Shamantha Iyer, 32, got back to work after serving her three-month maternity leave . Like all young working mothers , she too had no choice but to stop breastfeeding her baby. With her office 35 km away, a trip home during lunch hour to breastfeed her son simply seemed impossible, especially in the city traffic. “The nanny at home gives him powdered milk, as it is the only option left. I was not too comfortable with expression of breast milk and storing it,” says Shamantha, a techie who works near Brookfield.

For Joylin Anne, 29, an HR professional from Vasanth Nagar, it was a different problem . “I did not have sufficient milk when my baby was just three months old. I had to depend on bottled milk. But my gynecologist said that breast milk supply was low because I was not feeding the baby enough,” she says. Joylin got back to work after four months of delivery.

While the guidelines of World Health Organization make it clear that a newborn must be fed mother’s milk for 24 months, many Indian mothers do away with it at the fourth month itself. Reason: nuclear families, hectic work, peer pressure at work place.

Express and store milk:

Dr Ravneet Joshi, lactation specialist with Manipal Hospital, says the best method for working mothers is to express milk and refrigerate it.

“Many young mothers think they will lose their vigour if they breastfeed their infants. It’s just a myth. A breastfeeding mother will lose over 500 calories everyday and that way she gets back to pre-pregnancy weight and fitness ,” says Dr Joshi. She says there are chances of children being overfed when they get used to drinking bottled milk. “This can lead to obesity as they tend to consume more. The right amount of body weight increase can be seen with breastfeeding,” she says.

Milk is produced due to hormonal changes. Unless there is demand, there won’t be supply, say doctors. “Mothers must feed their babies often to generate more milk,” says Dr Joshi, herself a young mother who feeds her baby through expression of milk.

Need more awareness:

It’s a worrying trend, says Dr Kishore Kumar, managing director of Cloudnine hospital, on young mothers giving up breastfeeding. “There is a need to create awareness among not just young mothers , but also policy makers in the private sector. With only a three month maternity leave, working mothers end up going for work, leaving their kids with caretakers . But that affects the child’s growth as the mother’s milk is essential for at least the first six months. Some multinational companies do help their women employees by offering them cabs to go home for breastfeeding, but not all firms follow that,” says Dr Kumar.