Why "Evolve Lactation"?

Simplifying, shifting, leaning in to a bigger purpose

This is what I do now. I write. All the courses, workshops, products, and memberships I’ve offered in the past are now complete.

Substack is my home base. I’m writing here. Everything else felt confusing and too spread out for me to manage on my own.

Here, I can teach, document what I’ve learned, share, inspire, coach, and so much more. Whatever is on my mind will land here.

I imagine I will write most often and occasionally record podcasts - but it will all be right here through my Substack.

It makes sense to streamline and simplify now by shifting fully into writing mode because I am also writing a book. I can grow my audience - with your help if you’ll be so kind as to share this with friends and colleagues - in a creative new way on Substack.

{Because sometimes people ask: the rest of my work life consists of my work with GOLD as an Education Planner, lactation speaking engagements (virtual and in-person), managing the social media accounts for Baby Café USA and Baby Café Bakersfield, and some clinical lactation work. Paid subscriptions here to my Substack will also help support me!}

If you’re new here, welcome. If you’ve been around, great to see you. I’m so glad you’re all here for the ride!

I’d like to introduce some of the concepts that make up Evolve Lactation, which is essentially my philosophy of lactation care.

Part 1 (Clinical)

Over twenty years of practicing and teaching lactation care in multiple settings, in different roles, with a diverse range of education and experience have led me to build my own philosophy of lactation care. As I have evolved, so has my practice. Here’s a little bit of my Evolved Lactation Care framework.

Evolved Lactation Care is about understanding the spectrum of impact of a strategy or technique - the good and the bad for both members of dyad. We need to understand, acknowledge, and account for all of the potential impacts of any intervention. No intervention is benign, and many interventions have both intended and unintended impacts. Being an IBCLC requires that you can evaluate an intervention’s potential positive AND negative impacts; it requires one to look at it from many angles.

Creating barriers to exclusive breastfeeding causes harm in ways that many people never even consider.

Strategies (this can include infant care strategies, lactation care strategies, sleep training strategies, etc.) which disrupt the synchrony and balance of the dyad are harmful to lactation and cause people to minimize or abandon their own feeding goals. Infants and their parents and families all deserve to grow together and to develop in healthy ways, and normal development requires attachment and bonding. We must remain fully informed so that we can assist families in understanding how to avoid interruptions to those attachments and developmental needs.

In ways that are not as clear or obvious in other health disciplines or health behaviors, it continues to be true that healthcare professionals do not comprehend how their own lack of knowledge about breastfeeding and lactation actually impacts families. Guessing, directing people to “just look it up online,” or suggesting what you did when you were breastfeeding - these are not professional lactation care methods, yet families describe to us each day how they were affected by these types of behaviors by everyone from physicians to nurses to chiropractors to osteopaths and beyond.

Lactation and breastfeeding are treated as a topic that everyone thinks they know enough about to be an expert, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Families benefit when a diverse range of lactation care models is accessible to them: peer support groups, lactation counselors or educators, IBCLCs, and physicians trained in breastfeeding medicine. Each type of model has a function, and when all are available to a family, they can trust that regardless of which they access first, they will receive any necessary referrals to additional types of care that they may need.

Part 2 (Career)

I am equally as fascinated by these types of thoughts and concepts as I am with clinical lactation topics. I don’t understand why that is, but I accept that it is most useful for me as an instructor and mentor.

I did not go into this field thinking I would be interested in doing anything other than helping dyads on their lactation and feeding journeys.

An entire world opened up to me when I started teaching, and I get immense rewards from encouraging students and interns to think about lactation differently than they currently do - to consider what could be called “unpopular opinions.”

Disrupting thought patterns is a critical way we can effect change in the world. I didn’t realize this before writing this right now, but this need to disrupt is what has always driven me to ask of my students that they explain and declare their purpose and mission in lactation work right from the start. I need to hear their starting point so that I can help them open their eyes beyond what they thought their lactation work was going to be.

I believe it’s necessary for lactation care providers to take time to process their own experiences before they can really be effective at helping others. It seems clear that this element of preparation is sorely lacking in the current model of training and education that is available to aspiring IBCLCs. Due to the wide variance in clinical experiences that fall into the official Pathways to becoming an IBCLC, there is no guarantee that newly credentialed IBCLCs are not bringing their baggage into their work.

Unfortunately, that leads to compromised counseling skills. Spending time and investing in themselves, lactation care providers CAN get themselves to a place of better understanding of their own strengths and limitations. That’s what will ultimately lead to a lactation workforce that is resilient and capable beyond our current imagination.

Above all, I see so much potential in this field. There are so many incredibly gifted people who bring wildly diverse and important background skills and wisdom into their lactation work, and every single time a new person is elevated and facilitated to truly shine, we collectively get better. We have so much opportunity here - and people need guidance in many different ways to be able to shine.

Sometimes it’s just a little bit of inspiration from outside that gets someone moving, and other times it takes more intention on their part.

I promise to continue to challenge, question, and inspire you in questions of clinical lactation care AND career growth if you’ll stick with me here. And if you have a moment to share this with a friend, I’d really appreciate it.