Natural Nursery Blog

The Breastfeeding Manifesto was produced in 2006 in consultation with over twenty UK organisations working to improve awareness of the health benefits of breastfeeding and its role in reducing health inequalities.

This Manifesto has been launched for the following reasons:

• Several key organisations, including breastfeeding charities and professional bodies, were lobbying government for neccessary changes in policy and approach with regards to brestfeeding in the UK, but there was no cohesive message, no unified call to the UK Government for action.
• Despite signficant amounts of lobbying, the Department of Health still brought to an end the role of a National Infant Feeding Coordinator even though our Government in 2002 signed up to the Global Stratergy for Infant and Young Child Health which calls for a National Coordinator.
• NICE was soon to publish two key documents that could act as the back-bone of a National Breastfeeding Stratergy and it was imperative that we ensured that these action plans gained the support and resources they needed to be fully implemented.

The Breastfeeding Manifesto is being championed by David Kidney MP, Annette Brooke MP and Julie Kirkbride MP and a strong coalition of breastfeeding charities, breastfeeding co-ordinators, professional bodies, Royal Colleges etc. The Breastfeeding Manifesto Coalitions’ objective is to achieve widespread cross-party support for this document. We aim to ensure that its principles are reflected in government policy and legislation.

You can find out more and sign the manifesto at the Breastfeeding Manifesto site.

We are getting much busier in the shop now and the mailorder has really taken off earlier this year.  I think so many people experienced problems with internet and mailorder purchases last year that they have decided to order early this year.

All the better for us as it does mean that our workload is more evenly spread, we make less mistakes and (hopefully) end up with happier customers.

Anyway, we have had lots of new stock in as ever, with the fantastic mouse wheelybugs just arrived, lots of ethically traded stocking fillers, such as a set of 6 mini memo clips for 99p, wooden wrist compasses £1.19 each and hair bobbles 99p for 2.

Lots more in stock – see our Christmas Shop for details.

Mothers urged to sleep close to baby to encourage breastfeeding

Mothers of new babies should sleep close to them to encourage breastfeeding,
according to research published today.

A two-year clinical trial by Durham University’s Sleep Lab showed that unhindered mother and infant contact can have beneficial effects on the initiation of breast-feeding in the days after birth.

Babies who had "unhindered access" to their mothers at night were able to feed twice as often as those kept separate, the study of new-borns found.

The benefits of early suckling and skin-to-skin contact have already been well documented, but this study went further and showed how important it is for mothers to be physically close to their babies in the first few days after the birth.

The trial, conducted in collaboration with the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, compared the overnight breastfeeding frequency of babies in three different sleeping positions. It looked at babies sleeping in bed with their mothers; in a side-car crib that attaches to her bed and in a stand alone cot.

The results showed that babies sleeping in the bed and in the side-car crib made significantly more attempts to feed – both successful and unsuccessful – and showed more feeding effort than babies in the cot.

Dr Helen Ball, who led the research for Durham University, said the side-car crib was the "best compromise" for mothers, as they offer the closeness to encourage breastfeeding, while alleviating fears that the mother may suffocate her child while sleeping.

She said: "The study shows that mothers were feeding their babies more than twice as frequently if they had unhindered access rather than being in the next bed. Getting breastfeeding started and established successfully can lead to effective long-term breastfeeding.

"The results of this clinical trial would suggest that if a woman is keen to breastfeed her baby then maintaining unhindered contact throughout the night will aid the process. This unrestricted contact between mothers and their babies allows spontaneous feeding which is also important in order for mothers to understand their babies’ signals and to respond to those."

The research was being presented at the Unicef Baby Friendly Conference in Cardiff today, and appears in the December issue of the publication Archives of Disease in Childhood. The study considered the risks to the baby, from suffocation and falling, as well as the benefits.

It found that although there was more potential risk to the baby’s breathing when they slept in the bed than in the crib or the cot, there was still some danger in a cot due to the risk of airways being covered through swaddling.

Taken from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=
419367&in_page_id=1770