"It's Like Going Home To Emptiness" Becoming a Mother and Providing Mother's Milk to Premature Infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: A Latina Mother's Perspective.

“Painful, yet Beautiful, Moments”: Pathways Through Infant Feeding and Dynamic Conceptions of Breastfeeding Success

“…An informal role-making stage begins after a number of weeks or months, when a mother begins to trust her intuition and judgment over other experts in her life, followed by a personal identity stage, in which a mother is fully congruent and satisfied with her maternal role (Mercer, 1985). For the experience of "becoming a breastfeeding mother," the stages are ostensibly the same; in fact, other qualitative breastfeeding studies have utilized this framework extensively (e.g., Dreesmann, 2014;Flacking et al, 2007;Henderson, 2015).…”

“…It provides optimal nutrition for infants and young children and sets the stage for healthy development throughout the life course for childbearing people and their families (Victora et al, 2016;World Health Organization, 2003). Breastfeeding also represents a significant facet of the developmental transition to parenthood for many mothers (Flacking et al, 2007;Henderson, 2015;Mercer, 1985;Whipps et al, 2018). And as a central developmental facet during this transition, it is necessarily situated in a social, cultural, and historical context.…”

“…As theorists from multiple disciplines have written, these infant feeding experiences also represent crucial, and understudied, aspects of the transition to motherhood, or matrescence, for those who are birthing children for the first time (Mercer, 1985;Raphael, 1975). How a mother moves through infant feeding challenges, and the degree of "success" that mother has in meeting those goals, can dramatically alter how both they and their social sphere come to see them as a new mother (Dreesmann, 2014;Henderson, 2015;Mercer, 1985). It is also crucial that these issues are explored within a diverse sample of U.S. mothers: Differences in the meaning attached to infant feeding choices are often driven by cultural and historical factors, which vary dramatically by race, ethnicity, geography, economic privilege, and age in the United States (Anstey et al, 2017;Pithia et al, 2021;Smith, 2018).…”