Q&A: One Nurse’s View on Strict Breastfeeding Policies

Jody Segrave-Daly, our co-founder and the pro-mom advocate known as “The Momivist” regularly interviews nurses about their view and experiences, working with strict breastfeeding-only policies. Here is an excellently informative interview with a nurse we’ll call Sarah, as she’s asked we keep her name and hospital anonymous. 

Jody Segrave-Daly, AKA The Momivist: What are the most common encounters that you see with breastfed babies in the first 48 hours of life,  in your hospital, which has strict breastfeeding policies?

Sarah, RN at Hospital with Strict Breastfeeding Policies: I’ll start with the positive. One thing I really like about hospitals that have these policies, such as the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative, is the emphasis on skin-to-skin after delivery. Instead of baby immediately being taken to a warmer, baby is placed on mom’s chest. Mothers seem to really enjoy this immediate contact with their babies, babies’ vital signs tend to stabilize better, and breastfeeding is encouraged in the first hour after birth (if baby shows interest). Continue reading

Fed Is Best 101: What is Newborn Jaundice?

By Julia a. bennett 

Today begins the first of a series of posts dedicated to informing parents about infant health conditions related to feeding. We begin with Newborn Jaundice, which comes up frequently in our discussions here at The Fed Is Best Foundation.

Jaundice is not a disease or illness, but the name of a symptom found in babies (and some adults) whose livers can’t clear out a yellow-colored substance called bilirubin (bil-eh-ROO-bin). Continue reading

No Shame in This Mama’s Bottle Feeding Game

This story is an excerpt from KayLee of The Happily Average Blog, a mother who bottle fed her
daughter and breastfed her son after birth. You can read the full story here.

When I had my daughter it was three days after my eighteenth birthday . I WAS A BABY having a baby. I was very inexperienced, obviously.

My Lilah was born three weeks early, after a complicated pregnancy . She was small, and from the very get-go I wasn’t producing milk. I mean nothing, not even a little. My body just didn’t kick into gear to feed my baby.

And this broke my heart. Continue reading

Research Opportunity with MSU

Dear Readers,

As many of you have witnessed this past week, we have been inundated with (and deleted many) shaming messages to moms, from moms, and about moms on our blog and social media posts. Though some of the shaming has been intentional, much of it is unintentional, just passionate expressions of what is deeply ingrained in each of us as to what a “good” mother is and does.

We’ve heard your feedback about it, and appreciate the widespread support we’ve gotten from many of you as we’ve cleaned up our comments sections. On that note, we recently had a researcher from an outside organization reach out to us with a project on that topic that may be of interest to you all.

Continue reading

Welcome to the New and Improved FedIsBest.org!

Welcome to the new FedIsBest.org website, home of the Fed is Best Foundation.

You’ll see that we have updates for you, and we hope you’re as excited as we are. They include:

  • A full resource page that will be periodically refreshed with all the guides and data that you need to support the safe and effective feeding of newborns, aimed at our visiting parents and clinicians;
  • Our latest news, and evidence-based articles here on our blog (and some of our oldies and goodies as well)
  • And our PSAs and internet-friendly graphics ready to share with just a click of a button!

If there’s anything that you’d like to see that’s not listed on this site, of course, we’d love to hear from you. Please go to our Contact page and give us your feedback.

Thank you, and remember, #FedIsBest!