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Midwives magazine: Issue 4 :: 2011

Author: Suzanne Colson
Publisher: Hale Publishing
ISBN: 9780984503933
Price: £14.99

Review by Ali White

At last, this long-awaited book has arrived to challenge our assumptions about what constitutes effective breastfeeding support.

It is a summary of Colson’s PhD work into neonatal feeding reflexes and their role in achieving self-attachment at the breast. It aims to shift the paradigm away from the belief that breastfeeding is a learned skill that has to be taught, towards an approach that emphasises the innate capacity of mothers and babies to breastfeed. Colson calls this approach ‘biological nurturing’ because it is underpinned by both nature and nurture.

The book’s content makes logical sense and is compelling to read, with Colson starting off with the nature/nurture debate. She describes how her research work evolved and develops the theory of biological nurturing, detailing its key features: primitive neonatal reflexes; mother’s posture; baby’s position in relation to mother; the role of gravity; and behavioural states in baby and mother.

However, despite its fresh approach and undoubted success in challenging the current paradigm, the book is not an easy read. The language is at times awkward, with sentences too long to grasp first time. The contents page would benefit from bolder chapter titles, distinct from the subheadings, so that you can see at a glance how the book unfolds. Perhaps a bullet point summary at the end of each chapter would have been useful to aid clarity. The photographs would have really enhanced the words if only they had been larger and in colour.

Despite this, the book has a powerful intuitive appeal, as well as being the only approach to breastfeeding support that is truly evidence based. It has made me re-examine my practice, broadened my understanding of how babies feed and shown me how I can respond to a mother’s learning style.

This book is an absolute must for anyone embarking on providing breastfeeding support at whatever level – lay or professional – and I am quite sure that, at some point in the future, it will come to represent a turning point in the history of breastfeeding support.