Breastfeeding is tricky to talk about, but we must show support

New mothers don’t need your judgement on how they feed their babies, but if they do decide they want to breastfeed they need your support

Women who don’t get to breastfeed as long as they wanted to miss out on a lower risk of some cancers, including breast.

Breastfeeding can be a tricky subject to talk about. In Ireland, most new mums now want to breastfeed. Unfortunately, many of us don’t get the support we need to get started and keep going for as long as we want.

This might look like not enough practical help in hospital or at home, discomfort of others who aren’t used to seeing breastfeeding, or even outright criticism from influential people around new mums — including partners, grandparents, employers and society at large.

This lack of support has negative consequences for women, increasing their risk of postnatal depression, and it can lead to intense feelings of grief, guilt, or shame because they didn’t get to breastfeed as intended.

Women who don’t get to breastfeed for as long as they wanted to miss out on a lower risk of some cancers, including breast and ovarian cancer. This isn’t fair and needs to change.

It is also unfair to the babies that miss out on the benefits of better health, stronger immune systems, and better appetite regulation, helping them stay healthy throughout their lives.

More support for breastfeeding means a healthier population overall

Fewer babies and small children will get sick with painful ear infections, bad tummy bugs, or infections that cause them to be admitted to hospital.

All children deserve the chance to have good health and healthy babies lead to a healthier population overall.

It is unfair for society too because we’re all missing out on the benefit that women’s work in breastfeeding generates. If you are an employer, providing practical support for breastfeeding employees means women will be more likely to come back to work after maternity leave. Fewer kids getting sick means fewer days off work for parents.

It’s unfair to our planet too. Breastmilk is the ultimate sustainable superfood. It needs no packaging, no transport, no need to boil water for washing bottles and making up feeds.

Supporting women to breastfeed means lower carbon emissions. More support for breastfeeding means babies’ food source is still available in an emergency — including power cuts, storms, or flooding that can close roads and disrupt supply chains. This is good for all babies, reducing the demand for formula in an emergency. It makes it easier for families who rely on formula to get the supplies they need.

Breastmilk is the ultimate sustainable superfood. It needs no packaging, no transport, no need to boil water for washing bottles and making up feeds

So, how do we create an environment and society in Ireland that is more supportive of women who want to breastfeed?

An effective communications campaign is one way to help everyone to understand the value in supporting breastfeeding and how to help.

To understand how to create a good campaign, we brought together evidence on mass-media communications campaigns for breastfeeding in high income countries, including Ireland, to see what we can learn from others.

What have we learnt so far? This work has helped us to understand how campaigns that land well with the target audience are designed. The good campaigns listened to the target audiences, usually women, and their experiences of feeding their babies, and then matched the campaign with the things that mattered to women and their communities. 

Campaigns that got it right included the influential people around mothers

Usually this was fathers/partners, grandmothers, and sometimes employers. These campaigns showed how the wider family and society can support women.

Campaigns led from a health perspective only, emphasising the health benefits of breastfeeding or even the “risks of not breastfeeding”, were less accepted. Telling women that breastfeeding is best without tackling practical realities such as paid maternity leave, supportive workplaces, and support in maternity services and in the community can alienate the people a campaign is trying to communicate with.

One challenge in this work is being able to separate out the effects of communications campaigns, as they are often run as part of a package of other things such as investment in peer support, better practical information for mothers wanting to breastfeed, or improvements in government policy which will all have a positive impact.

Our next step is to understand how different audiences in Ireland think and feel about feeding babies.

Being a parent is hard work. New mothers don’t need your judgement on how they feed their babies. If they do decide they want to breastfeed, they need your support. We need to talk about how everyone can support breastfeeding by doing practical things such as offering to cook for the family while your partner/daughter/daughter-in-law feeds the baby, reviewing your workplace policies, and making it clear that breastfeeding is welcome in public spaces.

By being willing to share stories of breastfeeding, being curious and not afraid to ask questions, we can normalise breastfeeding as a part of everyday life for everyone’s benefit.

• Jennifer Hanratty is a researcher at the Centre for Effective Services, working with an international team to bridge the gap between the evidence on the value of breastfeeding and the implementation of effective and sustainable changes needed to make Ireland a supportive environment for breastfeeding. Jennifer is also founder of Breastival. The Maximising Support for Breastfeeding research programme is funded by the Health Research Board (HRB)