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Home › Articles › The Working, Nursing Mother › Nursing Mother, Working Mother: The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to Work

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 flood of relaxation that comes with the let-down of milk is made to order for stressed-out working mothers. You may find that, after nursing your baby at the end of the day, you have trouble remembering what had so vexed you at work just a few hours earlier. Your slate is wiped clean, and you can more easily and calmly attend to your family and yourself for the rest of the evening. A pediatrician comments, "My greatest release after coming home is putting up my feet and nursing the baby. We both feel wonderful. It is my unwinding time."

Working Woman For the typical nursing and working mother, the most important benefit of breastfeeding is that day after day it confirms that she is irreplaceable to her baby. Most women who decide to breastfeed do so for their babies' sakes. Only later do they discover that it's good for them, too. For working mothers, breastfeeding is a friend, a constant ally against the anxiety that comes from having to leave their babies in someone else's care for most of the day, and wondering if they are good-enough mothers. For your baby, after all, the babysitter may be very nice, but only Mama has a soft, sweet-smelling breast and warm, sweet-tasting milk. And when you pick up the baby and nurse at the end of a work day, you and she are immediately a couple again. There is no "getting to know you again" period for a working mother and her nursing baby.

A physician says, "Nursing has been a wonderful way to reconnect with my children while working. My daughter's favorite time to nurse is right after I get home at the end of the day. Even though she now goes all day without nursing, she gets a ittle frantic once I get home, and she really wants to nurse. I have found that nursing puts life into perspective. The sense of accomplishment, bonding, and wellbeing that I get from nursing makes me less anxious about having to leave her during the day."

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