My advice to mothers is this: Listen to your hearts. Love your babies; hold your babies; read to your babies; sing to your babies; be there for them.
Ignore the advice of society’s control freaks. Nurse your baby frequently. Nurse your baby to sleep. Nurse your baby all through the night in your bed with all the proper precautions and recommendations set by the experts. Take your baby with you to meetings or shopping and to church. Take the baby with you to that wedding.
Be one with your baby. Stay attached. Remember that breastfeeding is a continuation of pregnancy. There are many similarities between breastfeeding and pregnancy, but the important one is the oneness a mother has with her baby. Society needs to protect this oneness. Our churches need to promote and protect this oneness. Our husbands need to appreciate its value.
It is encouraging to see a psychiatrist like Dr. Elliott Barker promoting and teaching the importance of breastfeeding to society, as well as to the individual mother with her baby. May we renew our efforts to do what we can to promote breastfeeding and to help nursing moms and their families. Let’s give our children that healthy foundation!
(The last four blogs came from a luncheon address given by Sheila at the LLL Eastern Pennsylvania Area Conference, October 2000.)
The Croatian edition of Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood is now available.
Sheila Kippley
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding: The Frequency Factor, 2008
Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing, 2008, classic edition
Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood, 2005
www.nfpandmore.org