Call for videos: impacts of formula marketing on breastfeeding
40th Anniversary of the Code
The Global Breastfeeding Collective invites you to participate in a video project designed to highlight the impact of formula marketing on parents’ ability to breastfeed their babies and keep breastfeeding for as long as they want to do so.
Many families experience marketing behaviour that promotes commercial formula milks and other breastmilk substitutes, including advertisements, celebrity endorsements, coupons, or unsolicited samples distributed in hospital giveaway bags, at physicians offices, or delivered to their homes.
Research has found that parents who experience these kinds of marketing practices stop breastfeeding sooner than parents who do not. This happens even when parents don’t remember experiencing marketing activities. Research also shows that parents breastfeed for longer when these marketing activities are prohibited by law.
When parents stop breastfeeding early or when they are not starting breastfeeding, they miss out on the protection that breastfeeding provides to their babies and to themselves.
Have you experienced marketing for formula milk or other breastmilk substitutes? How do you think it affected your ability to breastfeed for as long as you planned? Did it affect the advice or support you received from others? Or were you protected from marketing in a way that helped you to reach your goals, despite challenges? We would like to hear your story.
We are creating a video designed to show policy makers and others how marketing - and protection from marketing - has impacted you, with the goal of building additional support for policies that support lactating families.
The video will be shown in a webinar and may also be used on social media. Selected videos will be edited to bring together your story with those of other families around the world.
To participate, read the instructions here.