Lamaze Staff Members Represented at UofM's Breastfeeding Support Team

By Cara Genisio, LCCE

Earlier this month I was fortunate to attend a meeting with the Breastfeeding Support Team at the University of Michigan Hospital. The BST is a group of labor and postpartum nurses with additional training in breastfeeding; they work to provide support to breastfeeding mothers and their newborns during the time that the moms and babies are at the hospital after birth.

Moira Tannenbaum, one of our Breastfeeding class instructors, attended the meeting with me, and we were both proud to represent the Lamaze Family Center and to speak for the prenatal educators in our community. Attending the meeting definitely strengthened my pride in what the LFCAA does to provide a supportive space for nursing moms, both before and after their babies are born.

All of us moms—and I include myself, as a nursing mom of a four-month-old boy—know how vital emotional and social support are to successful breastfeeding. The feeling that we can breastfeed safely and confidently in public; the feeling that our families and health care providers understand the patterns and rhythms of normal newborn breastfeeding; the knowledge that there are resources in our community should we encounter some bumps in the road—all of these things contribute to a strong foundation, a dependable surface to stand on and hold us up despite the inevitable challenges that we face in our personal breastfeeding journeys.