Breastfeeding Latch and Milk Transfer (The Analytical Armadillo)

By Lisa Lactivist, on September 28th, 2010

I won’t repost the whole article here, just a snippet with the hope that you will want to visit the Analytical Armadillo site for the rest of it.

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Tuesday, 28 September 2010

Effective breastfeeding – it’s not all about the latch

It was a new mum that first mentioned this to me, and as soon as she did it dawned on me that she was totally right. When supporting mums, lots of focus is on latch – because obviously the better the latch, often the less pain and the more effectively baby can feed; but all too often we meet a mum with a slow gaining baby who is always
wanting to feed, or perhaps a mum with sore/cracked nipples sometimes resulting in a the shape of a lipstick! and then we hear “the midwife/health visitor has checked my latch and said it was fine…”. Really if I had a pound for everytime I heard it, I would be writing this blog from Mauritius
This mum called me because she fell into all three of these categories – her baby was being supplemented with expressed breastmilk because of very slow gain, nipples were sore which the midwife had put down to baby spending long periods at the breast (with her supposed “perfect latch”) and mum instinctively knew something wasn’t right that was being missed. Almost as soon as I had stepped through the door mum posed the question that had been bothering her: ”everyone keeps telling me everything is fine, but I really don’t think she’s actually having much milk, yet when I say she doesn’t seem to swallow lots, they just keep saying latch looks fine - can it appear fine and yet baby still not take much milk?

And she’s right- there’s often little emphasis from mainstream sources on how to tell if baby is actually drinking lots of milk, either to mums or to health professionals; sure ears wiggling and a swallow pattern generally gets some coverage - but does such basic information really help a new mum or busy health professional? Whilst latch is a significant indicator, there are several problems with relying solely on it; firstly unless you are trained and experienced specifically in this area, identifying good latch from not so effective can be a tricky job. Those helping in the early days often hand over to someone else for later care – so some never see the longterm outcome of their advice, never realise that latch they thought was “fine” really wasn’t. Shoes are my favourite example - it’s comparable to someone saying their shoes hurt, having whopping great heel blisters and then an experienced shoe fitter telling them that ”sorry, but they appear to fit fine”.”

The rest of the article is here and it is well worth reading:

http://analyticalarmadillo.blogspot.com/2010/09/effective-breastfeeding-its-not-all.html

There are also links to videos that show different types of latch. Very interesting stuff, thank you Charlotte!

Lisa

Juno

September 29, 2010 at 5:30 pm · Reply

Thanks for posting this Lisa! I have been thinking about this over the last few weeks, as I have been feeding Dharma and reflecting on the support I have given mums recently. The last mum I saw at our breastfeeding group before my ‘maternity leave’ (!) had a baby who fed constantly, rarely seemed satisfied, but was gaining weight ok (maybe not ok for that baby though?), mum had not been sore at all & latch looked fine. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but still feel that I could have done better and think probably I should have at least recommended that she call LLL or NCTs helplines. I think that is an important thing that I often forget – it’s ok not to have the answer, but it’s important to admit it & to refer the mum to someone more experienced.

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Danielle

September 29, 2010 at 8:26 pm · Reply

Thank goodness someone has finally identified this problem! I had horrendous pain and cracks with my first baby despite being told that she was latched on properly. It was only down to steer determination and very gritted teeth that I didn’t give up. It took her about 2 weeks to get it right. If I’d had better support then it might not have taken so long and it would have spared me blisters and bruises. A close friend of mine had this same problem recently with her first baby and unfortunately she gave up feeding after a few days because the pain was too much. Again, she kept saying that everyone was telling her that the latch was right. Obviously it wasn’t and she and her baby had to suffer for the consequences.