Abstract
Experts say that of all the factors influencing a woman's decision to breastfeed, the two most critical sources of information are from healthcare providers and friends and family. 3 That's where organizations like Mocha Moms and others that provide education and support can make a difference long before a mother sets foot in the hospital. African American mothers, organized, empowered. We need to be the role models for our sisters and brothers who do not understand, who need to be educated and supported and lifted up, and need to be shown what to do and how to do it. Each one needs to teach one.
I would submit to you that it is time to think more out of the box, and maybe in some rather unconventional ways. It's time to go places you have not gone before, to reach out to mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, in the most unlikely and most naturally occurring places, in the churches, supermarkets, in the beauty shops, on the playgrounds, on the Internet, on Facebook and Twitter.
Mocha Moms, Inc., is a national, nonprofit support organization for stay-at-home mothers of color with 100 chapters in 29 states. Our mothers are primarily African American, mostly professional women with college and graduate degrees who have worked for some period of time and at some point made the choice to stay at home to focus on the raising of their children. At Mocha Moms we call this a season, for we know that a stay-at-home mom in January could very well be a working mom in September. During this “season,” we have chosen to support each other on this journey, a journey that is over the top rewarding, thrilling, and fascinating, yet, as we all know, also challenging and sometimes frustrating.
As black stay-at-home mothers, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to choose to stay at home, particularly in this day and age. Historically, large numbers of African American mothers have not had the opportunity to make that choice. Our mothers worked. They worked because they had to, to keep food on the table and to make ends meet. Our ancestors were often the maids and the cooks, the seamstresses and the factory workers, the women who cared for other people's children. During the 1950s, when many white women were heeding the call to stay at home and television shows featuring characters such as June Cleaver, wearing her dress, high heels, and pearls in the kitchen on “Leave it to Beaver," to "Father Knows Best" and "Dennis the Menace" depicted the stereotypical stay-at-home mother, black women continued to work.
Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s: the children of the very mothers who worked had grown up and gone to college. Some had gotten graduate degrees and gone on to climb the corporate ladder. With a steady growth in the black middle class, greater opportunities for college-educated men of color, and a measured level of success having been achieved for many of these educated women, a window began to crack open for mothers of color in larger numbers to make a choice that would otherwise have been unheard of. Staying at home to focus on raising one's children, something that had been commonplace in other communities and a luxury that had been thought of as something reserved only for white women, was becoming attainable by more two-parent families of color than ever before.
In 1997, when four mothers in Maryland met and decided that they wanted to connect with other women who stayed at home and looked like them in other parts of the country, Mocha Moms was born. On a very basic level, the organization existed to set the record straight, that there are in fact two-parent African American families in which the mother makes the choice to stay at home and that there are also families in which marriages not only thrive, they are celebrated. One of the founders of Mocha Moms, Cheli English-Figaro, happened to be on the local board of La Leche League and brought to the organization a deep desire to promote the benefits of breastfeeding among our members. With that, and other goals in mind, the founders created pillars for our organization that include community activism and volunteerism, the education of our children, a strong commitment to supporting our marriages, and a dedication to the health and wellness of ourselves, our families, and our communities.
In those early years, Mocha Moms and La Leche League were connected at the hip, and many of our mothers who had never breastfed before became educated about something about which they knew little. Several of our original members actually ended up participating in a book called The Breastfeeding Café, 4 in which mothers share the joys, challenges, and secrets of nursing, and a culture of breastfeeding within our organization that started from the very beginning was shared with new mothers who came along.
Most of the mothers in our organization join because of the unique sisterhood, but also because they want to be stronger, smarter, and more confident as they raise their children. These are mothers who are eager and open to exchanging information and learning what they can so their children can have the best of what this world has to offer. As a result, many of them have breastfed or are currently breastfeeding their children, some because they were exposed early to breastfeeding role models, such as a mother, sister, aunt or friend. Others, probably the majority, are first-generation breastfeeding moms who have benefitted from being educated about the wide range of benefits to their children. What really helps is that mothers meet with other mothers on a regular basis who support them in their choices and help them in making sound decisions. We see our friends and fellow members on a regular basis at mothers' support group meetings breastfeeding our children, and we talk about the joys and challenges.
The decision to breastfeed, for me, more than 15 years ago, was not a difficult one. In fact, I never considered it a decision at all. I just saw it as a natural, normal activity that mothers were supposed to do when they had children. My mother breastfed me. Her mother breastfed her. I had a steely resolve, and even in the hospital, after giving birth to my first child and struggling with the pain of my daughter latching on in those first few bleary eyed days, my resolve to breastfeed did not change when a nurse suggested I give my daughter a bottle of glucose water just to get her used to sucking. Never mind that sucking on a bottle is quite different than latching on and sucking from a breast. Even when I left the hospital, on three separate occasions with that infamous formula-sponsored hospital diaper bag, there was nothing that swayed me from my determination to breastfeed.
That's because breastfeeding was a part of my family culture long before I even took notice. As a child I remember my mother sharing her breastfeeding stories. She talked about how she enjoyed the bonding with me, how she thoroughly enjoyed the experience and lamented my weaning, and how she knew that the breastmilk that I received helped to make me healthy and strong. My mother passed away 15 years ago, but I remember the pride on her face every time she shared a breastfeeding story, such as the time right after my birth in 1965 that she and my father searched high and low for a breast pump and had to drive miles away to meet with a woman from an organization called La Leche who gave her a manual pump. One of my most poignant and powerful memories was of my younger sister who was born nearly 6 weeks premature at 4 lbs 5 oz in 1976. She was sick and weak, with pneumonia and congestive heart failure, and required many medications to help keep her alive. My mother, weak with pneumonia herself, left the hospital a week later and unfortunately had to leave my sister in the hospital for necessary round-the-clock care. During my sister's 4 weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, there were moments that doctors believed she would not survive. My family was preparing for the worst. But my mother was determined that her daughter would survive, and she wanted her to drink breastmilk exclusively. So she went out of her way to rent a hospital-grade breast pump and pumped breastmilk religiously at night for several weeks. My father, a professor at Temple University, would leave the house at 7 a.m. to deliver daily breastmilk to the Temple University Hospital neonatal clinic. Soon after, my sister started to gain weight and become a healthy baby. Doctors, and my mother, were convinced that my mother's breastmilk was the liquid gold that saved my sister's life.
But unfortunately the family culture I have just described, the one that shares and cherishes the beauty and the great benefits of breastfeeding, has not taken hold in the African American community as many of us would like. That's because African American women have a much steeper road to climb when it comes to breastfeeding, and some believe its roots go as far back as slavery, when our ancestors were “wet nurses,” forced to breastfeed the master's children, often to the exclusion of their own. That created a negative breastfeeding cultural legacy that some believe still permeates our culture today. The breastfeeding mountain is fraught with a whole host of other issues that contribute to a very complex problem for black mothers, including their tendency to return to work earlier after childbirth than their white counterparts and their greater likelihood to work in environments that don't support breastfeeding and with unsympathetic employers. Then there are the stereotypes about breastfeeding, the notion that breasts are merely sexual objects, and few, if any positive, black images of breastfeeding in the media or in our communities. Add to that the aggressive, overt, covert, and subliminal advertising by formula companies that capitalize on any opportunity to promote their products by sharing a sample, a coupon, a diaper bag, or feeding expert, and you've got a very dangerous mix.
Ground zero for many mothers is at the hospital. That's the place where, in no matter what neighborhood you live, you should be able to receive high-quality health care from knowledgeable and supportive medical professionals, and those hospitals need to be “Baby friendly,” with hospital rooms that accommodate both mother and baby and a deep commitment to removing the culture that sends mixed messages when a mother leaves the hospital with a gift from a formula company. I read recently through an organization called MomsRising that in Washington, DC, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital became the first maternity facility in the entire Washington Metropolitan area to be designated a “Baby-Friendly” hospital. That is great news. But across town in an area of the district of mostly African American families, there is no “Baby-Friendly” hospital, and counselors are tasked with convincing African American mothers to even try breastfeeding. 5
Breast is Best. That's been the “it” slogan for quite some time. It's a powerful and simple statement, rhythmic, rhyming, with great use of alliteration, but it's a message that doesn't resonate in the black community like it should. The problem among African American mothers is far too complex and requires a multilayered approach that includes education, encouragement, and support from everyone from the healthcare profession, from their communities, from family and friends, and through sisterhoods with organizations, nonprofit and otherwise, grassroots, and advocacy.
In our organization, through our nationwide regional and local chapter structure, mothers are supporting each other as they raise their children and make a difference in their communities. At mothers' support group meetings, at moms-only get togethers, and through a wide range of grassroots efforts, they are educating through the power of the tongue and finding powerful ways to communicate important messages about the education, health, and well-being of mothers, children, and families. Topics are sometimes broad, but often specific: how to help their babies sleep through the night and, yes, Beyoncé breastfeeding in public, a proud moment for black women.
Several years ago we established a community service initiative called "Closing the Gap in Minority Health, Prosperity and Achievement" to address the many gaps and disparities that exist, and so here's what we are doing to make a difference in the lives of others:
Through a cutting-edge literacy initiative called "Boys Booked on Barbershops," we are setting up reading nooks in barbershops and beauty shops to foster a love of reading. To date, we have set up more than 100 reading nooks across the country. Fathers are reading to their sons, sons are reading to fathers, boys are reading to barbers. Through our partnership with Donate Life America, we are promoting the importance of organ and tissue donation. Through our partnership with Be the Match, we are telling mothers about the importance of cord blood donation, particularly among African American women. Last year, we signed a partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency so our mothers could gain valuable information and fight for cleaner air, and we joined with the Susan G. Komen Foundation to educate women about breast cancer, how and why it disproportionately affects African American women. This year, we were honored to become stakeholders that partner with The White House on various events and participate in forums on the environment, the economy, and health. We've also established a new partnership with the Girl Scouts to mentor girls and promote an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math. And this year, our mothers are realizing that their message has global reach as we work with the UN Foundation's Shot@Life campaign to promote access to vaccines in undeveloped countries. In September our mothers will take to the schools to empower African American parents as advocates for their children as part of our new initiative, "Occupy Schools."
When we send an e-mail to our database, some 10,000 people receive it. When we post a message on Facebook, we have 9,000 plus fans. When we tweet on Twitter, it has the potential to reach our nearly 4,000 followers. Many who remember those old legendary Breck commercials remember the slogan, “If you tell two friends, then they'll tell two friends, and so on and so on and so on.”
I say all of this to convey the power of our collective voice as African American mothers. We may not be handing out pamphlets, or pushing a slogan, but we are talking, in places that many of you have never been, during private moments in which most of you have no access. The messages that we share with each other are powerful and pervasive, and they are messages that can make a difference and turn the tide.
Increasingly, health professionals, leaders, decision-makers, and policy makers are going to need to turn to grassroots organizations and the very women who walk in those shoes to get out the important messages about breastfeeding. As African American mothers, we need to do our part and be the role models that so many women so desperately need. The issue for us is not whether we are going to breastfeed in public. The issue is whether we are going to breastfeed at all. There is much at stake and much work to do.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Cheli English-Figaro and the National Board of Mocha Moms, Inc. for their invaluable assistance.
Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist. The author owns stock in GE Corporation.