A message from Siobhan Hourigan, National Breastfeeding Co-ordinator for the HSE to the members of Friends of Breastfeeding.

A message from Siobhan Hourigan, National Breastfeeding Co-ordinator for the HSE to the members of Friends of Breastfeeding.

Congratulations to Friends of Breastfeeding and all involved on the success of your many events during National Breastfeeding Week 2011.

I have been absolutely overwhelmed by the number of events organised throughout the country for National Breastfeeding Week. There is so much good will out there and so much interest in promoting breastfeeding.

The theme of National Breastfeeding Week this year was 'Breastfeeding Friendly', aiming to portray breastfeeding when out and about as a normal, natural part of daily life. That was certainly achieved by the Friends of Breastfeeding events.

To be honest, it felt a bit like 'National Breastfeeding Fortnight' this year as there was so much activity in the run up to the week! It was great to get so much media coverage the week before National Breastfeeding Week and it gave an opportunity to promote the events that were taking place. How wonderful to see Jolene, Maria and Maryline on television speaking about their breastfeeding experiences and really promoting acceptance of breastfeeding young children. We know the longer a woman breastfeeds the greater the heath protection for her and her child, so this was a really important message to convey.

The Friends of Breastfeeding Challenges that took place at locations across the country were a wonderful start to the week. My son and I really enjoyed the Breastfeeding Challenge in City West. It was a real fun, family day out. What an achievement that the Challenge events in Dublin and Cork were recorded as the top 2 sites worldwide, with the highest number of mothers & babies taking part. Over 350 mothers and babies took part in the challenge at 6 locations nationwide and Ireland was second only to Canada as the country with the largest number of participants.  Too often we hear in Ireland that we are bottom of the league as our breastfeeding rates are so low compared to other countries. It was very encouraging that Ireland could top the league of Breastfeeding Challenges. It gives great hope for the future, that we can turn the tide and that breastfeeding can become the norm for babies and young children in Ireland.

To all of you that took part in the events I hope that you enjoyed them and took something from it. Please keep the conversations about breastfeeding going. If you can inspire just one woman to think about breastfeeding what a difference we can make.

To Friends of Breastfeeding congratulations on all you have accomplished - all from hard work, dedication and huge voluntary effort. Thank you so much for the good work you do and the support and encouragement that you give to Irish families.

Best Wishes for continued success in the future,

Siobhán

What We Did

As of the end of Friday 7^th October, National Breastfeeding Week is over for another year and here at Friends of Breastfeeding, we’re delighted with our contribution to proceedings. There was so much going on, I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something, so here’s a summary:

To kick off National Breastfeeding Week, we co-ordinated the Irish leg of the International Quintessence Breastfeeding Challenge to have as many babies latched on simultaneously  as possible, across eight venues. Individual tallies were:
- Citywest with 146 babies
- Mahon Point with 145 babies
- Tullamore with 45 babies
- Limerick with 17 babies
- Galway with 12 babies
- Ballina with 6 babies
- Cuidiu in Kilkenny with 17 babies
- Babywearing Ireland in Dublin International Hotel with 4 babies

This gives us a grand total of 392 babies participating for Ireland and puts us in first and second place in Citywest and Mahon Point for biggest venues. We also ranked second in the World, for most mothers participating in the country, woohooo! Go us J

At the Challenge, we launched our breastfeeding video “Diary of an Infant” which tells the story of a breastfed child and their family, from birth to toddler and childhood. You can check it out here. 

We also initiated our campaign to have the current law, which gives working mothers an entitlement to breastfeeding breaks up to six months, extended until their child is two years old, to bring the policy in line with the current recommendations by the HSE and WHO to breastfeeding to age two and beyond. Mothers signed postcards for the campaign which will be sent to James Reilly, Minister for Health.

Many Maternity hospitals around the country had information stands to mark National Breastfeeding Week. Friends of Breastfeeding provided breastfeeding information packs and posters to the following hospitals:  Our Lady of Lourdes, The Coombe, The Rotunda, Holles St, Tallaght Hospital, Waterford Regional Hospital, Portlaoise Hospital, Cork University Maternity Hospital, Limerick Regional Hospital and Galway University Hospital. Our information packs were also provided to many Public Health Nurses around the country.

Our blog hosted a new guest post each day, proving hugely popular with contributions from writer and poet Nikki Magennis, writer Orla Shanaghy, dad of a breastfed baby Sean, writer Padraig O’Morain,  author Victoria White and former Friends of Breastfeeding council member, Jo Murphy.

We’d really like to thank lots of people who made all of this possible. There were lots of people involved, too many to name! We’d particularly like to thank the co-ordinators for each venue: Jolene Keating in Dublin, Annette Walsh and Maria Moulton in Cork, Sarah Sherlock in Tullamore, Laura Griffin in Limerick, Claire Kelly in Galway, Sinead Hanley in Ballina, Sue Jameson in Kilkenny and Tania Lawlor  for Babywearing Ireland. We’d like to thank Dr. Jack Newman and David Coleman for their video messages of support and Siobhan Hourigan, Angie Benhaffaf, Mary Bird, Vicky Mooney and Caitriona Jones, Mayor of South County Dublin for speaking at the Challenge venues and supporting the events.

A massive thank you goes to all of the people who took part in and supported all of these activities, the mums, dads, babies, toddlers, older children and extended family. With everyone doing a little bit, we can achieve so much.

For Friends of Breastfeeding, it’s onwards and upwards! We have lots more we hope to achieve by the end of this year, and even bigger plans for next year, so watch this space J

new mother story link

You might know Amber from Crappy Pictures about Parenting. She is hilarious and lovely.

She has a great guest post here  at Tucson Mama about the experience of nursing in public for the first time, and the joys of meeting Other Mothers. It's a lovely little tribute to both, I think.

My advice is Do This. It's a saviour.

by Maria Moulton

National Breastfeeding Week 2011

According to the calender, today marks the end of National Breatfeeding week.  For the last 7 days,  there's been a mobilization across the country to raise awareness of breastfeeding and the supports available for breastfeeding mothers in Ireland.  

From supermarkets in Galway to an IKEA in Ballymun, women have gathered together to nurse their children and meet other breastfeeding mums.  From a University in Limerick to a hotel in Gort they have helped to share information and dispell the myths surrounding breastfeeding.

On the 1^st of October, Irish mothers made history as they sat down to simultaneously nurse 392 children at 8 sites around the country as part of the Quintessence Breastfeeding Challenge.  Two of these sites, Dublin and Cork,  are currently leading the pack as the largest gatherings in the world.  Not bad for a country with the lowest rates of breastfeeding in Europe!

Today though, marks the end of it all.  Down go the posters and the fun Facebook competitions, away go the raffles and the extra special coffee mornings.  Today we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done and hang up our hats for another year. 

But what about tomorrow? 

What happens to the babies born next week?  And the week after that? 

This year in Ireland, approximately 75,000 babies will be born to mothers around the country.  About 55%  of these women will choose to breastfeed.  By 12 weeks post partum, the number of babies being exclusively breastfed will have dropped to around 19% and by 6 months of age, only 11% of these babies will be receiving any form of breast milk at all.  Of the 75,000 babies born this year, only 2.4%  of them can expect to be breastfed exclusively for the first six months of their lives as per the recommendations of just about every health organization on the planet.  

81% of Mothers who give up breastfeeding by 12 weeks of age will wish they had breastfed for longer.

We want to help these women feed their babies in the way they want.

  

So here at Friends of Breastfeeding we've decided to ignore the Calender.  This year our celebrations for National Breastfeeding Week are only the beginning, the beginning of an entire  year of celebrating breastfeeding.

Every day. 

Every week. 

We will do our best to try and be there for every mother who wants to breastfeed her child.  To provide information about the support services available around the country and to continue trying to foster a postive breastfeeding culture in Ireland.

Because for us, today does not mark the end.  Today, for hundreds of mothers and babies across Ireland, it's just the beginning.  And we want to be there to support them, every step of the way.

www.mammydiaries.ie
https://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=15535814031

Being a Friend

We have a lovely series of posts on the blog for this week, I think. But no one has submitted anything for today, so as I'm sitting here anyway, I'll pop one up.

I was talking to someone yesterday, about longer term feeding. She was comforted to hear I'd fed my son for so long (til three and a half) as she was already starting to get Comments from various well meaning friends and in-laws about the fact that she's still breastfeeding her eight month old.

So - a lot of people who don't have kids, aren't particularly delighted at the idea of breastfeeding, actively choose formula feeding - well, they do talk a lot about choice and how they don't want to feel pressured, and they'd never criticise a mother for breastfeeding, so please respect their choice to use artificial milk and so on.

And yet, despite the fact that people who choose artificial milk feel that breastfeeders have the moral majority, breastfeeding mothers seem to come under a lot of pressure all the same. Are you still breastfeeding? If it's that difficult, would you not give her a bottle? Isn't it time to stop now? When are you going to stop?

It can feel like a lot to counter, sometimes.

We all do think we know best about everything, though, I know. God knows I'm guilty of well meaning judgmentalism all the time - you might even say it's my default state.

So how to get your friends and loved ones to stop pressuring you?

I recommended a few tips - the same, calm, assertive statements over and over again, 'Thanks, but we're doing fine as we are', and some pointed vagueness.
'When are you going to stop breastfeeding him?'
'Ah, soon enough.'
I got away with that one for a couple years :)

If you really want to be supportive, ask questions. Mothers will be delighted to inform you. Hey, you could even go look stuff up, like most mothers do, to reach the conclusions they come to.

Also, unless mothers are doing something harmful like feeding their babies coke in a bottle, or toxic stuff, and allergens etc, I think the rule is to accept that people can feed their children as they feel is right - discuss things you've read, discuss your opinions, ask questions... but resist the urge to tell a woman you know better than she does when it's time to stop feeding her child. That's not so breastfeeding friendly.


*Pic from here. 

Following On...

 My baby turns nine tomorrow. She's like the stump of a tree with huge green shoots sticking out of the top of it – short and blunt but full of big thoughts.

She's fiercely independent, of course, like most girls, constantly demanding to be let do things by herself.

But she always asks me to get into bed with her for a chat at night. I always tell her she's the best little girl in Ireland and she always tells me I'm the best little Mammy in Ireland – though to tell the truth I am neither little nor particularly good.

But I did breastfeed her until she was four. I had four kids under three and a half. After the first difficult period when I used to feed her on the dining-room table to be out of reach of my two toddlers, the feeding was just so easy.

I never really thought about it. She could always be comforted. She could always be shushed. She didn't know what a doctor was and still doesn't.

She didn't get much attention but she did get the feeding. We had our little conspiracy.

I was told that, left to themselves, kids will wean at about four years and one month. That's when chimp Mammies calls it quits too, and firmly but gently end the feeding. Anyway, it was just exactly the right time for us to wean.

She remembers it all clearly. It's a furry little memory she strokes every now and then, and we have a conspiratorial giggle.

I think my three boys who got less feeding were pissed off, mind. I wouldn't like anyone to think it's all rosy in our garden. But now, as my baby's childhood streaks past and motherhood becomes a memory, I can only say thank you for the days.

by Victoria White.

Exploding Mums - breastfeeding in public

Some women have got unobtrusive public breastfeeding down to a fine art.

On a sunny afternoon in a quiet Dublin public house in the 1990s one such woman was breastfeeding her baby.

Her discretion cut no ice with an irritated man whom I had been doing my best to ignore.

A veteran of World War Two, he had nothing good whatsoever to say about modern society which is why I had been trying to ignore him.

Observing this woman and her equally discreet baby his eyes narrowed and he declared that "I saw things in the war, begod, but I never saw the likes of that."

This confirmed my view that his role in the war had been extremely peripheral but it also confirmed that a woman breastfeeding is viewed by some as the equivalent of an unexploded bomb.

What is it that objectors think will happen? Do they fear that the woman will, indeed, explode, showering innocent bystanders with mother's milk?

When I addressed this subject in The Irish Times I got an e-mail from a man who had been hemmed in, as he saw it, on a bus journey by a woman who whipped out a baby and began to breastfeed it.

So intimidated was he by this shocking turn of events that he was afraid to ask the woman to move so he could leave his seat when the bus got to his destination. He stayed on beside her in a state of discombobulation until she got off at the next town. He did likewise and paid for a taxi to take him back to his original port of call.

It’s extraordinary that the simple act of breastfeeding in public can panic so many people - even today we hear of women being kicked off planes and out of cafés for daring to breastfeed.

It's almost funny (though not for the women involved) that after all our sexual, technological, social and other revolutions we can still be startled by by the sight of one of the most natural acts in the world.

What a very, very silly species we are.

Padraig O’Morain writes for The Irish Times, The Evening Herald and The Irish Medical News. His website is www.padraigomorain.com