Two years ago I conducted a survey of 155 mothers who gave (or had given) breastfeeding to their children for a long time with the intention of know which people around them supported them and who criticized them.
The question was very simple, the mothers had to mark, together with the indicated person, if they supported their decision to breastfeed their child for a long time or if on the contrary they did not agree with that decision.
The people they were asked about were: the husband or partner, friends or neighbors, the mother, the mother-in-law, other relatives, the midwife, the pediatricians, the nurses, the doctors or gynecologists and others.
In the first instance, I simply wanted to assess the mother's closest environment, however, given that many mothers had been saying that during medical visits they received little support and some criticisms of breastfeeding I wanted to include several medical professionals to see what their behavior was.
What is prolonged breastfeeding
At the time of the survey I defined how prolonged breastfeeding the breastfeeding of a baby beyond 12 monthsHowever, mothers with smaller babies also responded, since for many breastfeeding more than six months it is already too long to breastfeed (and for some the cut is even earlier).
The most correct, probably, would be talk about prolonged breastfeeding when the child is over two years old, since two years is the goal that WHO considers to be suitable: “exclusive breastfeeding is recommended during the first 6 months of the child's life and continue breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary meals until 2 years of age or more".
In any case, the definition after all was not too important and those answers were also considered valid, since if a woman receives criticism from a person when her baby is seven months old, she will surely receive them from the same person when she has fourteen, for example.
Results
We can observe the fundamental role of husbands or partners in breastfeeding support, since the role of the nursing mother depends largely on the direct comments of the closest people. Mothers also support in large numbers and are the ones that offer less criticism despite the fact that 30 is not a negligible number. Mother-in-law offers more criticism and less support than mothers.
As for health professionals, children are often visited by several pediatricians and nurses, so there were more cases in which mothers pointed to support and criticism. There was also the case of having received support at first but critical after breastfeeding was prolonged.
Conclusions
It is common for people to show their opinion about behavior that they consider unusual. A brief comment can be taken as a criticism and sometimes what should have been a brief comment is a full-blown criticism.
By this I mean that there is little to say about the family and acquaintances because they will probably continue to do so (so we are the Spaniards, that we usually talk when we have to shut up and we usually shut up when we have to talk), but much must be said about healthcare professionals. It's quite outrageous to see that 70 mothers received criticism from nurses and 56 from pediatricians. It is true that in general there are more supports than criticisms, but in health professionals who must make a prevention and promotion of health such amount of criticism is inadmissible (in fact any criticism of a behavior or food that is beneficial for Health).
To be continue…
After seeing that the number of criticisms by health professionals was quite high I wanted to know what kind of criticism were the ones they received, so I asked them about it. You can read it in Babies and more in the next few days
