When I was birthing and nursing my youngest two, my husband was a pastor for young adults, just attending college or beginning their careers. As a mentor to the young women, I saw it as part of my calling to model natural parenting and to help cultivate “breastfeeding awareness” with them. So several of the girls were with us in the birthing room, and I never went away to nurse our babies. I was always discreet, but I also made it a point for breastfeeding to be a “normal” part of our family life, in which many of the young people we mentored became welcome regulars. I laughed one afternoon at a church praise team practice when a young man we’d become close with said, “hey, you’re nursing the baby and I’m having a conversation with you, and it isn’t weird at all!”
It was a great joy to me when, as those same young adults began to marry and have babies, they invited me into their birthing rooms, called for help with breastfeeding issues, and asked for “mommy advice” as they became parents themselves. (The young man from the praise team encouraged his new wife as she, too, became a breastfeeding mom.) I loved taking my time “in the trenches” of parenting, and sharing what I’d learned, both in successes and in struggles. Breastfeeding awareness was an important part of both my own parenting, and my mentoring of young adults.
Breastfeeding Awareness – Why It’s Important
As my children have gotten older, I realized that it is important to me that they, too, develop hearts of encouragement toward others, and that they have parenting hearts that prioritize the values that are so important to us. Recently, a young mom came to visit and asked me if I’d prefer she go into another room to breastfeed her baby, since we have teenagers and she didn’t want to offend them. At the same time I realized they hadn’t recently been around a nursing mom, I adamantly asserted that it is important to me for my boys to find breastfeeding the “norm” for parents with babies. Because years after we think we’re done with having little ones, breastfeeding awareness is still important to our family, I thought it might be helpful to others to have some intentional goals for raising future breastfeeding parent-advocates, so next week I’ll be sharing some breastfeeding awareness parenting tips with you – be sure to join our newsletter so the post will land in your Inbox hot off the press!
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