Making use of expertise: a qualitative analysis of the experience of breastfeeding support for first-time mothers.

There is now a body of research evaluating breastfeeding interventions and exploring mothers' and health professionals' views on effective and ineffective breastfeeding support. However, this literature leaves relatively unexplored a number of questions about how breastfeeding women experience and make sense of their relationships with those trained to provide breastfeeding support. The present study collected qualitative data from 22 breastfeeding first-time mothers in the United Kingdom on their experiences of, and orientation towards, relationships with maternity care professionals and other breastfeeding advisors.

Socially sensitive lactation: exploring the social context of breastfeeding.

Many women report difficulties with breastfeeding and do not maintain the practice for as long as intended. Although psychologists and other researchers have explored some of the difficulties they experience, fuller exploration of the relational contexts in which breastfeeding takes place is warranted to enable more in-depth analysis of the challenges these pose for breastfeeding women. This article is based on qualitative data collected from 22 first-time breastfeeding mothers through two phases of interviews and audio-diaries which explored how the participants experienced their relationships with significant others and the wider social context of breastfeeding in the first five weeks postpartum.

Maintaining the 'good maternal body': expressing milk as a way of negotiating the demands and dilemmas of early infant feeding.

Aim: To report a descriptive study of early infant feeding experiences focusing on ACCOUNTS OF WOMEN WHO EXPRESSED MILK EXTENSIVELY IN THE FIRST FEW WEEKS POSTPARTUM.

Background: Relatively little is known about the reasons for expressing milk following healthy term births. Evidence indicates it is an increasingly common practice during early infant feeding in Westernized countries.

'It should be the most natural thing in the world': exploring first-time mothers' breastfeeding difficulties in the UK using audio-diaries and interviews.

Breastfeeding is a practice which is promoted and scrutinized in the UK and internationally. In this paper, we use interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the experiences of eight British first-time mothers who struggled with breastfeeding in the early post-partum period. Participants kept audio-diary accounts of their infant feeding experiences across a 7-day period immediately following the birth of their infant and took part in related semi-structured interviews a few days after completion of the diary.

Expressing yourself: a feminist analysis of talk around expressing breast milk.

Recent feminist analyses, particularly from those working within a poststructuralist framework, have highlighted a number of historically located and contradictory socio-cultural constructions and practices which women are faced with when negotiating infant feeding, especially breastfeeding, within contemporary western contexts. However, there has been little explicit analysis of the practice of expressing breast milk. The aim of this article is to explore the embodied practice of expressing breast milk.