The End Of Our Breastfeeding Journey? A Devastating Nursing Strike

Our breastfeeding journey has had a lot of ups and downs; if you’ve followed our story for a while you’ll know that the start was extremely rocky. But after a lot of perseverance, we seemed to be getting along nicely. Until suddenly, it all stopped.

I didn’t know that nursing strikes were a thing, really. Basically your baby or your toddler just stops boobing. They don’t cut down gradually, they just stop nursing. There are many reasons why a nursing strike can occur, including teething, illness, a change in routine, a change in the mother’s scent or because they’ve had a negative association. Like maybe they’ve bitten you and you’ve reacted and it scared them.

I didn’t really know that was a thing until last week. Babybel had a sickness bug; in fact we both had a sickness bug. And she was being sick, she was being sick a lot. Obviously when they’re ill, they tend to go off their food. So she was only breastfeeding, all she had was milk and she was just throwing it up everywhere.

Then she developed a cold and a cough and she just stopped boobing. Whenever she’s been ill before, breastfeeding has been her comfort, it’s been the thing that gets her through. And she just stopped.

She would not latch. She would push the boob away. She would say no. She just wasn’t interested in it at all. I was just thought ‘oh, my God. What is this?’ The first time she did it I was like, okay, you’re not feeling very well, so maybe you’re not hungry at the moment. You’ve got no appetite. We’ll wait until a bit later. But then she did it again and at this point, I was starting to get a little bit uncomfortable because she’d been boobing loads before because she wasn’t feeling brilliant and then she’d stopped. But I was obviously still producing milk, trying to keep up with the previous demand. We went to bed that night without having a feed; in fact she hadn’t had one since lunchtime.

I just kept waking up in the night really uncomfortable and almost drowning in my own breast milk. It was terrible, it was leaking everywhere. All I kept thinking was ‘is this is the end? Are we now done?’ It was actually quite scary because as much as breastfeeding takes up a lot of my time, and sometimes I wish she would boob less. I don’t think either of us are ready for it to end completely, and especially not that abruptly.

There I was on Google and realised that we could be experiencing a nursing strike. I spoke to a group of ladies who are part of Boobingit.com and asked if anyone had experienced it and there were some that had experienced. They gave us a few tips, so I thought I’d share that with you guys to let you know what we’ve been trying.

The first thing is obviously to just keep offering the boob as much as possible. We spent a lot of time just snuggled up on the sofa. Neither of us were feeling particularly well and she just had access to boob.

This meant a lot of skin to skin too which seemed to really, really help. And the other thing that people recommended was having a bath together. We didn’t actually do that as I found that the snuggling on the sofa seemed to encourage her to try feeding again, kind of going back to basics, like going back to the newborn stage. She had as much access to boob as she wanted and she did feed a tiny bit.

And then she refused again, and then she fed a tiny bit more and then she fed again and suddenly she was back to normal. And now she is back to boobing like she was when she was five months old. So I think she’s trying to make up for the fact that she went over 24 hours without breastfeeding. But it was really scary. I thought we were actually coming to the end of the journey already.

Obviously, if she’s ready to wean, then that’s fine. I’m not going to keep forcing her to boob. Not that you can force a child to boob, that’s not a thing! But it was scary. She wasn’t eating any solid food, so that was really, really scary. She was literally surviving on water. But she is back to boobing now and I’m so relieved.

But if your baby or child does suddenly start refusing the boob, it’s not necessarily the end of your journey. It is quite possibly a nursing strike. Because from everything that I found out over the last week, they don’t just suddenly stop when they’re finished with breastfeeding, they do cut down gradually. So if they do suddenly stop, it’s probably a nursing strike and there are ways that you can get it back together. If you’re worried about your supply, you can still pump. I didn’t pump because I did it for ten weeks when she was first born and I can’t bring myself to do it again, but I did hand express just to make myself a little bit more comfortable. And the amount of milk I wasted through hand expressing was devastating.

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