I’m not always very good at breastfeeding support – it requires lots of patience and time. I have the patience but often on a postnatal ward I’m very short on time but it’s probably the most important thing to get right for new parents. So many babies I come across have this weird instinct to starve themselves to death. I guess we are just born very early in the scheme of things and need a lot of help to get through those first few months (unlike say giraffes who are born falling from about ten feet up in the air and are apparently just fine and still manage to latch on to their mother).
There is a lot to discuss on breastfeeding but this post is just about a very particular problem that can arise.
I was looking after a woman postnatally who had a baby with a tongue-tie. This is where the baby has a frenulum (stick your tongue out and up in the mirror to see where your frenulum is) that prevents their tongue extending normally. I had got an expert midwife in to talk to her about it and I thought I might listen in too for my own education.
“Well,” began my learned colleague, “he definitely does have a tongue-tie but it’s not affecting his feeding so we don’t necessarily need to snip it.”
“But can it affect him later on, could he have a speech impediment?” asks concerned mother.
“That’s quite rare, and not likely to happen with this partial type of tongue-tie. It’s up to you though.”
At this point I’m thinking, surely everyone is tiptoeing around the elephant in the room. I really want to mention it but there seems no way of even approaching the subject easily. The mother is looking at her partner with just vague uncertainty. Maybe cursing the new enthusiasm for throwing decisions at patients rather than clinicians. Why should I have to decide about something medical when I’ve just become a parent and I can barely remember to eat breakfast?
I chickened out of adding to the conversation, as before when I’ve been at a training event or on the postnatal ward with a paediatrician. I’ve had to hold myself back from crying out “but what about oral sex?” I’m thinking specifically about cunnilingus here – even a slight tongue tie is going to affect that. At best it can make it feel uncomfortable for someone to do it for any length of time. With severe tongue ties then it all gets very tricky.
I checked out medical research about tongue-ties. Pretty much all about feeding problems with brief mention that some adults with tongue ties have mild speech problems. The most I got was a comment about “various mechanical and social issues related to the inability of the tongue to protrude sufficiently”. Sounds a bit vague – I tried The Guardian, they wouldn’t be shy would they? Their Dr Luisa Dillner fleshes out the issue a little more mentioning “problems licking ice-creams or kissing”
So why haven’t I mentioned it? Partly because I worry about my reputation generally for discussing sexual topics at inappropriate moments but I do appreciate that talking about a two-day-old baby’s sexual functioning seems out of place. But maybe it isn’t?
I think people would consider the sexual function for a boy who had any problems with his genitalia. We wouldn’t be shocked by an anxious parent of a baby with hypospadias bringing the subject up – even on mumsnet. I think cunnilingus is the cornerstone of a good hetrosexual and female gay relationship. But no one seems happy to bring it up – at least not at that baby stage when parents are deciding on whether or not to have the procedure to correct it. Doing a more general search outside of the babynet on “tongue tie” and “oral sex” brought a mass of entries – mostly relating to men feeling inadequate about going down on women or women complaining about their partner’s inability or reluctance due to a tongue tie.
What we seem reluctant to discuss at a birth is the fact that sex was the cause of the baby in the first place – that maybe your lovely new child, tiny as they are at the moment, isn’t going to get to the point of procreating themselves unless some consideration is given to whether they can give good cunnilingus.