Food is one of our core, basic needs, and relationships are built around food. It brings people together, and when feeding is strained, it has the potential to be an incredible source of stress and anxiety on every relationship within a household, especially between the mother and her infant. Sources of stress can include poor weight gain, breast refusal, bottle refusal, a high-risk pregnancy, a NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) stay, surgery, or any amount of separation from your infant after birth.

Every breastfeeding mother embarks on a journey. Melanie’s (owner of The Feeding Connection) first breastfeeding journey was filled with obstacles, road blocks, stress, depression, and difficulties. She was a speech pathologist and feeding therapist, and she took all of the education she could prenatally - why was this so hard?!

With so much access to information, many people don’t know what is credible, what they should do in certain situations, or which direction to go in. Melanie had decent information, but what she was lacking was the strong, evidence-based support of a professional who could pinpoint exactly what was going wrong in her situation. She had family and a supportive husband, even, but she waited too long to seek that professional support with her first baby. Not with her second. She knew what to do. Melanie met with a lactation consultant, and she had an incredibly successful breastfeeding relationship the second time around.  

Those experiences birthed in Melanie a passion for supporting women and families at the breast. That passion, coupled with her background in speech pathology/feeding therapy and infant feeding - supporting families to feed their children in many different ways, led her to opening The Feeding Connection because that’s what we want - to connect while feeding - to have relationship with the people we love - to nourish, and to help our babies thrive.