A history of the Australian Breastfeeding Association, and a consideration of its contribution to health literacy over its first 37 years as an adult education provider

The Nursing Mothers’ Association, founded in 1964, changed its name to the Nursing Mothers’ Association of Australia in 1969 and it has been known as the Australian Breastfeeding Association since 2001. The Association introduced a highly effective program for educating mothers about breastfeeding. Its progressive adult education aimed to assist the mother to function in society, to learn by experience, reflect on that experience and thus attain a high level of critical health literacy in relation to infant nutrition. This thesis investigates how this program operated in the wider context of modern adult education principles. Using a qualitative approach to archival and oral history sources, this thesis identifies the education model devised by the Association and establishes its effectiveness in terms of health literacy in the mother-to-mother education about breastfeeding, in the training of Association counsellors and in the education of the community. It argues that the key to the success of the Association was that the Foundation Members, led by Mary Paton, devised a new model of educating mothers about infant nutrition and particularly breastfeeding: specifically, they simultaneously established a community of learners and a community of practice. The core principles of the Association’s maternal educational model were first, mother-to-mother education; second, valuing the experience of the learner; and third, encouraging a critical view of mothering and breastfeeding. The thesis establishes that the Foundation Members were particularly influenced by Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” mother, and the identification of the state of late pregnancy and the post-partum period as a time of “primary maternal preoccupation”, when mothers most needed the support of other mothers. They questioned the prevailing views about the “scientific mother” and they were vehemently opposed to the minimalist mothering implicit in the modernist approach to infant nutrition. The Association gave voice to mothers’ intuitive knowledge of a baby’s well-being and provided them with information that was not only correct, but understandable. It used the authentic voice of the Australian mother in its fully researched publications allowing the mother to choose for herself approaches that suited her own circumstances. Regarding knowledge as fluid and ever changing, its publications were constantly under revision. There were the training of the volunteer counsellors to facilitate the maternal education, the dedifferentiation and simplification of the program, a new understanding of how groups can support their members and the development of a new discourse of infant nutrition which have empowered mothers not only to successfully breastfeed, but also to change society’s attitudes to breastfeeding. This education model has successfully fostered mothers’ interactive and critical health literacy in infant nutrition, specifically in the area of breastfeeding, contributing to increased breastfeeding rates, and a wide acceptance of breastfeeding in the Australian community.