This is a natural thing, why can I not do this?: The impact of early breastfeeding difficulties on first-time mothers

Although there is now a considerable body of literature which seeks to understand breastfeeding by exploring the perspectives of breastfeeding mothers, knowledge of how breastfeeding difficulties are managed in the very early post-partum period, and the impact of these difficulties on mothers, is still limited. In this paper we use a social constructionist version of interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the experiences of eight first-time mothers who struggled with breastfeeding in the first post-partum week. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and audio-diaries. The over-arching theme identified was of a tension between the participants’ lived, embodied experience of struggling to breastfeed and the cultural construction of breastfeeding as ‘natural’ and hence relatively trouble-free.