Nikki Lee Health

Prenatal breastfeeding classes require a particular set of skills.  I don’t know of any follow-up research that identifies which strategies are most effective in breastfeeding classes. There’s a master’s thesis that needs doing!

Simple is best.  In one hour, present only 3 or 4 messages for her to take home. Remember that 97% of her brain cells are occupied with thoughts like, “How will I know I am labor” . You have access to only a few of her brain cells open to hearing or learning anything else.  Here’s some ideas that have worked to stimulate class dialogue, between participants and the instructor.

1) Show a skin-to-skin baby self-attachment video. My favorite is the first section of “Delivery Self-Attachment: Practical Advice for Staff”; this section illustrates the 9 stages of self-attachment that every baby goes through on the way to that first breastfeeding. http://www.healthychildren.cc/books2.htm This section captures all all audiences: from black teens to adult OB/GYNs. The video will generate discussion; turn the lights down low and leave them low after the video is over, so that folks will talk about their feelings and questions. The bright fluorescent lights of most classrooms discourage comfort. There is nowhere to hide;  creating a dimmer environment makes it safer to talk about innermost thoughts and feelings.

2) Make sure every mother has a list of phone numbers and websites to contact after she comes home with her baby. Suggest she go to a local nursing mothers group and see lots of mothers nursing babies of all ages; she will learn more from that watching than from the class. Dr. Peter Hartmann, the brilliant lactation physiologist from Australia, calls this “learning by osmosis”. In addition, she’ll meet people like her, and perhaps make a new friend who lives nearby.

3) For getting a class engaged, ask the group, “What have you heard about breastfeeding that you didn’t like?” Then write down all their responses verbatim on the board. This list of responses becomes the class agenda. Talking about the benefits of breastfeeding is useless, because everybody already knows ‘breast is best’, and it is a slogan on the cans of our competitors’ products. The teacher’s challenge is to help the mother imagine how breastfeeding will fit into her life; this class is the time to talk about the barriers and challenges and booby traps.

4) Invite a nursing mother to come sit in the class; ideally this is someone who has taken your class when she was pregnant. She will be the true expert. Even when she sits in the back of the room quietly and nurses her baby, she will have a powerful impact on the class.

5) Ask who the pregnant women knows in their family or network that breastfed and liked it. Encourage keeping this person close as a resource.

6) See if the mothers need doulas, as having a spontaneous, undisturbed, unmedicated labor and delivery is the best start to breastfeeding.

These are ideas based on my experience of teaching hundreds of such classes. I don’t know if any or all of these strategies will prove useful; however, as a nurse in labor and delivery, I could tell if the mother had been educated about breastfeeding or not by the time the baby was born.

What tips do you have to share?