Resilience, the butterfly effect, and being a biological system as you breastfeed your baby

You and your breastfed baby are single biological system (also known as a complex adaptive system)

In a report called Nature and Nurture, Professor Annette Hamilton commented that the Anbarra, Australian First Nations People who live in Arnhem Land in The Northern Territory, the lactation period is considered to be a continuation of pregnancy. The Anbarra say that the connection of the mother's nipple and baby's mouth is like the umbilical cord linking them at birth. Professor Hamilton's work is extensively quoted in Growing up our way, a report published by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care in 2011.

Your baby, from an evolutionary perspective, is still a part of your body's immune and metabolic systems after the birth, just on the outside now and connected by your breast milk and physical contact. Evolutionary biologists tell us that the human baby remains an 'exterogestate foetus' for about nine months after the birth. (The concept of the fourth trimester is a good start, but it's actually much too shortened, from the perspective of evolutionary biology!)

This is why a breastfeeding woman and her baby are best thought of as a 'complex adaptive system'. There are many factors from both the mother and the baby which interact together in a dynamic way, influencing each other in their breastfeeding relationship.

Unfortunately, as health professionals trying to help breastfeeding mothers and babies, it's tempting to focus on just one factor when things go wrong. You can find out about the One Factor Fallacy here.

But in Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation, we don't apply simplistic quick fixes or unhelpful diagnoses and treatments which lack an evidence-base. Instead, we consider you and your baby as a biological system, which means that to effectively sort out breastfeeding problems, we need to address multiple factors.

Resilience is built into the biological system of a breastfeeding woman and her baby

A complex system like the breastfeeding mother and her baby have great inbuilt resilience because the system

• Has so many elements interacting together

• Is self-organising, and

• Has myriad feedback loops operating to keep the system stable.

Experimenting is the key to your resilience as you and your baby find your way through problems. You can find out more about the incredible power of experimentation, also known as The Great Muddling Through, here.

Here, I offer you a way of making sense of you and your baby as a single biological system, and the concept of system resilience. Even though I'm simplifying these concepts, I hope you'll find them useful.

There are many factors which interact together in breastfeeding and each of these factors is a continuous variable trait

Imagine that a mother-baby system needs ten factors to interact together optimally to keep the breastfeeding ecosystem stable. Let's say these ten factors come out of a possible 15 elements, which are all interacting together in the system. Many of these elements are spectrum conditions, also known as continuous variable traits.

Let's use breast elasticity as an illustration of one of these factors. You might have highly elastic breast tissue, or you might have very firm and inelastic breast tissue, or your breast tissue elasticity may lie anywhere in between. This whole spectrum of breast tissue elasticity is normal, because breast tissue elasticity is a 'continuous variable trait' in lactating women.

But at each end of this spectrum of normal, certain challenges may be posed to breastfeeding.

• Highly elastic breast can mean that a deep face-breast bury is more likely to occlude baby's nostrils, or that the breast tissue drawn up into baby's mouth is more likely to impact upon the soft palate so that the baby pulls off.

• On the other hand, very firm, inelastic breasts may mean it is more challenging for baby to draw up the breast tissue into her mouth.

I'll refer to the ends of the spectrum that may pose more challenges the 'more challenging end of the spectrum' with respect to any factor.

It could be that the system needs only eight factors interacting together optimally, as long as the other seven factors are not all on the challenging end of the spectrum for that factor. But maybe three or four factors which are all at the very challenging end of the spectrum will tip the system into the emergence of breastfeeding problems.

You can see that in this analogy, there is an in-built buffer. We can have five factors which are operating in the more challenging end of the spectrum, but as long as there are ten of the 15 factors working together without challenge, the complex system will remain stable.

This explains why telling a woman that she is having breastfeeding problems because she has 'flat' nipples, or because her baby has a 'high palate', or has 'tight oral connective tissues', or has a 'recessed chin', can be extremely unhelpful for breastfeeding.

Occasionally, dealing with one factor that is on the very challenging end of the spectrum e.g. simple scissors frenotomy for a classic tongue-tie, might tip the system into workability. But mostly, an intervention to support a single challenging factor may well not help unless other factors on the challenging end of the spectrum are also dealt with (e.g. a breast-belly contour which impacts upon the landing pad of the breast).

Your breastfeeding support professional's role is to help make as many factors as workable as possible, even if there are some factors which fall on the more challenging end of the spectrum and which can't be changed.

Breastfeeding and the butterfly effect

Have you heard of the butterfly effect? The butterfly effect occurs commonly in complex adaptive systems. This is when a very small perturbation or disruption occurs early on in the dynamic unfolding of a complex adaptive system, and has consequences, often unpredictable or unexpectedly large, much further down the track.

Knowing about the butterfly effect helps us understand why it is so important that health systems change, to properly support breastfeeding right from the very beginning: a small problem or disruption can set up cascades of consequences and quickly make it very difficult to succeed with breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding and feeding problems also quickly set up cascades of stress and distress in families, and can result in a range of other problems, some of which may even impact on baby's development short and long-term. This is not widely acknowledged within our health systems. If it was, you and your baby would be wrapped in consistent, compassionate, highly skilful and evidence-based care (like Neuroprotective Developmental Care or the Possums programs!) from the very beginning. Nipple pain or difficulty bringing baby to the breast would be immediately understood as a breastfeeding emergency.

At the same time, I'd like to reassure you that you and your baby are likely to be prove very resilient even when things don't quite go as you'd imagined at the beginning - for instance, if you and baby need to have long periods of separation. What matters is that you receive the right kind of help to stabilise the system of you and your baby. Complex systems are inherently powerfully resilient, with many feedback loops working together for stabilisation and healing.

Health problems often emerge from complex systems, from multiple factors interacting together to cause disruption to feedback loop regulation. This would be true of nipple pain, or milk production concerns, or breast inflammation, for example. It's well known that inserting a simplistic one-factor solution into a complex system in response to an emergent problem often results in unexpected and unwanted outcomes, and is risky.

Recommended resources

• You can find out about how a mother (or loving carer) and her baby form a single biological system here.

• You can find out why breastfeeding is a symphony of biological systems here.

• You can find out why the breastfeeding mother-baby pair are a complex adaptive system or CAS (not a dyad) here

• You can find out about complex adaptive systems and complexity science here.

Selected references

Annette Hamilton, Nature and Nurture: Aboriginal child-rearing in North-central Arnhem Land p. 31 1981

Christian P, Smith ER, Lee SE. The need to study human milk as a biological system. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2021;113:1063-1072.

Guillen-Morales DdJ, Cruz-Cortes I, Sosa-Velazco TA, Aquino-Dominguez AS. The mother-infant symbiosis: a novel perspective on the newborn's role in protecting maternal breast health. Hygiene. 2025;5(46):https://doi.org/10.3390/hygiene5040046.

SNAICC. Growing up our way: practices matrix. North Fitzroy, Melbourne: Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, 2011.