Amidst a decline in the rate of mothers who are breastfeeding, a local paediatrician is advocating that more supportive workplace policies be made available to mothers in postnatal care.
According to paediatrician and executive director of the Breastfeeding and Child Nutrition Foundation, Dr Alison Bernard, breastfeeding is crucial to postnatal care and offers various health benefits to both mother and child, however very few mothers in Barbados breastfeed exclusively.
“Less than 20 per cent and actually that’s from 2012,” Bernard explained, noting that the rate plummeted between 2024 and 2025.
This decline is attributed to several reasons, the most prevalent of which came down to the demands of work and the lack of facilities at the workplace.
Referencing the results of a 2016 study done in collaboration with the University of the West Indies, Bernard noted that 40 per cent of mothers cited a return to work as a reason for not breastfeeding or alternating with formulas.
“I’m putting a plug here for breastfeeding workplace policy,” she said. “I know that we’ve had a bit of an extension with longer maternity leave but in the context of improving breastfeeding rates, I am not sure how much it will improve it. I think it’s a step in the right direction and maybe we can lobby for some more.” Bernard emphasised that a Breastfeeding Workplace Policy which looks to create an environment where mothers can pump their milk in a safe and comfortable space, can and should be possible in this day and age regardless of the place of occupation. “It’s difficult if you don’t have an environment where you’re allowed to pump your milk off and it’s safe and clean. Mothers I’ve come across have said they’ve had to pump off the milk in the bathroom and then give that to their child. So, rather than trying to store it, they just pump it off in the sink.
“We shouldn’t, in the 21st century, have to be doing that as mothers. There should be spaces, doesn’t matter if you’re a small, medium or large organisation. A small organisation would make a slight adjustment for the mother,” she added.
Bernard’s comments came after the Healthy Parenting Expo, held yesterday at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre in Two Mile Hill, St. Michael.
The specialist explained that a significant percentage of the workforce in the country consists of mothers and women in their reproductive years, which makes a fair argument for the accommodation
of mothers in the stage of post-natal care.
Additionally, she stressed that this is an area that needs to be prioritised, given the crucial benefits of exclusively breastfeeding newborns, especially in the first six months.
“If you are breastfed and if you do it exclusively for six months and then continue on, it lowers rates of respiratory illness, ear infections, gastroenteritis. Breastfeeding is protective against sudden infant death syndrome, it decreases the risk of heart disease.
“It protects not just the baby, but the mother as well. It protects against hypertension and diabetes and decreased risk of breast cancers. For every year a mother breastfeeds, her rate of the risk of developing breast cancer, even invasive breast cancer, is about nearly five per cent,” she said, adding that it also helps with bonding time.
“Now, I’m not saying that if you formula feed, your baby is not going to bond with you, but the impact is greater with breastfeeding,” she clarified.
Along with the need for improved policies, Bernard also called for breastfeeding in Barbados to be more normalised.
“I think formula feeding is more normalised and we need to get back to breastfeeding. I know people think if you are breastfeeding it means you can’t afford formula. The ones that I encounter are mostly mid and high income, and I want to believe that lower income mothers are breastfeeding as well, but perhaps not as exclusively as they need to be,” she added.
(JRN)
