I would recommend that people get in touch with a lactation consultant before their babies are born because lactation support is now covered by insurance. But there’s a little bit of paperwork that you have to fill out and things that you have to do to approve your benefits and understand what your benefits are before the baby is born.

And so the time to do that is when you have a little bit of brain space before you baby arrives, and not when you have crying three-day-old baby in your arms and you’re filling out insurance forms. 

Whether you think you need lactation support or not, it’s good to, you know, get it in place if you need it … I mean, people get their baby registries going, and, you know, things like that, but you need to know who to call if you’re having trouble and also know who to call if you’re not having trouble. 

You don’t need to have a ton of trouble to get some benefit from a visit with a lactation consultant after the birth, to just know that things are getting off to a good start.

I think that really down deep all moms are just trying to do their best job. And I think that there’s kind of a feeling sometimes of being judged, whether [or not] you’re just imagining that that’s happening to you. But I think sometimes if I decide to formula feed or bottle feed or pump and bottle feed and you’re breastfeeding, it doesn’t mean that I think I’m better than you. Everybody makes a choice.

A lot of people are doing things because their first choice didn’t work out, you know, and I don’t think that we need to judge people because you don’t know what shoes people have or have walked in. And some people want to breastfeed, but they have low supplies and it’s not working. 

Actually, I event want to say that there’s so many different ways to feed a baby or how people want to feed a baby. Right off the bat sometimes I think that there’s a lot of my clients that are like, "I’m pumping and bottle feeding." Yeah, I’m having a night nurse. I want to have my partner to split the load. 

I want to help people with whatever type of plan they want. I have people who have serious mental health issues or I work with moms who have different medical conditions that if they don’t get enough sleep their medical conditions will spiral. So right off the bat, we need to make a plan for that family to do some type of combination feeding, and we don’t need to judge people.

In the grand scheme of life and in the bigger picture of what’s important is that everybody’s feeling good about what’s happening in this family, right?

Almost all of it.

Everybody has a different journey there and everybody feels differently about their journey. One thing that I say to so many of my clients on a daily basis is how are you doing mentally and emotionally? 

Because I can have a mom who has a 90 percent supply. She has to do a little bit of something, a little bit of supplementation or a little bit of pumping, and she’s just like, this is terrible. Yeah, this is absolutely terrible.

And then I can have another mom who makes hardly any milk. She’s pumping her brains out. She’s working so hard. And I’m like, “How are you doing?” She’s like, “This is great. I’m so happy that I can pump ten times a day and make one bottle of milk for my baby.” And I say, then let’s keep going if that’s what you want to do, because I’m constantly checking in on people mentally and emotionally where they are, and I’m trying to say partners too that we cannot let this person slip into the depths of depression over this.

So the answer’s more about how is mom doing mentally and emotionally. That’s a huge part of it for me because, again, in the grand scheme of life, if your kid has to get a bottle of formula a day to make everybody feel better in this family, it’s worth it, right?

Even though we put so much pressure on women to breastfeed, and you should breastfeed for a year or whatever it is, we don’t support them in that journey.

So by the time most people go back to work, most other moms are formula feeding. […] Most of the childcare workers, as wonderful as they are, are not familiar with the difference between breast milk feeding and formula feeding.

What I find the hardest thing is that my moms are constantly being undermined and being told by childcare workers that “You're not bringing your baby enough milk. You’re not pumping enough. You’re not doing this enough.” And it’s constant pressure every time these moms go to pick up their babies, because a formula-fed baby will eat much more than a breast milk-fed baby. 

So I think the biggest thing before you go back to work is to education yourself.  Understand how much you’re supposed to be producing. So many of my moms tell me, “I couldn’t maintain breastfeeding when I went back to work,” but really what it was, was misinformation. They were making plenty of milk.

They were making the perfect amount of milk for their babies, but the childcare workers kept telling them, “I think your baby’s hungry. I think you’re not bringing enough.” Because the formula [feeding] moms are bringing in gigantic bottles, and the breastmilk-[feeding] moms are bringing in smaller bottles. And when the childcare worker doesn’t understand, they’re constantly giving subtle message to my moms. 

I have these women who are these high-powered, corporate, amazing, badass women in tears because they think they’re not doing enough. And I always say to them, “Has your doctor ever told you you’re not feeding enough to your baby?

But somehow when they go back to work and they’re in this very vulnberable environment, leaving their child with somebody else, you know, they just start [feeling] so much self-doubt. Educate yourself before you go back to work because you will get undermined so fast going after going on a pumping and bottle feeding journey after you’ve been breastfeeding at home for months. It can get unraveled so quickly. […]

What I want for all moms is to understand how their bodies work. And I feel like most moms do not understand how their bodies work. They don’t understand that.

Like, they don’t understand that their milk comes in on the third day after their babies are born. So even sometimes by the time I get out to see people, they’re like, “Well I had to formula feed the whole time I was in the hospital because my milk didn’t come in for the third day."

But, it’s like, you and everyone else’s milk on the planet doesn’t come in for three days. But they didn’t know that, so they felt scared and they felt nervous and they were worried about their babies.

People don’t understand how much milk a baby’s supposed to be eating. You know, they see moms on TikTok and they’re like, well, this lady has a deep freezer full of breast milk in their living room. I don’t make [enough] for a deep freezer in my living room. It’s like, right, nobody’s supposed to have a deep freezer full of breastmilk in their living room!

That’s not what you’re supposed to have. But seeing those things, and when you don’t know how your body is supposed to work, what is normal, and what is baseline normal, it undermines everything. And it scares women and it makes them feel their like their bodies aren’t working properly when everything was just perfect and baseline normal for them.

So that's what I want for people: I want to educate you. I want moms to educate themselves about how much milk they’re supposed to be making, how breast milk production works. You know, there’s just so much garbage on the internet where like, for example, people will say, “Oh, well if your baby’s sleeping through the night, you need to get up in the middle of the night and pump.”

What are you talking about? Did cave women pump in the middle of the night? No, they just fed their babies. You need to make enough milk for your baby, but you don’t necessarily have to be doing all of these other things. 

And also understanding that everyone makes a different amount of milk, and the amount of milk you make literally has more to do with happened to you when you went through puberty and your breasts were formed with when you were a young adolescent girl, than it does with what happened to you during your birth.

Some people are like, “Oh, I didn’t get the golden hour, so now I don’t make milk.” No, that’s not how it works. Yes, it’s great have the golden hour and all that kind of stuff and get things established. But if you have the capacity to make milk, you’ll be able to make milk, you know? 

But some people don’t have as many milk-making cells as other people. So [it’s more about] understanding that and how do you manage yourself if you have the largest milk supply on the planet or the smallest milk supply. How do you manage those things?