You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Qualitative research
Research
Women’s experiences of ceasing to breastfeed: Australian qualitative study
  1. Jennifer Elizabeth Ayton1,
  2. Leigh Tesch2,
  3. Emily Hansen3
  1. 1 School of Medicine College of Health and Medicine, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
  2. 2 School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
  3. 3 School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jennifer Elizabeth Ayton; jennifer.ayton{at}utas.edu.au

Abstract

Objective To investigate mothers’ infant feeding experiences (breastfeeding/formula milk feeding) with the aim of understanding how women experience cessation of exclusive breastfeeding.

Design Multimethod, qualitative study; questionnaire, focus groups and interviews.

Setting Northern and Southern Tasmania, Australia.

Participants 127 mothers of childbearing age from a broad sociodemographic context completed a questionnaire and participated in 22 focus groups or 19 interviews across Tasmania, 2011–2013.

Results Mothers view breastfeeding as ‘natural’ and ‘best’ and formula milk as ‘wrong’ and ‘unnatural’. In an effort to avoid formula and prolong exclusive breastfeeding, mothers will endure multiple issues (eg, pain, low milk supply, mastitis, public shaming) and make use of various forms of social and physical capital; resources such as father/partner support, expressing breast milk, bottles and dummies. The cessation of exclusive breastfeeding was frequently experienced as unexpected and ‘devastating’, leaving mothers with ‘breastfeeding grief’ (a prolonged sense of loss and failure).

Conclusions and implications For many mothers, the cessation of exclusive breastfeeding results in lingering feelings of grief and failure making it harmful to women’s emotional well-being. Reframing breastfeeding as a family practice where fathers/partners are incorporated as breastfeeding partners has the potential to help women negotiate and prolong breastfeeding. Proactive counselling and debriefing are needed to assist women who are managing feelings of ‘breastfeeding grief’.

  • breastfeeding
  • cessation
  • infant formula
  • qualitative research
  • mothers

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi-org.ezproxy.u-pec.fr/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026234

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors JEA and EH designed the study. JEA and LT conducted 90% of the FG/interviews/field notes with participants and collected the data. All authors had full access to all the data, were responsible for the integrity of the data and were involved in the analysis and interpretation of the data. JEA took the lead in writing the manuscript. Both LT and EH provided critical feedback and editing to the final version of the manuscript.

    • Funding This study was funded by the Tasmanian Early Years Foundation 2011–2013.

    • Disclaimer The views expressed are those of the authors and the authors are all independent of the funding body.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Ethics approval Ethics approval was obtained from the Tasmanian Social Science Ethics Committee (Ethics Ref No: H0011838).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Due to the nature of the data (audio recordings and transcripts), we are not able to share the raw data. We are able to share upon request the deidentified transcripts to researchers for the purposes of further analysis and comparison or research translation.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.