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Home › Articles › The Working, Nursing Mother › Nursing Mother, Working Mother

Nursing Mother, Working Mother

The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to Work

By Gale Pryor

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The Confident Parent
Successful breastfeeding not only tends to produce healthy, happy babies, it also creates confident mothers. Marianne Neifert, a pediatrician and mother of five, saw this in her practice. "I began to recognize the impact of early parenting experiences, such as breastfeeding, on long-term parental competency. A woman who received necessary support and information, which enabled her to breastfeed as long as she had planned, tended to look back on her experience with pride and satisfaction. Her confidence radiated to other areas of mothering, and she viewed herself as a competent and successful parent."

"Breastfeeding nudges other aspects of maternal behavior."
--Niles Newton

Breastfeeding Breastfeeding's gift of confidence comes as you nurture your baby with your own body and mind. Parents who use formula often rely completely on manufacturers' and doctors' advice, and so develop little faith in their own judgment. And, whereas a breastfeeding mother generally leaves milk composition, temperature, cleanliness, and intake to nature, for the formula-feeding parent these are all subjects for worry and argument, which further erode her confidence.

Parenting styles differ enormously from family to family, and many different kinds of families produce wonderful children. Whatever their parenting style, though, mothers and fathers who are confident in themselves as parents tend to raise equally self-assured children. These parents not only teach self-esteem by modeling it, but because they are self-confident they are also empathetic. They respond to their children's needs, and thereby help their children to feel secure, trusting, and confident in themselves and their world.


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