It’s MEN’S fault that women stop breastfeeding!

They want their wives back says JEANNETTE KUPFERMANN who’s seen it first hand as an NCT teacher

THE post-natal support group was drawing to a close. I was packing away the cushions, plastic dolls and flipcharts in my front room as couples strapped babies into carrycots and shuffled off, exhausted, into the night.

Suddenly, one of the fathers was by my side. I recognised the sleepdeprived desperation in his red-rimmed eyes immediately. ‘Is there any way I can produce milk, too?’ he asked, as I tried to suppress a smile.

‘I mean, there must be a way for me to take over some of the feeding. It seems so unfair that women get that close bond and we don’t.’

It was at this point I started to wonder whether involving fathers in childbirth hadn’t perhaps gone too far.

I’d been a volunteer breastfeeding counsellor and National Childbirth Trust (NCT) teacher ever since my daughter was born in 1967. Over the years, I’d seen a shift away from childbirth and parenting being seen as a women-only club, as more and more fathers joined their wives at ante-natal classes and in birthing suites.

It gave me a revelatory insight into the psyche of the new father that is so rarely witnessed.

And I was rapidly coming to the conclusion it wasn’t a hankering to nurture the baby himself, or to give his wife a break, that was fuelling this poor dad’s plea, but something else entirely. He wanted his wife back. Tired of being on the periphery while the needy infant was permanently clamped to his wife’s body, sapping her libido, he was desperate for the whole breastfeeding business to end. And it makes me wonder if it is the

real, unspoken reason why so many women choose to give up breastfeeding prematurely. We learned this week that just 0.5 per cent of British women are still doing it after 12 months, the lowest rate in the world.

This prompted the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health to call for pupils as young as 11 to be taught about breastfeeding to help ‘normalise’ it and change our society’s attitude.

But how often have I heard mothers complain their husband was ‘jealous’ of her breastfeeding, making disapproving and subtly undermining comments?

A partner’s support is fundamental to a woman’s ability to breastfeed, and the lack of it, I believe, is one of the biggest factors in our disappointingly low breast-feeding rate.

So, as well as focusing on 11-year-old boys and girls for whom breastfeeding is still very much in the future, shouldn’t we first acknowledge the changes a new baby brings to male/female relationships and the pressures they place on women at this time?

MOdERNmen may not behave like Poldark’s vile Rev Whitworth who brutally takes his ‘ conjugal rights’, but they still have ways of undermining a woman’s confidence with ‘jokes’ about ‘droopy boobs’ and glances towards lissom 18-year-olds on the beach, usually because they simply feel jealous and neglected.

Often, this leads to women panicking that their husbands will seek comfort elsewhere, or immerse themselves in online porn.

It can lead to feelings of guilt and inadequacy on both sides, and contribute to post-natal depression — and the abandonment of breastfeeding.

I think the answer partly lies in educating everyone, not simply in the mechanics and health benefits of breastfeeding a baby, but also of the changes it brings to partnerships and how to navigate, rather than resist, them.

There are, of course, many reasons given for a woman’s inability or unwillingness to breastfeed that have nothing to do with negative comments from her husband. Social discouragement and the view of the breast as simply erotic are just a couple.

Another significant reason is the pressure women feel to go back to work, either from financial necessity or fear of their career stalling.

Once at work, the lack of fridge space for expressed milk, creches and comfortable places to feed, usually mean most give up long before they’d planned to. I remember being outraged at being forced to feed my baby son in a pub toilet in the Sixties. But times are slowly changing.

Royal breastfeeding mothers, for example, are a relatively new phenomenon. The Queen Mother and our own Queen did, as did diana and the duchess of Cambridge, and I remember being amazed by the beautiful Princess Grace of Monaco giving a passionate pro-breastfeeding speech at an early NCT conference. But many shuddered at the thought.

It’s interesting that Queen Victoria, who had a very active sexual relationship with husband Albert, found both breastfeeding and babies repellent. Her own daughters concealed their breastfeeding from her, and on discovering it, she called them ‘cows’.

The 19th- century ‘domestic goddess’ Mrs Beeton echoed this sentiment, advocating the use of newly available powdered milk.

Breastfeeding began experiencing a resurgence in the Sixties, with the creation of the Natural Childbirth Trust (now named the National Childbirth Trust), of which I became a pioneer in the UK.

My fellow NCT counsellors and I advocated the physical benefits of breastfeeding and less-invasive childbirth. But there were — and remain — so many things that weren’t taught.

What many still don’t realise is that as well as acting as a natural contraceptive (the hormones responsible for the production of milk suppress ovulation), breastfeeding often also acts as a natural libido dampener.

The oxytocin ‘feel good’ hormones produced when a woman breastfeeds are the same as those produced when making love, and she doesn’t feel she needs anything else.

Often, men (and women) don’t understand this, and worry they’ve ‘ gone off ’ each other, leading to feelings of guilt and rejection — and those nasty, unhelpful little comments.

How do you get the message across to parents that things do not immediately ‘go back to normal’, physically or emotionally, after a baby is born? That the household routine may have to go to pot for a while, as will their social life, something many men resent as much not having their wife’s attention in the bedroom.

I’ve seen new mothers dragged out far too soon to raucous parties or on faraway holidays, where there are few facilities for her to sit down and feed the baby in peace and quiet.

AlSO,there are those who feel obliged to leave the baby at home with a babysitter or nanny, as they cram themselves into uncomfortable clothes and sit with leaking, aching boobs all night, all to please a partner who doesn’t want to face the reality that something very big has changed in their lives.

Often there’s a sort of pretence going on.

‘We’re not letting a baby change anything,’ the father will boast to anyone who wants to listen. ‘look, she’s even got into that bikini again after a month, and has been doing her normal work from her bed, doing conference calls to the office each day.’

Then you hear, often without a pause, how she’s ‘ given up the breastfeeding as she wasn’t producing enough milk’.

Stress is known to slow the flow of milk production and inhibit the calming effects of oxytocin that make the whole process so rewarding for both mother and baby. No wonder these poor stressed-out mothers give up.

And what do you do to help women who have to be the breadwinner? Those who have other children to care for, and little practical help to enable them to spend hours breastfeeding?

Mainly, reassure them it only seems to take hours in the early days: once established, breastfeeding can take far less time and effort and be easier to fit into a working day than bottle-feeding.

We have to make the father, as well as the mother, realise that it’s OK to let other things go for a while, that their sex repertoire

will undergo changes. Intimacy will return and often couples rediscover each other with renewed rigour and passion that comes with having forged an even closer bond as loving and supportive parents.

So, by all means, let’s start in the classroom a drive towards increasing breastfeeding rates — but let’s save a few lessons for the husbands, too.