(I Am) All About Early Lactation Care

since 2014

In the making since 2014, my book about early lactation care in the first 100 hours of baby’s life is now available.

This is what I do: I’m focused on early lactation care. I’ve watched my colleagues spread their wings and specialize into all kinds of beautiful, interesting focus areas that make a difference for their clients, and I have stayed here in hospital/early lactation land.

I’m not an expert in tongue tie. I don’t have all the latest on specific herbs that can support lactation. I am not the person you call when your client needs a referral for low milk production support when their baby is 5 months old. I do not have any additional certifications in other disciplines other than childbirth education.

I am a get-things-started-in-the-best-way-possible lactation consultant. I know the Ten Steps and how they can be implemented in a hospital environment. I am a how-to-get-back-on-track-when-your-first-few-days-were-awful lactation consultant.

I am fascinated with the how: how things can go off the rails so quickly when it comes to lactation. I look at breastfeeding initiation data local to me and I think “How is it even possible that more than half of these babies ‘need’ formula in the first 24-48 hours of life?”

I hear the questions new mothers and parents are asking and I can’t help but think “How can people still be receiving such inaccurate information from nurses and doctors?”

I talk to my lactation colleagues and hear them lament that hospitals in their communities are “baby-friendly” in name only.

I want to fix it all. I’ve always wanted to fix it all.

Too often what I see is that folks are looking at the early postpartum experience in terms of how it affects just one of the people. The First 100 Hours brings it all back to what is going to benefit both people, and it can be a hard pill to swallow for some.

If I had written and published this book in 2014, it would be such a different book.

Of course, 10 years of experience has given me new insights and there’s been new research, but…

so very much has changed about the landscape in which new parents are beginning their lactation journeys.

The proliferation of products and tools that claim to serve breastfeeding and milk production, a worldwide pandemic, heightened awareness of health inequities and outcomes, widespread access to information and connections with people via the internet, and so much more.

I know people say this all the time, and that’s because it’s true: the world is changing so rapidly. (Faster than ever before? That’s debatable, but it’s not my point.)

Some things stay the same, though. The earliest hours of life and breastfeeding require the same things they did 1000 years ago.

So you could say, well, why do we need a book about it then?

It’s always useful to put that basic, age-old information into a modern context.

It will help you be a better educator about lactation. In modern terms, you’ll be a better “explainer.”

It will help you be a better source of support to the other health workers in your sphere of influence.

It will help to shape how you provide prenatal lactation education to expectant folks going forward.

It will help you create content for social media that is focused on what people actually need to know about lactation and how to optimize it to achieve their own goals.

It will help you be a better lactation care provider to your clients when you are able to mine their earliest experiences to help elevate what they have already learned and what they do well.

It will remind you why you got interested in this work in the first place.

The First 100 Hours approach focuses a human-centered lens on both individuals in the dyad and prioritizes their earliest experiences together in a way which defines health as recovery from the birth experience, critical early immune protection, and optimization of the capacity for breastfeeding and milk production.

The book’s title is

evolving the modern breastfeeding experience:

holistic lactation care in the first 100 hours

and I can’t wait for you to become part of this movement to make early lactation care better!

We can do it - we can improve early breastfeeding rates, early exclusive human milk-feeding rates, and breastfeeding duration. We can make the whole experience better for everybody, inclusive of all feeding plans and medical needs. Are you in??