Aimee Grant, PhD, is a Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellow at the Centre for Trials Research, Cardiff University. She will be speaking at our conference in October on what the evidence says helps and hinders breastfeeding in public spaces, like shops, cafes and public transport. Here she gives a taster of what will be covered. Find out more about the full line up of speakers and buy your tickets to the conference.
“In 2012, I started doing research on infant feeding for the NHS. I come from a British working class background and had never seen breastfeeding before my early twenties, so I can still recall wondering what all of the fuss was about; surely you pop the baby on the boob and everything just works. How wrong I was about so much!
Fast forward a few years, and last year, I published a small study where we spoke to mothers and grandmothers from south Wales about their experiences of feeding babies (you can find a blog with the findings here, and the full text here). We found that mothers reported more intrusive looks and comments from strangers than their grandmothers had experienced. I’ve also looked at how breastfeeding in public spaces is considered on social media and Mail Online reader comments (my advice is it’s best not to look at the Mail Online comments!), and found the public have a lot of misunderstandings about breastfeeding, and the legal right to breastfeed in England and Wales.
So, how does this link to what I’ll be talking about? Much of what the NHS does in relation to breastfeeding is aimed at trying to change individual mothers by giving them support. My research (which has been confirmed by lots of other research in the UK and abroad) showed how difficult our society makes it for women to breastfeed outside of the home. As I’m sure you all know, if a mum can’t breastfeed outside of the home, this is going to make life as a breastfeeding mother very difficult. Because of this, I decided I wanted to focus my research on changing society, to make it more breastfeeding friendly.
In October, I was fortunate to begin leading a Wellcome Trust funded project doing just that. Myself and colleagues at Cardiff University have reviewed every academic paper for 10 years that looked at experiences or views of breastfeeding in public (38 of them in total!). I will discuss our findings, the barriers and facilitators, and I hope that together we can think about ways to take these findings forward to change the UK for the better!
As an aside, the second part of the Wellcome Trust project will be looking at existing programmes that try to make it easier for mums to breastfeed in public. If you are aware of projects, programmes or interventions that aren’t published in the academic literature, I’d really appreciate it if you dropped me an email with details and any evaluation reports you have (my email address is: GrantA2@cardiff.ac.uk ). You can also find me on Twitter: @DrAimeeGrant”