Understand, Accept, Transform

Welcome to the First 100 Hours Family!

Several years ago, I embarked on a mission to create an innovative way to view the earliest hours and days of lactation; the first 100 hours.

I created a curriculum around it, and I have taught it to hundreds of people since then. There are many IBCLCs, nurses, and lactation support providers out in the world whose first exposure to lactation education was founded on The First 100 Hours Masterclass, and I am so proud of that.

Today I am launching this mission again in a new and important way: Free.

I want this way of thinking to become widespread and common and empowering.

I want to overhear people talking about it at conferences and see social media posts that educate new parents about it.

Over the years I have had a lot of feedback about the program/strategy, and the number one thing people say is that it tied things together for them.

I wanted to write a book, and if I had done that from the start, maybe it would have made sense. Today, though, it feels like a book might not reach as many people as it would have then. (I haven’t rule out writing a book, but I can’t say when or how that’s going to happen.)

What is happening: you’ll be reading, as long as you continue to subscribe (for free), about The First 100 Hours. There will be audio versions available for those who prefer to listen. It’s not going to come at you all at once; there’s no rush and no need to feel overwhelmed.

Occasionally I will make some additional, optional resources available to paid subscribers, things like PDF forms and checklists that go along with the main program. Possibly I will release some long-form presentations that way as well. Paid subscriptions are simple to manage, relatively inexpensive at $8/month, and discounts will be offered at times. (There’s a discount going on now for National Breastfeeding Month:)

Your support helps me to continue my own learning and then translate that into new resources for you - I’m getting ready to enroll in something new* today!

If you really don’t feel like you can afford to subscribe but you want those optional resources because The First 100 Hours program really resonates with you and you’re getting a lot out of it, just email me at christine@evolvelactation.org.

Supporting me by paying for a subscription is like a warm embrace to me, and another thing you can do to ensure that my work is supported is to Share my work with others. Tell people about what you’re reading, learning, and having feelings about. Bring them into the First 100 Hours Family!

Here are just some of the main sections or modules we will cover going forward in The First 100 Hours:

• managing common challenges of early lactation

• communication & counseling skills and techniques

• critical clinical skills for supporting early lactation

• Early Birds (late preterm infants)

• normal newborn behavior

• history of lactation support

• commercial influence on infant feeding & lactation

• educating others (parents, colleagues in other health care disciplines) about human lactation and breastfeeding

I believe that transforming the modern breastfeeding experience is going to take more than overcoming the huge structural barriers which have arisen. Things like the ubiquitousness of birth interventions and breast pumps, lactation product and infant formula marketing, the persistence of breastfeeding myths and medical authoritarianism, lack of lactation education in medical and nursing schools, uneven continuity of lactation care in communities, and more have created a challenging atmosphere.

But I also believe that returning the earliest hours and days of lactation to the physiological ideal can make a difference. Facilitating the first 100 hours to be a time where people can actually FEEL what breastfeeding, milk expression, skin to skin, and physical rest are supposed to feel like can be powerful.

Too often, we (collectively) overcomplicate it. That’s the point of The First 100 Hours. We can simplify it. We can make it a better experience that leads to better long-term outcomes for everyone.

(And if your role does not have you helping folks in the hospital when babies are born, don’t worry - this is absolutely still for you. Wherever on the road you are meeting dyads, you need this because it will help remind you how to help them find their reset button.)

Let’s start here.

I want to help you make a shift - or a series of shifts - in how you think about breastfeeding and lactation. That shift will allow you to provide more effective clinical lactation care and breastfeeding support.

Here’s why: several monumental changes have occurred over the span of my own lactation career. They have fundamentally changed how we do this work, what is required of us, and our potential to impact others.

Among them: access to the internet, the proliferation of products, devices, and supplements marketed to support lactation, legislative change in the United States which led to every birth making a parent eligible to receive a breast pump, and a global pandemic that confined people to their homes and reduced access to all types of social support and health and wellness care.

There are, of course, many other incredibly important changes which have occurred which are shaping our field and its future, and I’ll go into many of those as well.

But it is those major ones which most clearly define for me what is different today than when I first went from a breastfeeding mother regularly attending a breastfeeding support group to a student in a lactation educator course.

They have fundamentally changed the experience of breastfeeding and brought it to a place that demands innovative action. The First 100 Hours plan for improving early lactation outcomes is just that. It is based on existing initiatives and protocols, but it goes further and addresses more of the modern realities of lactation in Western societies and beyond.

The shift I am encouraging in you will also allow you to better understand and frame your own experiences around lactation. As you read - and this is a different kind of lactation training than you are probably used to - I will challenge you and ask you to engage with your academic, clinical, personal, emotional, and theoretical thinking systems.

While most lactation care providers that I meet have committed themselves to improving the environment and landscape in which parents pursue their lactation goals, they are primarily effecting that change through education, clinical work, and advocacy.

After spending the first part of my lactation career doing exactly those things, I have now committed myself to ensuring that we as lactation care providers, as well as others who are asked to provide support in conjunction with the other types of care and education they perform through other disciplines, have an abundance of tools and resources to scaffold our didactic knowledge acquisition, our growth as counselors and educators, and our own emotional well-being so that we can be healthy and resilient and continue our work for as long as we choose.

To be clear, I don’t believe the system is currently set up for that.

I have seen the many ways that lactation care providers can struggle with their entry into the field, their transition to clinical work from an education-centered practice, their ability to maintain personal boundaries and pursue a healthy non-working life when involved in work that is intimate and emotionally difficult for a myriad of reasons, their motivation to continue working on what can feel like an uphill battle throughout their careers, and their right to feel respected by others based on their work.

I think there are ways we can make the lactation career path easier to manage and integrate into people’s lives and into the culture of our modern world.

This Substack is my idea for bringing all of those needs together under one umbrella. It covers a lot of ground, including some broad clinical foundations, such as The First 100 Hours, ideas and proposals for improving existing structures in the way the field operates, and creative yet simple ways to make life and health better for lactation care providers.

I have had the privilege of speaking about lactation and the lactation career with so many people from many different settings, folks who came through all the various pathways from widely diverse other careers and backgrounds, people in different geographic regions around the world, people with economic resources to support their dreams and people who lacked them, people whose skin color or religion or number of children or relationship status or gender identity made entry into the field more challenging, people who came in when computers weren’t a thing and people who are digital natives who have been on the internet since they were children, people who breastfed their children and people who couldn’t - I could go on and on.

I love talking to people about this work, and I have always made it a point to take every opportunity to ask what brought people here, to hear about their passion or fascination with human lactation, to listen to them talk about how they imagine/believe it could be if we could just change X and Y.

I have had so many of these opportunities because I have worked and volunteered in organizations serving everything from local providers to national and international associations, and because when I go to lactation conferences, I spend my time outside of presentations talking to people.

I put myself in situations where I get to talk to my peers, and I encourage you to do the same.

When I have the privilege to be a presenter, the best part for me is actually right afterward when people come up to talk and ask questions and give feedback. I learn so much from getting people to talk about why and how they do this work, and I want to make it better for them - and for you, reader.

I want you to know how much it matters to the world that you do it.

I want you to feel like there is not just a skeleton holding this health discipline of lactation care together, but fascia, intertwined in ways that make you indispensable to the whole.

I want you to recognize when you could really use the support of your peers to get through something, and I want you to keep your eyes open for when you can be that support for your peers.

This Substack is for you, to show you what we can do together with some shifts in thinking about lactation and the lactation career path. I’m grateful to you for offering me your time and attention by reading. Let’s get started!

*Here’s what I am enrolling in today

**Here’s where you can join me on Instagram for even more First 100 Hours content (it’s also free)