I spent some time over the weekend re-reading Simon Sinek's "The Infinite Game" and considering my own mission and purpose.

I was reminded of how easy it is to fall back on old patterns when we become burned out or a little bored, or even when we think our work isn’t getting us anywhere.

This isn’t just another blog about breastfeeding.

This Substack is built to strengthen the connections between the practice of lactation support and the rest of the universe of health and well-being.

More than twenty years of lactation care in multiple settings and from multiple vantage points have given me some insights, which I share here, along with ideas, inspiration, and resources designed to help you grow in your lactation career.

Feelings of isolation, frustration, and a sense of working uphill are all too common in our space.

Join me here for the boost you need to keep going - the Notes app on my phone is bursting with ideas to share with you and ways that we can work together to share what is important about breastfeeding, human milk, and the practice of lactation care.

I've had so many conversations in the past 24 years about how the solution to all the breastfeeding issues we face is "Prenatal Breastfeeding Education."

(Sometimes I even play a little game in my head where I try to estimate how long it will take a group of lactation people to get around to saying that in a conversation)

It is, but it's also not.

We have to ask ourselves who stands to lose if we keep fighting with the same strategy and it doesn't work?

If someone loses, someone else wins.

Who wins when we continue the same ineffective breastfeeding promotion strategies over and over?

Anyone who makes money when babies aren’t breastfeeding.

That's the thing: a lack of breastfeeding education isn’t what has changed society’s perception of it.

Society's perception of breastfeeding has changed as a direct result of the marketing of infant formula, breast pumps, and all of the products that are designed to "support" breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is seen as hard because when all you see are ads for things that will help make it easier, it must be hard.

It doesn't mean that we don't need those things at all; two things can be true.

It's the marketing that makes the real difference.

The marketing messages change the narrative around what breastfeeding is, and society follows the narrative.

And the health care system/people/universe is part of society.

Though we like to imagine that anyone who works in health care is immune to the marketing messages, we can clearly see in the example of breastfeeding that this is not even remotely true.

Prenatal breastfeeding education is great, and I love it as much as you do when my new client tells me all about her classes or her instructor.

But unless my client lives under a rock, she is also receiving messages from thousands of other, uninformed sources about how and what to feed her baby.

Prenatal breastfeeding education isn’t the answer.

If I had The Answer, I would happily share it with you.

We’ll need a lot of strategies and a lot of hard work.

I don’t know the exactly right combination of things to do to get us to a point where breastfeeding is truly possible for everyone who chooses it.

What I do know, though, is that there is a lot of work to be done

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I know that I am here on this beautiful planet to remove the obstacles that prevent mothers from breastfeeding.

I do it because I know that breastfeeding is transformative to mothers as well as babies.

I’ll do it every day until I’m gone.

I know I won’t remove them all, and new ones will arise even in my lifetime.

But in the meantime, I’m connecting with YOU because there are a lot of strategies we’ll need to use in order to combat all of those obstacles, and you have a unique way of doing it, a specific background that will help, and a particular way of saying things that will reach the right ears.

Thank you for sticking with me for articles like this, where we explore higher-level thinking about “the breastfeeding problem.”

I am forever trying to connect with people like you - you are my people! You get it. You know what I mean, and if you don’t, you tell me so that we can have a real conversation.

If you know anyone else like us, please share this with them!

It would be so great to have them here in our space, too. ✨

And if you know anyone who is just starting out their lactation career (or any other career that’s going to put them in front of pregnant and postpartum people), share this with them, too!

We’re growing because YOU care enough about breastfeeding to share.

There’s so much to do…