Breastfeeding is Beautiful
Be a Champion for Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding is beautiful—and it is challenging. That’s why moms and caregivers need health professionals who can support them on every step of their journey. Below, find three articles on being breastfeeding champions.
- Use a conversational approach: Meaningful education starts with individualized, compassionate conversations rather than didactic instructions. Watch this webinar on improving conversations, or read an article that sums up six strategies.
- Respect cultural differences: Breastfeeding is a personal choice informed by social and cultural factors. Here, find best practices for engaging in respectful conversations that meet families where they are.
- Remember, mom’s sleep matters too. Support new mothers trying to breastfeed by talking to them about how to manage their stress and sleep habits during the early months of care. Find ideas here.
Tackle Twin Improvements
Supporting safe sleep and breastfeeding can help more babies reach year one. NICHQ’s video quiz, How Safe Sleep Savvy Are You, is an interactive, visual tool to prompt discussions around safe sleep recommendations. Now, thanks to recent updates, the quiz can encourage conversations about safe breastfeeding as well. Use it to inspire your conversations with families, whether in the hospital, through home-visiting services, or during a well-child visit.
Access the updated version here.
Spread the Word
Join us and fellow breastfeeding advocates celebrating on social media all month long. We’ve pulled together a social media toolkit with ready-to-use graphics and sample social posts to help you get started. Download the toolkit, share on your social accounts, and tag @NICHQ so we can amplify your reach.
As you help us spread the word, please remember, breastfeeding is a personal decision. Outreach should always recognize that every family’s situation is unique and their own.
Be a Children's Health Change Agent
Like you, we have a shared passion for improving the health of every child in every state across the country. Join us in our mission. Take action to make a difference for children now and in the decades to come:
- Donate. Give a gift that supports NICHQ’s initiatives that touch millions of children’s lives. Every dollar raised benefits the health and well-being of children.
- Sign up. Join our network of thousands of other subscribers. We deliver resources, articles and webinars right to your inbox so that we can drive change in children’s health outcomes together.
- Spread the word about children’s health initiatives, advocacy and the stories that inspire systems-level change. Share our monthly message on Facebook and Twitter.
What People Are Saying
Working with NICHQ has been a very rewarding experience … A partnership with families has been a hallmark of what the Maternal and Child Health Bureau has done for years, but NICHQ really demonstrated how important those partnerships are.
Working with NICHQ, I have been able to assist communities all over New York State with their breastfeeding care efforts. The NICHQ staff is experienced, organized and thorough, ensuring each interpersonal interaction is maximally engaging and productive. Because of the way change efforts are organized, I find myself learning new procedural and educational techniques, and even more about my own field! Thanks to NICHQ for including me on this interesting ride.
Our work to improve children’s vision and eye health in the U.S. has always centered on big ideas and massive systems shifts, thus we found the process of continuous quality improvement to be an exciting new way to tackle the challenges we face in our work.
NICHQ’s role in coordinating these grantees working on improving sickle cell care and making an agenda that at least tries to push for improved care for all of these patients is very important. The role has been not been very well-served and NICHQ, in my mind, has the experience and staff expertise to bring to sickle cell disease the sort of rigor in methods development and analysis of outcomes to move the bar of caring for people with sickle cell disease several notches up.
For me, NICHQ is uniquely positioned to support complex, system-based efforts to improve child health and healthcare, locally and on a national scale. NICHQ helped my teams succeed by supporting collaboration, information management, and continuous learning. With NICHQ's help, the whole of our work was much greater than the sum of each of our individual efforts!
Participation in this project has uncovered new desires for me personally, and for our hospital and community. We are making progress in the little and big things, and changing the way a baby is welcomed into the world step by step. I am so thankful for the Best Fed Beginnings team, the opportunity to gain insight from other hospitals, and the chance to serve with my local hospital. With the drive of this collaborative, we can change the health of our world, one baby at a time.
I'm passionate about early identification and connection to services and supports for children and families because we know acting early makes a difference. When I learned that the ECCS CoIIN leverages collaboration, innovation and quality improvement methods to improve early childhood systems, I was thrilled to get involved. There is a great focus on parent engagement too, so I was really happy to join the team and be a part of this great work.
Being involved with NICHQ has been a career-changing and life-altering experience in many ways. Quality improvement methodology is not additive to my work, it influences how I do my daily work.
Participating in NICHQ's Improving Children's Vision project has facilitated a rich opportunity to pursue robust quality improvement strategies to enhance early childhood vision health in Wyoming. [We] appreciate the expertise provided by the leadership team and the opportunity to share ideas and feedback with other states in the Collaboratory.
I want to tell you how much I have enjoyed and learned from all of you at NICHQ. You are enthusiastic, supportive, smart and FUN. You have talked me off the ledge many times when I wanted to quit. You are true leaders and passionate about what you do.
Being a parent partner for NICHQ ...has been a pure honor. I would encourage anyone that has the opportunity to work on a NICHQ project to take advantage of it. Working with them has opened many doors for me in the medical field.
NICHQ has really supported our work by formalizing a process to do PDSA cycles, report and track how our progress is doing. As a data person, CoLab has been really instrumental in terms of gathering the data and tracking it over time.
