We have interviewed Monica García Calzada, lactation consultant, mother of four children and member of the Nacentia team, private natural childbirth clinic, in which a global accompaniment is proposed in the process of maternity of women.
Monica is in charge of advising by telephone, during the day, every day of the week, including Sundays and holidays, on all the doubts that mothers who decide to breastfeed have, from the third trimester of pregnancy until weaning, regardless of whether produce a month or three years after the child's life.
He also deals with lectures on breastfeeding and conscious breathing in childbirth preparation workshops, an aspect we will talk about in the second part of the interview, which we will offer in the next few days.
As a lactation consultant, what advice would you give pregnant women who want to breastfeed their babies?
The best advice I can give you is to inform yourself during pregnancy, to know what breastfeeding is. That they go to their midwife, or a breastfeeding support group, since there is a lot of ignorance about this issue and, worse, a lot of wrong information.
What are the most frequent doubts of breastfeeding mothers? What advice do you give them?
The doubt par excellence is always related to time, in all its aspects; First, how much time do you have to spend between take and take; Second, how long does a shot have to last? The best advice is to forget the clock.
Breastfeeding, for it to work, has to be on demand, this means when the baby wants; It doesn't matter if 5 minutes or 5 hours have elapsed, on demand it is on demand.
As a fact, breast milk is digested 20 minutes after being ingested. In addition, the breast not only covers the nutritional needs of the baby, which in fact covers them, but also covers their emotional and emotional needs. The breast is everything a baby needs: food, drink, love, company, security, etc.
What do you think are the main enemies of breastfeeding? Why do you generate so many doubts and what should you improve so that women who want to breastfeed can have a successful and happy breastfeeding?
There are many factors. The society has changed in the last decades, the families are now formed by the couple and before the families were very plural in terms of their form, they were composed of several members, that is why the woman faced maternity very wrapped up by her own relatives, Even by neighbors and friends.
All the women who lived in the same house had their motherhood recently, because they had many more children, and this allowed them to coincide with mother and daughter. He also gave birth at home, and breastfeeding was another step in the natural process of motherhood.
Before women did not consider whether or not they wanted to breastfeed, they gave it and that's it. Today all that has changed, women are alone in the puerperium and when they have doubts they don't know who to turn to. Breastfeeding has never been a pathology and historically the medical staff has not had to deal with it, so sometimes the mother is not very supported.
If everything develops as expected, perfect, go ahead with breastfeeding, but if there is minimal difficulty, which is almost always due to errors in the management of breastfeeding, they are usually remedied by prescribing formula milk. This together with that atrocious advertising campaigns about the benefits of formula milk were made about 40 years ago, making mothers believe that this was the best for their children.
Today the scientific evidence supports breastfeeding, but we continue to carry these 40 years of bottle fashion; We still hear things like that: the shots are every three hours and have a duration of ten minutes in each breast.
In this first part of the interview with Mónica García Calzada We have focused on breastfeeding. In the second part he will talk about the preparation for childbirth and the importance of conscious breathing.
