麻豆传媒

IT IS almost two decades since the UK鈥檚 National Health Service launched its 鈥淏reast is Best鈥� slogan. Yet despite campaigns and relatively generous maternity leave, the number of mothers who breastfeed after 12 months in the UK is still less than 1 per cent 鈥� one of the world鈥檚 lowest rates.

These figures jumped out at Kate Boyer when she moved to the UK from the US in 2008, giving birth to Jake nine months later. Boyer, a human geographer at Cardiff University, wondered if the geographical variation in parenting cultures might influence their decision-making more than people believed and help explain why some policies targeting new mothers succeed while others fail.

Since then, Boyer has crawled over parenting blogs, forums and policy texts, and surveyed and interviewed new mothers in London and south-east England. Her decision to concentrate on women when many men share childcare was pragmatic: women still do most care and only women perform a key aspect of parenting, breastfeeding. The result is Spaces and Politics of Motherhood, looking at how the physical and cultural spaces women inhabit shape the mothers they become.

The book is a fascinating challenge, asking us to see parenthood through a new lens. It tackles the difficulties of mobility with a baby, for example, and how that influences journeys mothers make, in turn affecting how they interact with others. Take the unwieldly 鈥渁ssemblages鈥� of mothers, babies and prams. Not only is it difficult to physically get from A to B, many of Boyer鈥檚 new mothers described their anxiety, epitomised by the possibility of being trapped in an enclosed public space with a screaming baby. All this has implications for policy-makers because public reactions can be off-putting, she says, and 鈥渟erve as a disincentive to journeying outside the home鈥�.

The bulk of the book focuses on breastfeeding, which Boyer says is far less of a choice than health campaigns make out. Not all women can afford to sit in a warm, inviting, breastfeeding-friendly cafe. Almost half her interviewees had some kind of negative experience, from people making tutting noises to being glared at.

She also highlights experiences of pain while breastfeeding and perceived poor milk flow, for which women felt underprepared and which some saw as their bodies working against them.

鈥淲omen can feel shame for breastfeeding, and they can also be shamed for not breastfeeding鈥�

It is a theme picked up in Social Experiences of Breastfeeding, which Boyer co-edited. Drawing on seminars funded by the UK鈥檚 Economic and Social Research Council, the authors seek to bridge the gap between the professionals keen to increase breastfeeding rates and the women actually doing it. I found the chapter by Dawn Leeming, a psychologist at the University of Huddersfield, very insightful. Many new mothers say they feel guilty not breastfeeding, but a less-recognised, arguably more destructive, emotion is shame. As Leeming writes: 鈥淣ot only can women feel shame for breastfeeding, they can also be shamed for not breastfeeding.鈥�

Although there is overlap between the emotions, shame can involve a negative judgement about the whole person, leaving a woman feeling powerless and at greater risk of depression, writes Leeming. 鈥淛ust because breastfeeding is natural doesn鈥檛 mean it鈥檚 obvious what to do鈥� is a message that needs promoting, she adds, or women will go on seeing breastfeeding problems as 鈥減ersonal shortcomings鈥�.

Parenting books, often standing in as role models for mothers, can create idealised expectations and undermine their resolve to breastfeed. In another chapter, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, shared her work on parenting books that promote strict routines: only 20 per cent of mothers managed to comply, and failure was linked to increased anxiety and depression.

The training and support to fix all this won鈥檛 come cheap, and neither book considers the cost or economic benefits of the outlay. Even so, there is real food for thought. After all, researching the health benefits of practices like breastfeeding is fine, but without studying the social forces shaping it, change seems doomed.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he shape of motherhood鈥�