This is an example of a mom whose baby was born early and who had problems from the Cross Cradle and Football Holds.
Marissa:
-baby born at 35 weeks, weighed 5 lbs
-Football and Cross Cradle Holds caused a cascade of problems
-experienced mastitis and thrush
I am no stranger to breastfeeding.
I am the eldest of four breastfed children.
I have watched all of my aunts nurse my younger cousins.
I have been the nanny of three breastfed babies.
I have never once seen a woman use the positions into which I have been instructed to contort myself in order to nurse my son.
On December 1st, I gave birth to a beautiful, premature baby boy.
At just over 5 lb., at 35 weeks my son was perfectly healthy with the exception of regulating his own glucose.
Though I was able to nurse initially using the Cradle Hold in the delivery room, nurses insisted that only formula would do the trick of stabilizing his sugars. Desperate to have my baby back, I conceded.
However, formula was not the answer; my son would be admitted to the Special Care Nursery.
The feeling of leaving the hospital without my son paled in comparison to the heartbreak I felt every time I saw an artificial nipple in his mouth.
I tried numerous times to nurse him in the NICU, only to be discouraged by the staff. Apparently, nursing was a ‘waste of his energy’. It ‘burned too many precious calories’. Just pump your milk, hand it over, and get out is what they might as well have said.
I ignored them as much as possible and tried to nurse without assistance.
Since given a bottle, my baby’s natural rooting reflex had been diminished, and I was having trouble latching him on.
(Bottle nipples often cause a preference for the bottle because the milk comes out of the bottle easier.)
The nurses walked right past me and timed my attempts.
After 15 minutes, they would take him away and feed him a bottle.
I gave up trying, pumped instead, and prayed we could leave the hospital soon.
At four days old he was moved to ‘Nursery E’, where the staff was far more relaxed. When I walked into the hospital that morning, my baby’s nurse was about to feed him a bottle.
When she saw me, she asked if I would like to nurse instead!!!
I struggled to latch him, and the nurse responded by showing me
the Cross Cradle Hold.
She had me hold my son with my right arm as she put my left breast in his mouth. We were nursing. I did not care if it felt uncomfortable to hold him that way, I just wanted to breastfeed my baby.
We were visited by a lactation consultant three days later, who gave me information on how to wean my baby from the bottle using a wheel chart of transition.
She checked my ‘pumping technique’, remarked on my ample milk supply (I was able to exclusively provide breast milk for my son from his third day of life), offered a few tips on dealing with my severe engorgement, and advised me to have formula on hand ‘just in case’ when we got home.
She showed me the Football Hold and the Cross Cradle Hold,
neither while I nursed. For some reason she did not have time to actually show me how to breastfeed my preemie, saying my
‘large breasts (I am actually a petite 5’2’’, small framed, and a 38 D while pregnant/nursing...not an unusually large person in any respect) ‘would make it difficult to feed him the normal way’.
We left the hospital the next day with our son, armed only with diagrams, wheel-charts, a few lactation consultants’ phone numbers, and a lot of hope.
The exhaustion of pumping and bottle feeding my expressed milk around the clock the first weeks is indescribable.
Newborn preemies eat almost every two hours; it would take, on average,
30 minutes to feed my baby 50 to 60 ccs, another 20 to 30 minutes to change his diaper during and after almost every feeding, and 30 to 40 minutes to pump the supply for the next feeding. That left about 30 minutes in between to eat, clean the pump parts and run to the bathroom. There was rarely time to sleep.
My husband had two weeks off after the birth of our son, and our baby was 8 days old when we brought him home.
Without any family to help, and with my husband returning to work, I decided to chuck the wheel-chart from the LC, the only way I would survive was to get my baby on the breast by the time my husband returned to work 6 days later.
We were unable to afford a lactation consultant home visit at the time, and I was apprehensive about taking a preemie to any meetings in December, so I went to a bookstore and bought the most breastfeeding-friendly book in the store. Desperate, I took it home and began using it as my sole learning tool, my bible.
The Cross Cradle Hold was hailed as THE position, the Football Hold a close second for ‘large breasted’ women.
We could not manage the Cross Cradle Hold, but the Football Hold seemed to work for us... though it was extremely uncomfortable.
Leaning forward with your arm under the weight of even a five-pounder took its toll. But it was all we could master, so I rode it out.
Somewhere around 5 months my baby and I managed to figure out
the Cross Cradle Hold. It seemed like one step closer to ‘normal’ nursing, but I still couldn’t transition to the Cradle Hold.
The Football Hold made it impossible to nurse in bed, and night-time feedings required us to get up and nurse in the living room. We also found ourselves unable to nurse in public, so we rarely left home.
With the Cross Cradle Hold, I was still feeling the stress of leaning forward, as there was nowhere to sit in our house that was quite vertical enough, and we were still unable to nurse in bed, no matter how many pillows we used to prop both the baby and me up.
The long months had begun to take their toll, and I found myself with constant neck pain and severe headaches. I knew the pain was relative to our positioning and tried to learn how to nurse in the ‘normal’ Cradle Hold.
I was unsuccessful, until I saw a news clip of a woman learning to nurse in the hospital after delivery. My son was 6 months old, but I was able to mimic her positioning immediately, though latching on was still achieved Cross Cradle Hold style.
My baby and I also learned to nurse lying down, which became an enormous relief to our family.
Co-sleeping became a pleasure, and nursing through the night was beautifully achieved in our own bed. Six months into the game we were finally getting it down!
At 7 1/2 months I started to have a great deal of nipple pain while nursing that I mistakenly attributed to new teeth. He had bitten me a few times, and we were trying to position him in a way to cause less damage with his teeth.
It took me two weeks to figure out that we may have thrush.
In August 2002, I attended my first LLL meeting (we did not nurse at the meeting), after which I took my son straight to the pediatrician, who confirmed my suspicions of thrush. Ten days into treatment, we were not improving, and were put on Diflucan.
Ten days after that, I developed mastitis. A round of Erythromycin did not clear the symptoms, though I had no fever. It did, however, bring back the thrush.
My OB insisted I could not possibly have mastitis without a fever, but prescribed antibiotics ‘just in case I developed a fever suddenly’; I was told to absolutely not take the meds unless I spiked a fever.
She also advised me to wean my almost 9 month old. "He’ll be fine", she said. I walked out.
After suffering in pain that I can only describe as beyond agonizing
(I truly felt more pain than during childbirth... at least there is time between contractions) I went to LLL again for the September meeting, where the leaders felt certain the hardening and red patch on my right breast qualified as mastitis.
I filled the prescription that day and had improved 80% by the next morning. Two preventive treatments with Gentian Violet stayed off a major thrush infection this time, but I did develop two milk blisters on my right breast.
At the September LLL meeting, there arose the topic of proper positioning, and I heard someone mention the Cross Cradle Hold and how it was harmful... as I positioned my son on my right breast with my left arm holding his head (this describes the Cross Cradle Hold).
I whipped my head around the room and said "why, what do you mean... I thought it was the ‘preferred position?"
The two leaders then explained to me that they truly believe the
Cross Cradle Hold creates nipple damage, along with countless other discomforts such as back pain, headaches, etc.
I was in shock, and honestly, a bit skeptical. After all, it contradicted everything I had learned thus far. I agreed to give the old-fashioned
Cradle Hold a try, though I was concerned that it may not work, as it had not before, and with a 20 pound infant, I doubted we were going to manage such an enormous change.
Over a period of 9 weeks, my baby and I suffered through an excruciating round-robin of mastitis and thrush. We struggled to figure out how to nurse the ‘normal’ way. I wavered back and forth between feeling gung-ho about re-training both my son and myself, and truly thinking these women were downright wrong;
as I struggled to latch him on properly time and time again in the Cradle Hold, it seemed as though it was more painful than before.
Finally, after a phone call from my LLL Leader, I was visited by a long-time nursing mother and LLL Leader, who graciously came to my home and helped me to position my son.
I cannot tell you how incredible it felt to have the Leader tell me to sit back comfortably, and have it actually work.
We can do this, I realized. I sat against the back of my couch, rather than pillows, for the first time when my son was almost 10 months old.
She showed me how to hold him and balance his weight on my ribcage (tummy to tummy) and told me that learning to support him with only my arms (and ribcage area) would take patience on my part. I learned how to wrap his body around me to create a better latch.
She encouraged me to do away with all the pillows around us. That took a lot of trust, and though we were still challenged for a short time after, now, six weeks later, I finally feel comfortable in saying we are successful.
I am, for the first time since the end of July, confident that we are cured of our infections. My baby and I have been thrush and mastitis-free for a full month. It was a 3 month long battle for my son and I, but with the help of La Leche League, we persevered and succeeded.
I breastfeed my 11-month-old son in public without a second thought.
I sit at home comfortably with my beautiful baby in my arms and nurse him without pain.
I know inherently that the Cross Cradle Hold caused the nipple damage that led to our struggle. There are no more doubts.
There is, however, an intense need to prevent other women from suffering needlessly.
It is not ‘okay’ to nurse in pain.
It is not ‘normal’ to be uncomfortable.
It should not be ‘expected’ that breastfeeding is difficult.
And it should not be accepted as common to struggle with the most natural of behaviors.
I know that most women would not have kept nursing.
My son is lucky, I come from a breastfeeding family.
It was not an option for me to wean.
I have built-in supports most women of my generation are not fortunate enough to experience.
I am eternally grateful I met this group of LLL Leaders whose knowledge contradicted everything I learned before.
I am hopeful their wisdom is contagious, and that LLL will revise its standing about the newer ‘trends’ in positioning.
(As of 2010 LLL and other lactation literature is still teaching the
Cross Cradle Hold, as are virtually all breastfeeding books and websites except this one, www.BreastfeedingSense.com.
Teaching women quickie-solutions to issues of positioning will never foster a breastfeeding-friendly environment or culture. The implications are far too severe.
I theorize the consequences of these positions are possibly the single largest contributing factor to early weaning.
We must protect those women for whom nursing is a courageous choice,
Women for whom nursing is a foreign concept,
Women who are cultured to believe breastfeeding is unnecessary, or even disgusting.
If these women experience pain and discomfort when ‘giving it a try’, there is nothing to stop them from weaning prematurely.
The norm must be shifted back to the old-fashioned ways, of nursing without all the foreign supports of pillows and reference manuals.
Those alternative positions (HSH positions), the Cross Cradle Hold and Football Hold, damage the culture of breastfeeding by making it a complicated act.
Restoring nursing to a comfortable, relaxing and natural behavior should become a priority.
Only then is there hope of long-term breastfeeding becoming pure in itself once again.
Mother - Marissa
CAUTION - The Football Hold often causes problems - not recommended
The Cradle Hold Position is effective from birth through weaning,
including for preemies, once they can suck and swallow.