Always ready for use, at the right temperature, it is the main food, the best you can offer your child to ensure excellent growth.

For the World Health Organization and Unicef, just to name a few, breastfeeding is a fundamental right of both children and mothers who must be supported and supported so that they can feed their babies in the most natural and healthy way. own children. Breastfeeding is also good for them: in addition to its essential emotional value, it prevents some forms of breast and ovarian cancer, and reduces the risk of developing osteoporosis. However, WHO data report that, globally, only 37% of children under six months are fed exclusively with mother's milk.

Bring and Benefits for Nursing Moms:

Reading the information brochure of the Ministry of Health on breastfeeding, I found a sentence that I really liked: "Breastfeeding does not prevent you and your baby from leaving the house and enjoying life" .

That's it!

I know mothers who, on the other hand, shut themselves up at home, or who in pleasant situations, such as a meeting between friends, would suddenly run away with their babies saying: "It's time, I have to run home to breastfeed him" . Such a pity.

Depriving yourself of your personal life by separating it from your baby in this way can become heavy, inhibit the continuation of breastfeeding itself and increase the risk of feeling frustrated.

Breastfeeding is natural and it is certainly not "scandalous", as are so many images that we are forced to see around us. Equally true is that everyone makes their own choices, which must be respected.

Forcing a mother to adopt this or another behavior is a form of violence that I don't think leads to much. Taking her by the hand and supporting her can be sweeter and more effective alternatives. There are support groups, where you don't feel alone and deeply understand how much good we can do to our baby by breastfeeding him.

Baby carriers are fantastic in this: they allow you to breastfeed almost without being noticed. When I used Mei Tai, I pulled up my collar and nobody noticed anything.

The benefits of carrying when the choice has been made/there is the possibility to breastfeed do not end here: the proximity of mother and child also increases milk production. We have already seen how much this little miracle happens with premature babies, and how the experts interviewed confirm that this also happens with full-term babies.

The vertical position assumed in some types of support also helps a lot in the case of post-feeding reflux.

(...)

After a good feed, babies often fall asleep exhausted and satisfied. In a baby carrier they will be ready to take a nice nap, relaxed and happy in their mother's arms.

Bring and benefits for non-nursing mothers:

Not breastfeeding can be the result of a more or less conscious choice, or an unexpected meteor that falls on you. And it can hurt a lot. Scientific literature, including the documents mentioned in the previous chapters, tells us that physiologically there are very few women "without milk". But we know well that being predisposed by nature to breastfeed is not enough to be able to do it. The psychological component also counts a lot in this area.

Even government policies, aware of all this, encourage help to the mother to facilitate the first breastfeeding.

Indeed, when a woman gives birth she can be very weak, live in a state of total disarray, be at the mercy of emotions, cry for no (apparent) reason.

All of this greatly affects milk production . For me, the sensitivity of a midwife who took me by the hand was precious. A colleague of hers, a couple of days earlier, had inadvertently risked doing the opposite: in those moments, very little is enough, one way or the other. Faced with my efforts with the breast pump (I felt pain but no milk), she turned around and in German — perhaps she thought she wasn't understood — she said to another woman: " no need to insist, this one has no milk ".

That sentence petrified me and hurt a lot. Furthermore, it did not help having to detach myself for several hours a day from my baby, fortunately a nice healthy bull weighing 4.5 kg, born however with a hint of jaundice which forced him to stay in a thermal cradle to sip for several hours of UV rays.

If it hadn't been for the loving care of my colleague, her drops of lavender placed on my pillow before bed, her comforting hug and lovingly encouraging me, I really don't think I would have made it.

I experienced a feeling of inadequacy for not being able to take care of my baby as I would have liked, mixed with a sense of guilt for not being able to feed him with my body. It was very painful. I am close to those mothers who didn't make it, equally loving mothers even if deprived of this experience.

Carrying can help, as the testimonies also tell us, when the desire to breastfeed has not been fulfilled. In fact, it establishes a deep contact that instills a lot of well-being.

Sometimes it can also happen that, although it started well, the breastfeeding experience has to be interrupted, and this new situation causes discomfort. Feeling close to your child can bring relief in those moments.

Then there are mothers who decide not to breastfeed, and this does not mean they will enjoy the closeness of their baby in the band any less.

(excerpts from: "Let yourself be embraced!", ed Trevisini).