, once you kind of get past that initial hump, your baby becomes so efficient at feeding, you can nurse them on demand, anytime, anywhere on the fly. You never have to remember bottles, you never have to remember a pump. You never have to remember formula. You never need clean water. Everything is right there, easy, ready and perfect for your baby in the perfect moment every time, you never run out of food. You never run out of food for your baby. I feel like, if I were a mom, I had plenty of times where I just didn't have a diaper when I needed one. I You don't expect it, you know. Or like you have to run to the car where you have a diaper bag or something. I feel like if I had been a formula feeding mom, I would almost definitely have a story where I was somewhere in a crisis without food. And that's a really scary thought, yeah.

And the other thing is, people worry about, well, then don't I always have to be home for the baby, or do I always have to be home by the three hour mark? If the baby is going to be hungry, how am I ever going to go out for a full day? I mean, once breastfeeding is established and you have a healthy milk supply, it's also very easy to pump and leave milk behind. So if you're going to be away from your baby for an extended period of time, you just pump milk and you leave it behind. Or if you have some pumped milk already stored, you don't even have to worry about pumping the milk before you leave. The baby just gets the pump the pumped milk that you already have stored, and then you pump while you're away to replace that milk. And then you never run out of this little stash of milk that you have. So you always have the freedom to leave your baby, because you can always give a breastfeeding baby a bottle of pumped breast milk.

Okay, milk not coming in, not coming in at all. It's extremely rare that a woman's milk would not come in at all. Like that is not something to worry about, because that just almost never happens. Okay, part of the issue here, Trisha is that women don't know how very long it can potentially take for milk to come in, especially in cases of a cesarean section. And what happens is they have friends who tell them, Oh, I had to formula feed because my milk never came in. And we don't know that those women only gave it two or three days in some cases. So why don't you address that timeline? Yeah, so the milk will come in. It's just a matter of how much it comes in, in the amount and when it happens. So babies are designed to go on colostrum for three to four days. That's it, when your milk doesn't come in till the fifth day. Now, babies are getting a little hungry, and many mothers do get their milk in on the fifth day, especially if they have had a lot of interventions in birth, if they've had a lot of IV fluids, if they've had a lot of medication, or if they have had a C section, they may have delayed onset of the milk production. That doesn't mean that your milk didn't come in. The milk is still coming in. And then it's a question of how much does it come in, and is it enough to satisfy and feed the baby in those early days, and a lot of that is influenced, one by birth practices, and two, by stimulation to the breast. So how much skin to skin, time you have with the baby, or separation? If there's a lot of separation or stress, for example, a baby who maybe has to go to the NICU, that mother might have a challenge with her milk coming in as abundantly as it would have if her baby were skin to skin with her immediately after birth and continuously, you know, through the first few days. So in that case, if we are dealing with any type of stress after birth, any type of separation between baby and mother, or a delayed onset of milk production, we need to actually be stimulating the breast with a hand pump, our hands or an electric pump, something to help encourage the milk to come in. But it's a really, really rare scenario that we don't have control over whether or not the milk comes in. I thought colostrum comes in until milk comes in, but it sounds like you're saying it full on stops coming in on day three or four. That's not what happens. Yeah, no, no. Colostrum will continue until your milk comes in, you will continue to have classroom it's just not enough for the baby. The baby's physiology is anticipating the milk on the third or fourth day they have brown fat, which they use as fuel in those first three to four days, and by the time they get to day five, they're kind of running out of those stores a little bit. So that's why we need the milk to come in by that time to then be able to give the baby sufficient energy. When is the soonest it comes in? Day two. Day Two, yes, next, this is, of course, extremely common, low supply. Women are fearing low supply. It's funny, not one woman said out of maybe 100 responses, easily, no one said over supply, which is really problematic, but yeah, they shouldn't fear it. They should fear right? But low supply, big concern. What do you say to the women fearing low supply? That was kind of a joke about fearing oversupply. It's just a misunderstanding that oversupply is a good thing because there are so many complications in feeding your baby at the breast that can happen from oversupply. If you're an exclusively pumping, bottle feeding mom, it doesn't really matter so much. But if you're trying to feed your baby at the breast, it's it complicates things, but yes, under supply much more common and a much bigger fear for mothers, because they hear everyone around them saying they just didn't have enough milk and not having enough milk. Again, it almost is never about the woman's ability to make enough milk. I will not say that's never the case. Some women have a condition called insufficient glandular tissue. It's a terrible term, and I really try not to use it. But some breasts are not fully developed. They are underdeveloped, and they have a more difficult time making milk quickly enough to produce enough milk for a baby. Women with this, women with insufficient glandular tissue, absolutely can still breastfeed, but they definitely need some guidance and support on how to build their milk supply. But most of the time, the vast, vast majority of the time a reason. The reason that a woman would not have enough milk has everything to do with how much the breasts are stimulated in those early days, which is something you have control over. So if your baby isn't latching well, then you need to use an external source of stimulation, your hand to hand pump or a pump to stimulate the breast. If you are feeding your baby at the breast sufficiently in those first few days, in early weeks, building up to a full milk supply by two weeks of age. It's very unlikely that you're going to have low milk supply. So low, low milk supply comes from usually delayed onset of milk production and under stimulating the breast in those first two weeks. Is there any way for a woman to know if she has IGT?

There are some clinical markers. And if you are doing a prenatal consultation, that might be something that a lactation consultant will even examine or talk to you about. But I really don't like to label women with that diagnosis, simply because, even if they do have it, they can still breastfeed. And if you tell them in the beginning that, oh, sorry, your breast seemed to have insufficient amounts of, you know, glandular tissue for milkmaking. I mean, what is that going to do for her psychology, right? Like a lot of this is about believing and trusting in our bodies and that we can do it. So I try to really not use that label too much. Okay, one more sort of related to this topic. We had a few women write in and say their concern is with their supply suddenly dropping either a when returning to work or B when becoming pregnant again.

So when becoming pregnant again is a bit out of our control. The body sort of does what the body is going to do. It depends on how old your breastfeeding baby is when you become pregnant. So if you're further down the line and your baby's on solid foods, it may not be such a big deal, and your supply can dip, and your baby may still be getting enough from, you know, other food sources. But if you're find yourself pregnant at six months and you're exclusively breastfeeding, you can't really afford much of a supply dip at that point, because the baby is still exclusively on breast milk, so you don't again, you don't have a lot of control over that. Many women do continue to breastfeed through pregnancy, and many, many women end up stopping because of the decrease in milk supply, or they start supplementing at that time because of a decrease in milk supply, a sudden drop in milk supply outside of pregnancy, like going back to work. It can happen for many reasons. It's usually recoverable, though. So if you have a very stressful event in life, a close friend or family member passes away, a move, even the stress of going back to work and leaving your baby getting your period back. All of these things can cause, sometimes pretty significant and substantial drops in milk supply. But if you recognize it early and it's not a chronic thing that's been going on for weeks, you can usually recover it pretty quickly through supportive herbs, extra pumping, nursing marathons with your baby, where you just get in bed and you nurse your baby for 24 to 48 24 to 48 hours, like non stop, as much as they want, you just kind of go back to, like the first two weeks, and do the skin to skin thing. And then I guess the only other thing I would say is that sometimes when parents sleep train their baby, you can lose your milk supply because our bodies are a little bit dependent again.

On the baby's cues, and if we are overriding those cues through sleep training, and now suddenly our baby is sleeping 12 hours a night, which is amazing, but it's really not good for your milk supply.

Okay, here is one that came in from several women. I'm sorry to say, I'm sorry they're having these fears, but it's kind of a double whammy. A few women said that they're afraid of having not only a traumatic birth, but a traumatic birth that will then impact their breastfeeding experience.

Understandable, understandable because they know, they know that birth interventions can influence how their milk comes in, when their milk comes in.

You know, separation, as we talked about, separation of mom and baby, a baby who needs time in the NICU because of a traumatic birth or something that is going to influence breastfeeding. So it's a very understandable fear. I think the only thing we can do with that fear is to get educated as best as we can on how to have the birth that we desire, control the things that we can we know we can't control everything in birth. We have to relinquish and surrender some of this, and if it impacts our breastfeeding, then just you know, there are ways to recover it. So I guess the fear, the way around the fear, is to understand that if something about your birth is going to impact your breastfeeding. If you have the right help and support, you can recover it. It doesn't mean that you won't be able to successfully breastfeed for the long term. It just means that you might need more help and support early on to get the latch right, to get the milk supply right, to kind of re establish whatever may have been interrupted by the birth experience. Okay, next several women wrote in CO feeding two and three of those several specified that they're pregnant with twins. So I don't know if the other women meant toddler. I don't know if they meant tandem feeding, which is feeding a toddler and a newborn at the same time, but I'm throwing them all together, twins and or tandem feeding fears. What do you say? I think meaning their fear is that they won't have enough milk. Yeah, that it won't work, that somehow it won't work. I mean, I think in the case of tandem women, are always afraid about the milk itself changing in constitution, and then, yes, for sure. You know, those moms with twins coming, you know for sure, on top of all the fatigue and work involved, they're always going to be concerned about the babies not getting enough. Yeah, they need a lot of support, because feeding one baby is a lot of work. Feeding two babies is a lot of work. And again, this is all really intensive in the beginning, and then it usually kind of sorts itself out and becomes a lot easier as time goes on. But your breast make milk in response to stimulation. So if you are feeding two babies, your breasts will make enough milk to feed two babies. If your breasts are being duly doubly stimulated, you can make enough milk for two babies. I mean, we know, I know many moms who are pumping enough milk for two babies because they're stimulating your their breasts that extra amount. So it is supply and demand. So if there are two babies, three babies, you your breasts will respond accordingly to the stimulation. So it's about getting that early and often stimulation, making sure that the babies have a good latch and that you're feeding them well and often enough. And then the other thing is, you got to nourish yourself. I mean, if you are talking about making milk for one baby, we're talking about 600 plus calories a day, plus, you know, extra water hydration. We're sleep deprived. We need a lot of nutrients. And if you're feeding two babies, you're gonna have to double that, right? Your your body needs a lot of fuel to make breast milk. Well, now you lead us to another one on the list, which is one woman who said, my fear is not being able to lose weight due to the higher caloric demands. Yeah. So I'm gonna say something that probably a lot, a lot of people will might disagree with me on but the less you eat breastfeeding, the less weight you're going to lose.

So because your body is smart and your body is intending to breastfeed for an extended period of time, it's going to retain more you're saying it's going, it is going to retain that fat to protect your milk supply for the long term. Wow, that's compelling. All right, bring out the ladies. So eat up more, and your body will be more likely to start to break down that pregnancy weight for fuel. But if you starve, and not starve yourself, but many women are under eating because actually a lot of women don't have a really healthy appetite, a really strong, vivacious appetite when they're breastfeeding, which is interesting, but it is, I think, just part of the hormonal shift. So you do really have to encourage yourself to eat, but don't let the reason to not eat because you're worried about the baby weight.

Weight, I promise you, the more you eat, the faster you will lose that weight. And you need to eat carbs, because if you don't eat carbs, you don't have the fast fuel that your body needs to make milk. And if you don't eat enough calories, that fat is going to stick around, because your body's like, we got to keep this milk waking up for a long time, so we're going to hold tight.

I'm very happy this one came in that's really interesting.

Okay this one I loved because I could identify with it, and it brings back memories of my first baby. When the baby gets a distraction, he would turn he would hear the slightest sound, I would see his eyes go from me to off to the side like he would. You could read it on his face while he's nursing, saying, what was that? And then inevitably, he would unlatch your nipple with you, while he would just unlatch and look away. And I would be like, No.

I mean, I just wanted complete silence. I mean, what? What do you do when those babies get distracted when they're a few months old? Yeah, this happens around four months, sometimes as early as three. It's usually passes by five, so it doesn't really last forever. It is a stage, but it is. It's pretty crazy how a four month old will pop on and off the breast practically 100 times a day. I mean, one feeding, they might pop on and off 20 times in a feeding, and you're up down with your shirt, up down, up down, up down. And this is one of the things that can make moms feel a little uncomfortable about nursing in public, because they're like, I'm constantly lifting up my shirt, you know, I'm constantly have my breast out. So if you have a very distracted four month old baby, it can sometimes be helpful to go into a quiet, dark room, lay down with the baby, keep the light slow, give them nothing to look at, because if there's a lot to look at and there's people around, I promise you, they're going to look I mean, in a lot of my breastfeeding consultations, when I'm working with older babies, I have to stay silent.

You know, I'm trying to give feedback to the woman and talk to her, but the second I say something, the baby's popping off and looking at me. It's their job to learn about the world around them. They're suddenly very interested in everything, and you just sort of have to be willing to just let them do it, or try to find that quiet space when you can. It's not realistic to do it for every feeding. But the good news is that a four month old baby is extremely efficient. So if you think that they have popped on and off 20 times and they've barely nursed for five to 10 minutes. They've actually probably gotten enough in that time.

Okay, many women wrote in that they are afraid of ending up getting clogged ducts and or mastitis.

Yes, so understandable. Again, mastitis is a real bear. You do not want to get mastitis, but it does happen. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be something that you have to go and get antibiotics for. So mastitis is a spectrum, and it starts usually with a plug duct. It's an inflammatory process. Most of the time it is not bacterial. Eventually, if it hangs around long enough, it might be bacterial, but I have a very proven remedy for mass early mastitis that works very well to prevent it from becoming bacterial. Mastitis, if you catch it early, and you treat it right away. The first most important thing you do if you have a plug or pain in your breast is you go to bed, you rest, you get in bed with your baby, and you stay there until you feel better. So if you have fever, body aches or chills, you must rest. You must treat it with anti inflammatories. So you can use cold compresses. You can use anything in your world that you use to treat inflammation in your body. Ibuprofen works great. And then you do breast gymnastics, or the the exercises of the breast, the breast physical therapy that helps to move the swelling and the inflammation out of the breast and allow the breast to heal. And then you just keep feeding the baby. You feed the baby normally. And as the milk moves through that plugged area, or that inflamed area, because it's not actually plugged, it's just inflamed that milk helps clear the inflammation, but it's really down, comes down to rest. Now, sometimes a bacterial mastitis just hits out of nowhere, and it is intense, and it's bacterial right from the beginning, and those cases require antibiotics, but that is so much less common, and I would say 85% of the women I see with mastitis can get over it within one to two days with the very simple interventions that I just mentioned. Okay, teeth. Yeah, not to worry. Teeth can obviously feel terrifying, because you probably feel your baby clamp down on your nipple from time to time to time with their gums, and then you imagine, oh my God, what's going to happen when they have teeth? Well, good news is, top teeth don't really do anything, because they're not actually holding on to your nipple with their gums. So when they're latched on, the top teeth are just touching the skin. They're not doing anything, and the bottom teeth are covered by the tongue.

Really.

So the only time the teeth get involved is if your baby intentionally retracts their tongue and bites your nipple. If they get mad enough, they just might. It's not even mad they do. It kind of out of play. Let me experiment. It's very hard for that not to feel personal. Yeah, it's not personal. It's never personal. But you don't need to fear the teeth, because they don't use them when they're breast. When they're breastfeeding. Okay? And the final one I want you to respond to is, it touches the heart.

A couple of women wrote the exact same thing. They wrote being a complete failure. Three women used the word failure in writing to us. So how do you want to address that?

Any amount of breast milk that you can give to your baby is success. Any amount benefits the baby even if they don't see it as a success. Because I know how we're hard on ourselves. The fact is, any amount does benefit the baby, even one day of colostrum, benefits a baby tremendously, tremendously, tremendously. If all you do is give your baby colostrum in those first few days, to me, that is a success. Yes. Do I want you to breastfeed your baby exclusively for six months to 12 months and have it all go perfectly well and be enjoyable? Yes, of course. And that's my job, and that's what I'm here to help people do.

But any amount of breast milk is a success. Yeah, I just want to say to those women, the word failure is just simply the wrong word, and that's why this is such a painful question, that that word is even in your mind. And women go through this all the time with pregnancy, conception, birth itself, if and when, breastfeeding does not work easily or work at all, which can happen. It has nothing to do with what a woman did or failed to do, and that's the hardest thing for a woman to believe she wants to take total responsibility, but please reframe that fear without the word failure, just hope and pray that it goes as smoothly as it can, that you have the support you'll need if and when you'll need it, and just remove that language, because any of us are going to feel crummy when we use language like that, when things don't work out The way we want in life. They're just things that do and don't happen. And it's not about failure and success. Many things are this is not one of those things. Yes, like in birth, the word failure is just it has no business here. It has no place here. In the same way that we want a woman to feel at peace with her birth experience. We want women to feel at peace with their breastfeeding experience, whatever that may be, and if you get help and support along the way, I promise you, you can find a way to be at peace with your experience, no matter how challenging or difficult your situation is. With the right support and guidance, you can come through the journey wherever it ends, and feel at peace and happy with your breastfeeding journey. 

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.