Breastfeeding is one of the best gifts you can give your baby. Here are five tips for making it as easy as possible:

1. Be Good to Yourself — The frequency of feeds varies as your baby grows. Early on feeding may be very frequent. Later, your baby may not need to feed as often, but no matter the frequency, it can take a lot of moms’ time and energy. While breastfeeding, be especially good to yourself and realize that during this window in time the most important thing you are doing is caring for your baby. Everything else can wait.
2. Drink Lots of Water — This helps you make the amount of milk your baby needs. Before sitting down to feed your baby, fill a large glass or stainless steel canteen with water so you can drink while your baby drinks.
3. Treat Yourself to a Nutritious Diet — I recommend continuing to take prenatal vitamins while nursing and being sure to eat healthy amounts of real food – this is great for mom and baby.  As an added bonus, the flavors mom eats come through breastmilk as a wonderful way to introduce baby to a rich variety of tastes.
4. Take Advantage of Your Hormones – Every time you nurse, hormones are generated that make you drowsy after nursing and take a nap when the baby naps. You are not being lazy. You are taking care of yourself so you can take care of your baby.
5. You’re Not Alone — If you have trouble nursing, call an expert for help. A Certified Lactation Consultant is an invaluable resource. You might also want to connect with a La Leche League volunteer or an experienced family member or friend. Getting the encouragement you need could make a world of difference.

Unless they’ve been living in a cave, women these days KNOW that breastfeeding is better for their babies. They just do.

So why isn’t every new mom getting on the train to lactation station? Sure, some have had surgeries or other medical problems that preclude them from the task, but for most? I theorize it’s something totally different altogether…

Deep down, many women cannot disassociate breastfeeding from SEX.

There, I said it.

Don’t believe me? These are all actual quotes from my subscribers:

• “I just can’t breastfeed. I have been conditioned throughout my entire life to see breasts as nothing more than an erotic, sexual objects.”
• “I grew up as a Baptist in the south. My mother thinks that breastfeeding is disgusting, perverted & selfish. I’m sure she’s praying that I’ll fail [at it].”
• “The thought of having an innocent little baby sucking on my boob seems so sexual that it makes me feel dirty and perverted.”
• “When I told my boss I had to go pump, he said, “that’s disgusting, your baby’s gonna be a perv. Why can’t you just bottle feed like everyone else?””
• “My husband has a major issue with it. He had my breasts all to himself until baby came along and now he’s jealous!”

People don’t like to talk about this particular issue; it’s awkward, personal, icky.

You’re much more likely to hear a woman say something like “my breasts belong to me and are not for sharing.” Ok, fair enough… but what’s really going on is something deeper.

Shameful, yet… verrrry sexy

Breasts connote two things in America: shame and S-E-X.

As girls growing up, we are taught to always hide our breasts. My friend Ashley laughs as she recalls what her mom taught her, “Later on, all the boys will try to touch them. Don’t let them. They are your PRIVATE parts.”

Any mention of milk? Sustenance? Feeding a baby, errrr… anything like that? Nope.

Janet Jackson has a costume malfunction and OH MY GAWD, we’re never letting our kids watch the Superbowl ever again! That was one powerful nipple.

And boobies take center stage when it comes to sex appeal in the media. I don’t think you need any convincing on this point. Just look at any billboard or magazine.

So it’s no wonder that some women are aghast when they are confronted by the concept of “shoving their fun bags into their baby’s mouth”, as one reader described it.

For nearly everyone else in the world, boobs really aren’t a big deal. Ever seen a Hooters in Spain? No way.

Sadly, something has been lost in this country. We must re-brand the breast in America.

Your Turn, Hollywood

Whether we like it or not, we are deeply influenced by what we see in the media. When is the last time you saw a woman breastfeeding in a movie, TV show, or commercial? Probably never.

However, we’re now seeing celebs coming out in support of the cause.

Let’s hope these displays of support help us reach the tipping point of acceptability in the mainstream culture.

The Full Picture

Recent research has revealed new benefits to breastfeeding – namely, reduced rates of cancer in baby AND mom.  Who knew?

So, in celebration of Breastfeeding Awareness Month, I present this infographic on Breastfeeding in America. This is NOT about shaming women who formula-feed, it’s about education, moral support and de-stigmatizing. For many, it’s simply about overcoming fear.

Interestingly, babies tend to suck more vigorously when a new flavor is introduced into their mothers’ diet (even if the mothers don’t notice the change in nursing, researchers can measure it). The babies’ bodies seem eager to learn new flavors. When that flavor has been repeated a few times, nursing returns to normal, suggesting that babies have indeed learned the new flavor.

Though the ability of breast milk to provide babies with exposures to a series of specific flavors is exciting, perhaps even more exciting is the ability of the variety of flavors in breast milk to help kids be more accepting of vegetables in general.

One interesting study looked at breastfed babies versus exclusively formula-fed babies and how quickly they learned to enjoy their first pureed vegetable. The babies were given either peas or green beans every day for ten days. Both groups of babies could learn to like the veggies with repeated exposures. But the breastfed babies learned to like them faster, even though their mothers hadn’t focused on either of these flavors during nursing. And after the full ten days of the experiment, the breastfed babies still tended to eat more of the veggies than did their counterparts with limited flavor experience.

Learn more in Feeding Baby Green Chapter 6, The First Months
Sullivan, S. A., and Birch, L. L. “Infant Dietary Experience and Acceptance of Solid Foods.” Pediatrics, 1994, 93: 271–277

Hours after Alex was delivered by C-Section, I lay gasping on a hospital bed still trying to comprehend how I’d been flayed like a cod fish and robbed of the precious living cargo that had roomed within me for nearly nine months when the nurse arrived with my newborn and jammed his mouth over my tender nipple like a woodsman firmly planting an axe.

On his first “latch”, Alex’s bite force felt like the “lethal banana teeth” of a freshly hatched T-Rex.

I’m sure people on the street heard my pitiful scream as I waited for the visual fireworks of agony to subside. This new brand of post natal torture pumped up the volume on my synaptic receptors with a violent suddenness that left me an octave short of leaping for the window ledge.

Mercifully a ministering angel arrived in the form of lactation consultant Marianne Brophy who floated into the room with the soothing reassurance of a Red Cross nurse at the Battle of the Mammaries.

Her almost supernal wisdom in the ageless bonding of mother and child and gentle, expert guidance marked a milk-shed moment in my life as a mother.

I was later to learn that I was far from universally singled out for lactating greatness. Midlife moms are cutting a distinguishing swathe in the nursing business.

With looming menopause, and feminist backlash against breastfeeding, you might assume that fewer midlife moms (having been weaned on the feminist equal rights ethic) would nurse.

In fact, the opposite is true.

According to a recently published survey from the Public Health Agency of Canada, new moms over the age of 40 are more likely to nurse than the average mother—over 90% initiated breast feeding between 2007 and 2008.

It supports the old adage that age begets wisdom. (Or, rather, is it determination being begot?)

From vital colostrum (packed with antibodies) to enhanced bonding through hormone-stimulated receptivity to baby’s cues, it is widely acknowledged that nursing nurtures wellness to wellbeing.

But the long arm of nursing reaches even further, extracting the gold standard of post natal wellness from the baby teeth of scientific research. A 2007 California study showed that, although women giving birth after 35 are at increased risk for breast cancer, this applied only to those who did not breastfeed.

However, for moms in front lines on the maternity wards, the end of a day’s hard labor inspires only common sense. Equality is a social issue that can be defended and fought for in the cloisters of academia or in HR departments, or in feature articles that generate controversy and media hype.

In the meantime, while the “to feed or not to feed” debate rages, almost every mother will give her kid the elixir of life if she possibly can. Hands down.

Brophy highlights the need for a stronger infrastructure supporting onset of nursing (a most tender and vital beginning) in hospitals and maternity care facilities. Health professionals need to be teed up on the tricks of the trade, in order to grasp the fleeting opportunity for success.

However, there is still a tide of social censure on breastfeeding mothers and this is compounded with midlife moms—the whole idea of granny-aged nursing moms flies in the face of the popular dewy-eyed Venus-de Milo-style-image of a young mother with her baby at the breast.

And this further puts us at risk of making the lame assumption that any challenge to nursing for over 40 moms must be due to age.

Lisa Cohn, a fifty-two year old mother from Oregon who is currently nursing her 15 month old son may be a case in point. Cohn, who had her first two children at 31 and 41 by vaginal delivery was “overflowing with milk” following those pregnancies.

However, when she gave birth to her third child by Caesarean at 51, it was hard getting started and the baby slept a lot. It took months of working with a lactation consultant before they could go with the flow.

Cohn, an author who specializes in parenting and environment, wasn’t sure if the problem was caused by her being an older mom.

Marianne Brophy argues that age has no bearing on our ability to nurse. “Interventions such as caesarean section or labor medications may cause mother and baby to get off to a slow start” she says.

In the end, Mother Nature presides over birth and nursing with her system of checks and balances that have been in place since the beginning of humanity.

Once a woman has conceived and given birth, what’s age got to do with it?

Asthma in children is increasing around the globe. It’s not unusual for it to be a country’s number one reason for a child to be hospitalized. Researchers from Australia (a continent where asthmais the leading cause of childhood hospitalization) have completed an important, long study.

They followed over two thousand children from birth until the children were 6 years old. Their findings were published in the September 2004 American Journal of Public Health. The researchers defined asthma in the study as doctor-diagnosed asthma with wheezing still present within the final year. The key finding was that even after taking into account exposure to tobacco smoke, prematurity, gender, gender infection history, and asthma in the family, breastfeeding offers significant protection against asthma. Specifically, every additional month of exclusive breastfeeding (by which they meant no formula – not no solids) resulted in an additional 4 percent decrease in the chance of developing asthma. In addition, breastfeeding protected against eczema. The study also showed that overweight and obese kids had a higher chance of getting asthma, as others have found previously.

Many studies have demonstrated a variety of benefits from breastfeeding, including lowering the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The first study linking breastfeeding with overall lower infant mortality was presented at the Pediatric Academic Society meeting in San Francisco on May 2, 2004 (Dr. Benjamin’s Spock’s birthday). Most babies do well however they are fed.

But, an analysis of 8944 U.S. babies demonstrated that those who were breastfed had a 21 percent lower chance of dying for any reason during the first year. Detailed results of the study appear online in the May, 2004 Pediatrics.

The longer children were breastfed, the greater the effect.

In the study, the risk of death from SIDS was reduced by 16 percent in breastfed babies; the risk of death from injury by 31 percent. The good news is that among non-breastfed babies in the U.S., age one month to one year, about 997.3 out of 1000 will survive. Among those who are breastfed, about 997.9 will survive.

The 0.6 per 1000 difference seems small, but with about 4 million babies born each year, this difference would be about 2,400 babies lives in the U.S. alone. Around the world, 132 to 135 million babies are born each year . 97 out of 100 babies are not born in the U.S.

On May 3, 2004 the estimated U.S. population is over 293 million. But the world population is 6.4 billion. More than 19 out of twenty people in the world do not live in the U.S.

Encouraging breastfeeding is an important part of improving children’s health around the world.

The longer that children breastfeed, the less likely they are to wheeze when they reach their first birthdays, according to a study published in the October 2003 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The researchers followed 243 mother-baby pairs for 12 months. They measured a number of active compounds in the breast milk. Levels of transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta1 were the most closely related to protection against wheezing. This active growth factor seems to account for at least some of the protective effect of breast milk against wheezing.

Breast milk supports the development of a healthy immune system in babies. Breast milk is an amazingly complex fluid, and we continue to learn more about its many properties. The more we learn, the better we understand how babies are designed to grow – and the more we appreciate that breast milk is a precious gift.

Dr. Greene’s Answer:

It sounds like your pattern is working very well for you and your son. The main reason that people recommend against feeding right before sleep is to protect the teeth from cavities, but cavities from nighttime nursing develop very, very slowly.

Sometime before he is 18 months it may be important to try to keep him awake for 20 minutes after his last feeding or to give him a little bit of water right after feeding, but at 8 months, it sounds like you have come up with a great solution for your family. For most kids, 8 or 9 months old is the most difficult age for sleeping. This is not a good time to interrupt something that’s working so well!

Dr. Greene’s Answer:

With breast reduction surgery, if the nipple is moved it severs the connections to the glands and afterwards nursing is exceedingly unlikely. But if the nipple is protected, most women can breastfeed well, even if a lot of glandular tissue was removed.

I recommend a meeting with a lactation consultant when possible. They can be so helpful at getting nursing going.

Dr. Greene’s Answer:

As a dad, I sure loved those special times that I got to feed pumped breast milk. There is no one right amount to feed babies, but there are some good rules of thumb. Most newborns take two or three ounces at a time, and by 4 weeks the average amount has gone up to four ounces.

But in real life this may vary quite a bit from day to day and from baby to baby. It’s best to stay flexible and to let your baby set the amount. You don’t need to coax him to finish a bottle or stop him if he still acts hungry. Babies are born with a wonderful, sophisticated mechanism that prompts them to eat until they are full and to stop when their nutritional and fluid needs are satisfied.

If babies consistently take more or less than expected, it is smart to run this by his pediatrician to be sure this is a healthy amount for them.