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Sue Cox is a breastfeeding educator, author and online facilitator with BreastEd. She has been a breastfeeding educator since 1975, when she first became a counsellor for the Australian Breastfeeding Association Since then Sue Cox has become widely recognised for her work. She was named the ‘Breastfeeding Sister’ at Royal Hobart Hospital, was the first ABA representative to the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners (IBLCE) and was grand-parented as an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC). She has also represented the South Pacific Region on the IBLCE Examination Committee, was the President of the Board of Directors of the International Lactation Consultant Association and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2004 Australia Day Honours list.
Author and freelance writer, Candice Lemon-Scott, spoke with Sue about the release of her new book, Baby Magic: Planning For a Lifetime of Love and discovered a passionate advocate for babies, mums, dads and the power of love. Visit Baby Magic for more information. This is Part One of Candice's interview.
How did your book Baby Magic come about?
The Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) asked me to write the book. The ABA felt it was important to be written. It was absolutely beautiful that the family allowed me to use the photo that’s on the front cover. I remember working at the hospital that I would see babies just lying there in that sort of position. It’s as though they were thinking, “Gosh, where am I? Isn’t this new?” To me, it’s a very calming photo, in comparison to the days when as soon as the baby was born we (the midwives) would take them away and wrap them up. The mother would maybe have a look at their babies and then disappear while the babies would stay in the nursery and cry.
What was your main intention with writing the book?
I just hope that in time new parents will find that what they felt during pregnancy actually goes into parenthood. During pregnancy they imagine this sweet little baby coming out, and how lovely it will be, and how they’ll be able to give the baby a happy life, but in fact when the baby’s born I don’t think that necessarily happens.
Parenthood is such a shock to new parents that they need to find ways of staying in control. I think control is such a big thing in our community. Everything’s controlled now and so a woman (particularly since the average age for giving birth has risen so much) has in fact achieved something within the workplace and she’s done that by controlling how she does things within the workplace. Then she goes through pregnancy without allowing the hormones to help her learn about babies. That’s what the hormones are all for during pregnancy: to get women to relax and open up and ask questions. But most women are staying in the workforce until they’re 36 or 38 weeks and then all of a sudden they’re mothers and they’re tired.
There are so many negatives about coming into parenthood tired. If you have some pre-labour and then you go into first stage and second stage it’s going to take somewhere over 48 hours for that baby to be born, that’s normal. So these women are going to have two or three nights when they haven’t slept, and they’re already tired before that.
How is your book different to others out there?
For me, what is now happening is that there are a plethora of books about how to control your baby instead of how to love your baby. My hope for this book is that parents will realise that they know the soft things. They don’t have to listen to other people. They can, between the two of them, very nicely bring up this baby without needing other input.
I think women have a very difficult life now. I think my generation of mothers probably had the best of the way life as a mother. Except for all those women who didn’t breastfeed and I feel very sad for them – that the medical profession didn’t encourage them.
Who is your intended audience with the book, besides mother-to-be?
I really would like that fathers-to-be would read it because most of what they watch on the television is negative to fathers and negative to babies. Fathers need to fall in love with the thought that they are so vitally important to the family. There’s lots of research around now that shows lack of input by fathers really has a detrimental effect on babies when they become adults. We need to get fathers to recognise that they’re vitally important. Some of that importance is just shielding the mother from everybody else. You don’t normally bring your breast out in front of the football team but when family and friends come in to see the new baby it’s different for some reason.
How did you carry out your research for Baby Magic?
Over the past five years a great deal of it is because I carry out an online lactation education program. The Breast Ed program was developed by a woman in Queensland and she now has students from 60 countries around the world. One of the things I need to do in that course is to write a new forum every week. I do a lot of research in finding something interesting for the students. Teaching online is a really enjoyable and important part of my life.
How closely does the information in the book about breastfeeding relate to your work as a lactation consultant?
Very, very closely. In particular, the thing that I do with most women now is that I get them to stand up for the right position. For a long time what we’ve learned in hospitals is that the baby needs to be chest to chest. Yet if you’ve got the baby chest to chest it probably means your nipples are pointing straight out but there aren’t many nipples that actually do that. So when a mother actually stands up and holds her baby on the arm of the side she’s going to feed on she would naturally drop the baby to where the nipple sits naturally. When she can actually see that positioning she can then sit down and continue it and allow the baby to latch on.
So many women now have bought these special pillows for breastfeeding but how are you going to take them to a shopping centre or a picnic? It’s just become an expensive thing and really there are some things that aren’t necessary as far as feeding is concerned.
Baby Magic is largely about preparing for breastfeeding during pregnancy. Why do you think this is so important in establishing breastfeeding successfully?
I think for most things we do we prepare for them beforehand. If you play a musical instrument or you play sport, or you knit, you’ve had to learn how to do that, and you don’t decide to do it unless you’ve seen it being done. Yet there are thousands of women who decide they’re going to breastfeed and they’ve never, ever seen anybody do it. It’s the only thing I know about in the world that people would decide to do, I guess aside from sex, without having seen it. There’s some research out this week that says people between 18 and 24 don’t approve of women breastfeeding in public. That’s just the time when they need to be. If you think of 18 to 24 women, they’re using their breasts to catch a man, and if they’re a man they want a breast to cuddle, so I don’t understand why they don’t like breastfeeding. It’s a kind of really strange way of thinking, when breasts are important to you for other things.
In Baby Magic, you talk a lot about the need for immediate skin-to-skin contact between baby and mother. Why is this so important?
When mothers have skin-to-skin contact with their babies after the birth it develops their ability to be able to do whatever that baby asks of them, so it’s extremely important for women. Skin-to-skin contact is something a woman who has a vaginal birth will just do. A woman who has a caesarean, or a woman who has an epidural, won’t have. This means they don’t have the huge amounts of oxytocin released as the baby’s being born. As they don’t have that hormone to help them to fall in love, they need to have as much skin-to-skin contact with their babies as possible.
For instance, a woman after a caesarean doesn’t need to get up and go to the toilet because she has a catheter in, so she could have her baby for three to four hours of skin-to-skin. The amount of movement that the baby would do on her chest in that time, and the amount of stimulation of the top of the uterus, would allow lots of oxytocin to be released for her. In turn, this would overcome the problem that she didn’t have the feeling of the baby going through the vagina. It’s the same thing for mothers who’ve had epidurals. They’ve been so cut off from what they were doing that they need their baby there to get some oxytocin going.
I remember one Grand Final day a woman came in experiencing labour. At about one o’clock she was encouraged by her doctor to have the epidural. She and her husband sat there and they watched the Grand Final and then at four thirty she said, ‘I’m ready now.’ So for three and a half hours her interest had been on the football and then the next thing the doctor pulled the baby out with a ventouse. I can’t get my head around that.
The early epidurals, when they were first testing them out, were done on ewes. They found if the ewe had an early epidural and it was wearing off when the lamb was born she would do the natural things – nuzzle the lamb, encourage it to stand up etc. But if she had a late epidural she didn’t know anything about what to do because she didn’t have any oxytocin released as the lamb went through the vagina. The next research they did was to actually inject oxytocin into the brain of the ewe that had the late epidural. In this case the ewe knew what to do. As a result, they recognised that oxytocin was absolutely central to maternal ability to parent.
We’re just animals. We’re no different to any other animal. Professor Peter Hartnett, a breastfeeding lactation researcher from Western Australia, had similar findings. His original research money was from working for the pig board in understanding pig lactation. He tells us that if a sow has a caesarean, and if you don’t stimulate her vagina enough after the caesarean, she won’t lactate because she won’t know what to do with her piglets. This stimulation of the vagina is so important in this oxytocin release and the ability to let your milk down to the baby.
Part two of Candice Lemon-Scott's interview with Sue Cox will be posted next week.
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