Abstract
B
We say “it's about communication.” But what is communication? Sometimes, we go to “Oh, it's a campaign” or “social media.” We resort to these tactics. Communication is the words we use, the pictures we show, the things we search for, the stories we tell, and I want to talk about that framework.
I'm going to start with the concept of a shaky ground story. There is a woman by the name of Kirsten Lodal who operates a poverty alleviation program called LIFT. She talks about telling our shaky ground stories, of narrating points in our lives when we're vulnerable as a way to open our experience to others.
My daughter Rory, who is now 4 years old, was born with duodenal atresia, which means that her stomach and her intestines weren't connected. Obviously as a parent, those are really trying days, and you are concerned first and foremost with the health of your child. But what it also means is that she spent the first 6 weeks of her childhood in the neonatal intensive care unit, on feeding tubes, making breastfeeding impossible.
I remember my wife, who is a wonderful woman and a working mom, having challenges with our first child in terms of breastfeeding. She was not able to do what she wanted to do for her child. So, she did what she could. She expressed her milk, and she expressed it and expressed it. It was a joke that if you opened up our freezer, that's all you saw. And that's the way it was for several months.
Therefore, while I obviously don't have any direct experience with breastfeeding, I have seen what my wife has gone through. Despite having a stable support group, she still experienced challenges, especially at work. This makes me wonder about all the women who have no support. We talk about breastfeeding in this context of something that needs to be accommodated versus something that's natural, something that gets hidden instead of something that's open, something with which we are not forthright.
I even thought to myself, “Was I breastfed? How long was I breastfed?” I don't even know my own breastfeeding story. If we don't know our stories, if we're not telling these stories in a forthright way, how do we expect society to do so?
Part of what I was looking to do in this exploration of breastfeeding and culture and communication was to see what we are sending to each other. What stories are we telling? If you Google “breastfeeding is,” this is what automatically populates: “It's hard.” “It's gross.” “It's disgusting.” And then, finally, “it's best,” and “it's painful.”
This is the message being sent, it is a compilation of all the cultural messages that we are putting out there, and it's not the signal we want to be sending.
Google “breastfeeding isn't.” It isn't “best.” It isn't “always best.” It isn't “working.” It isn't “for me,” and it isn't “for everyone.” This is what people receive. If this is what is out there, then we, as a field in communicating about this issue, aren't doing something right.
When we talk about communications, we often talk about what we want to say to moms and how we want to support them. What I want to talk about is what we want to say to each other and how we get our message out in a way that will change these algorithms.
So, are we missing the big picture? If you Googled breastfeeding and you clicked on image, the majority of the images you have would be a tight shot that takes the mother out of the equation. This creates an artificial visual that is devoid of any representation of the bond between a mother and child during this process.
Literally, I'm talking about the pictures, but metaphorically I'm also trying to convey something else, which is to say, “What is the big picture that we're telling?” And I think it's been fascinating. But what's interesting about all these individual things that are going on is in terms of challenges that we have, Baby-Friendly hospitals, lactation rooms, individual fights that we're waging on the state and community level, in businesses and corporations.
And then you ask, “Well, wait. What is the story we're telling? What is the big picture that we want to tell? What's the framework by which we want to hang these things?” And the reality is that I don't think we have that story. We've come so far as a society to backtrack from something that is so inherently natural.
Is this natural? I searched mainstream media to see how breastfeeding is culturally represented. One picture I found is from Game of Thrones—I think the boy is around 11 years old. The second picture is actually a slightly younger boy from a movie called Grownups.
Now think to yourself, when was the last time you saw an image of breastfeeding being portrayed as a natural process in any kind of media environment, on any television show, in any media, in a magazine where it wasn't a story about breastfeeding?
The reality is that although we know intuitively it is natural, we as a society don't believe that anymore. We think it's unnatural. Why else do we have to hide it? Why else don't we discuss it? Why aren't we sharing these stories in a way that seems, quite frankly, natural?
When we think about supporting the mom or the connection, what are we supporting? We have been doing some work for the last several months with 1,000 Days on this issue more broadly in terms of what kind of nutrition a child needs for the first thousand days of life from conception to 2 years old. We know the science. We know what we want people to be doing, so why aren't they doing it? We did a national survey of moms. We found—and this is what's really sad— 75% of women strongly agreed or very strongly agreed with the statement that people don't appreciate the importance of the human bond between a baby and a mom when it comes to nutrition.
Three-quarters of mothers don't feel support for the most basic act of motherhood. So, then we asked what are we not getting right here in terms of the kind of support. Again, the data was really troubling; 85% said their doctors encouraged breastfeeding; 83% also said formula was fine. Half said it was okay to introduce solid foods at 4 months.
As a husband and being empathetic to my wife, I wanted to be supportive and not push her. We understand the challenge. We understand it is a struggle. Do what you can. But we also have to back off and say, “Well, you know, that's not bad either.” And that's troubling if we really want to advocate for something.
As a spouse, what was interesting is that the same research showed that in terms of people that moms go to or find very helpful as sources of information when they're pregnant about nutritional issues, the spouse was last, behind the Internet, behind the books, behind their own moms.
In terms of support and supporting these conversations beyond the policies and the rooms and the Baby-Friendly hospitals, what about as humans? What are we doing in terms of the storytelling, the conversations we're having, the stories we are sharing, etc.?
“Embarrassed” by Hollie McNish 1 is a brutally honest video from a brave young woman talking about her experience struggling with doing something that should come naturally. It has been viewed 1.2 million times on the Internet. In terms of likes, which means that you saw it and were motivated to actually say, “I liked it,” or “I want to share this with someone,” that number is 13,000. 13,000 out of 1.2 million.
I asked my wife, “What do you think of this?” And she said, “Wow, it's really great, but I don't think I could share it,” for the same reason why she wouldn't feel comfortable breastfeeding in front of her mother-in-law or her father. These are ways in which we're sort of supporting something, but not completely.
While I think it is great to have a place, like a Facebook group, where women can go, the ultimate goal should be actually having a woman post on her normal Facebook page about breastfeeding to everybody, to not have to shelter this in a room or in a hospital or in a conversation, but to have it be public.
How do we change the story? This has become a question of committed moms or non-committed moms, over-the-top moms, moms who were struggling. We let this be a judgment on moms. Not about society, not about the stories that we tell.
How do we shift the conversation that's so entrenched? A couple of ways. Come out of the closet. Now there has been a lot of conversation about other social movements, like the idea of gay marriage and how that is literally sweeping the country. Some people will say, “Oh look, that's a great policy. That's a policy win.” That wasn't a policy win. It was a cultural win.
To go within such a short period of time to change the entire country's view on a topic that polarizing was not done because we had emboldened leaders in the states. That helped. It's because we had people who changed their points of view in a massively profound way.
Earlier, someone shared a story about walking up to someone breastfeeding in church and saying, “Hey, that was great. That was beautiful.” I have never done it, would never have thought about doing it, probably would not be comfortable doing it, but that is something we should be doing.
The idea in terms of beginning to change the dialogue is finding ways to make this more public, to not work within our silos, in our individual groups, but to try to get this out in a way that is connected to each other.
Focus on the overcoming. There was a wonderful Helen Keller quote that says, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” Messaging around a problem actually has some benefits. It often has an uptick in fundraising in the short term. In the long term, it's actually debilitating for any kind of cause because it shows something that seems intractable, and people would actually more likely want to get ahead of a solution. And again, it creates a sort of perpetuation of an image of something that's unnatural, unclean, and unworthy, instead of something natural.
Find unlikely messengers. We know that the idea of preaching to the choir is great if you're trying to get the choir to sing. If you're trying to get people to come and join your choir, you need to change your tune. There is a campaign showing men attempting to breastfeed. The idea here is that you have guys expressing support, albeit it in an over-the-top kind of way. What is probably a more effective campaign is something where the guy didn't have that awkward look when his wife tries to breastfeed in public, where he is being supportive. He's making the gesture in church we just mentioned before.
The unlikely messenger being not only the parent or the spouse in this case, but also the doctor who is sending the mixed signals. The same research that we did for 1,000 Days showed that the majority of women are saying they're getting confusing messages about breastfeeding. They're saying the places where they want to get more information or they wish they could talk to more are people like doctors or even their moms, who they're not feeling comfortable speaking with—or talking to all the time.
We think about who to talk with about this issue. It's not necessarily government messages from a source of authority. It's people to whom moms and society will respond, moving from shock to “Aww.”
When an article was published on Beyoncé breastfeeding in public, it was received as a sensational idea, “I could not believe Beyoncé breastfed in a restaurant. Who can believe that? Oh my God,” versus how the story should be, “Oh, isn't that great. Beyoncé breastfed in the restaurant.” But that's not the way we tell these stories because it doesn't feel natural.
Even the way we tell these stories, the way we promote them, is important. If you have a story to tell about a celebrity, it should not be told in a sensational, over-the-top sort of way, because it's someone doing the most basic, natural thing that could possibly be imagined.
Coming back to the stories we tell, I Googled “doctors encouraging breastfeeding.” What you do not see in the pictures that appear are doctors.
So, what are the stories that we tell? When we have these conversations, do we tell a shaky ground story of what it was like for your mom or when you were a mom or your experience as a husband? Are we sharing those in a way that sounds like, “Hey, I can relate too. That's awful. We should do something about it.”
Are we posting supportive things on Facebook like, “Hey, I made it to 8 months. Isn't that great?” Yes, that it is great. Or, “Hey, I'm having that struggle? Anyone have that same sort of issue?”
We found in the same 1000 Days research something that was really interesting. We asked moms what they'd be willing to do to get involved in nutritional issues for the first thousand days. Eighty-five percent of moms said that they would be willing to connect with other moms and talk about their challenges. More than donating money, more than sponsoring a program for women struggling in the developing world, more than signing a petition, they just wanted to tell a story. They wanted to share their story.
What was also interesting was the correlation between which moms would be more likely to tell that story, and it was moms who themselves expressed some level of confusion and who had come through the fog and now wanted to share their experience with others.
We know through this research as well that there is a direct correlation between doctors' willingness to support breastfeeding and the length of breastfeeding. We know that there is an inverse relationship between when that support isn't there, either by a spouse or by a doctor or by a friend. So we know that this kind of support, these stories that we tell, the images that we use, the language that we share, it all has an impact.
When you tell stories, when you're trying to persuade the next person to do something, will you just go at them with a fact, or will you actually say, “Let me tell you a personal experience?” That's how we relate as humans. It's how we change behaviors. It's how culture changes.
I want to commend everyone for the incredible work that we're all doing on something that's so important, something that quite frankly took me time to realize in terms of how precious it is, and how strong a woman has to be to do something that should be so natural and that we shamefully have made unnatural as a society.
Footnotes
Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.