Two of my sons had problems with nasal congestion. They wanted to eat, but they needed to breathe even more. A baby who tries, screams, and tries again is the tell. Or who just can't seem to make up his mind as to whether he wants to or not. Or who just can't seem to form any sort of a secure latch. It's easy to blame a bad latch, but babies are good at sucking on things. I didn't find latching was any sort of problem when the noses were working right. They were letting go because they had to. The fridababy nose sucker, saline sprays, and sitting in steamed up bathrooms were life savers for us.
Playing support staff for a 6 month old now..daily massages for the baby in steamy bathrooms is helpful. I have been doing this with my grandmother in our large joint family from back when..one thing I have noticed that is diff now than it was over many years ago are the eczema rashes and esp after vaccinations. I guess that’s the immune system kicking in…treating the eczema gently rather than directly and immediately resorting to steroidal creams is better. The nasal congestions are also on the rise..usually post vaccination. The steamy room massages do help alleviate the distress a bit.
Nursing mothers need capable nutritionists as well as lactation consultants. The advantage of crone women in the family assisting is that they usually have a history of all related women and the various births in their heads. Women usually went back to their mothers’ home after seventh month of pregnancy and stayed there for at least 6-12 months post birth.
child birth was a huge factor on human mortality (both mother and child). Human's ability to conceive frequently (monthly fertility rather than annually) and being able to conceive for many years allows success. If we only bred annually and only bred for a few years, we likely would have gone extinct.
Different poster: But what worked for my wife was "Medela Nipple Shield" in the appropriate size.
What I find interesting is that our first didn't eat for TWO DAYS until we got that piece of silicone. It was recommended by the lactation consultant, but the hospital didn't stock them because they had a policy against assistive devices. It took two days because the lactation consultant didn't work weekends.
The hospital's view was essentially: Breastfeeding had to "just work" or else formula. Nothing in-between. Ultimately our kid was 90% breastfed with minimum supplemental formula, we also were able to move away from the Nipple Shield within a month. But yet things like Nipple Shields get fought even by some lactation consultants and many hospitals.
You can find numerous articles pointing out why they're bad, but in my view "fed is best" and by attacking assisted devices like they do, all they're indirectly doing is hurting mothers trying to breastfeed, many of which will give up, and just use formula (since they're essentially called bad mothers either for using assisted devices OR formula, so may have well lean into it).
When we had our second, he was a larger baby, and while we did need the shield, he only needed it for a week total. The different lactation consultant recommended "trying without" every time we met her even when it was self-evident it was ineffective.
TL;DR: Breastfeeding information, advice, and assistance is shit-tier in the US and is very hit-or-miss.
You'll find hospitals have a lot of "current thinking" policies around babies that seemingly have no real concrete reason. For example, they swung wildly from little to no skin-to-skin (it was "dangerous"), to skin-to-skin being of absolute priority. Co-sleeping has also swung wildly, and is currently in the "you'll kill your baby!!!" side of the swing. Little or low quality science, it is very cargo-cult run.
Most current bad policies in the US originate from wanting to be "Baby-Friendly Certified"[0]. For example MANY (most?) US hospitals have closed overnight nurseries in Labor & Delivery, so post-operative mothers cannot get better sleep which improved their recovery times and reduced risks of post-operative issues, this is from a bad reading of "Baby-Friendly" key clinical practices No.7. The problem is that third party certifying organizations have taken WHO's fairly commonsense ideas and run wild with them in order to make certifying a time-consuming and expensive process (and done tons of harm in the process).
The specific reason Nipple Shields are the current evil is Key clinical practices No.9 even though it directly contradicts Key clinical practices No.5, and worse No.9 doesn't actually forbid assistive devices, it is the intermediate organizations that have interpreted it that way.
Here's a quote from the below Wikipedia article:
> It questioned whether full compliance with the ten steps of the initiative might inadvertently lead to the promotion of potentially hazardous practices and/or counterproductive outcomes. Specific concerns described in this paper included increased risk of sudden unexpected postnatal collapse, rigidly-enforced rooming-in practices leading to exhausted or heavily medicated mothers caring for newborns, and an unnecessary ban on pacifier use.
Keep in mind this isn't some government initiative nor is the WHO really responsible for many of the US specific problems. This is for-profit US hospitals competing against one another to appear superior, while actually creating situations where both mothers and babies get worse care in the process (and the financial savings of not having on-site nurseries, is likely a huge bonus).
I wish it was shareable. If she presented my son to her breasts with a certain posture, he would latch without any issues. If she didn't, then it would hurt her immensely. I want to say the lactation consultant "smashed" the boy's head to the breast, getting his mouth full before he had a chance to do anything, but its been 15 years. I think the biggest thing to learn is that works for one may not work for another. Keep searching with optimism.
Not OP, but one bit that helped for us was insisting that our second newborn doesn't get given a "pacifier" to stop crying (which the nurses all want to do at the hospital because something something... quiet). My best guess is that it makes the baby "lazy" and used to "easy sucking", so they don't try hard enough on a real nipple.
Different position worked for my partner - the sidelying position. Otherwise she found she was having to lift him up higher than was comfortable for any length of time.
