Breastfeeding Celebration Week
Breastfeeding Celebration Week will take place during the week 1st – 7th June 2020. The theme will be ‘Promoting and supporting breastfeeding during the Covid-19 pandemic’. Start4Life helps support parents through their breastfeeding journey.
Start4Life, Public Health England’s marketing programme that helps parents adopt healthy behaviours, has launched a national campaign illustrating the suite of digital support tools available to support mums through their first weeks of breastfeeding and beyond.
Breastfeeding provides all the nutrition a baby needs for the first six months and also helps build a strong emotional bond between a mum and her baby. Breast milk also helps boost a baby’s ability to fight illness and infection by passing on the mother’s immune defences. Babies who are not breastfed are more likely to get diarrhoea and respiratory infections.It is not uncommon for mums to experience challenges with breastfeeding and these problems can often be unanticipated, meaning that when they occur mums can tend to give up and instead switch to formula feeding.
Breastfeeding rates suggest that just 44% of mothers are still breastfeeding at 6-8 weeks.[1] Breastfeeding is something that a mother and her baby learn together, and getting the right support can help enable mums to breastfeed for longer.
There are a range of digital offerings to help guide new mums through their first weeks of breastfeeding and beyond, providing help at any time of the day or night and complementing the support and advice from health care professionals and breastfeeding specialists:
- Try the Breastfeeding Friend from Start4Life available on Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Assistant, or on Facebook Messenger
- Visit the Start4Life website for helpful information. You can also sign up to receive weekly emails and videos with advice about pregnancy, birth and parenthood.
- Printed resources such as the Off to the best start leaflet, walletcard and walletcard dispenser are available to order. There are also posters available here.
- A range of downloadable resources that promote these free tools are avaiable – these include TV screensavers for waiting rooms, ready to use editorial for newsletters and local publications and communications toolkit resources to help you spread the word about these resources.
The information provided by all the Start4Life services is NHS-approved and both services are independent of Amazon and Facebook.
If you have any questions at all, please contact [email protected]