I became passionate about the support of breastfeeding women once I had my first baby in 1990 and began to breastfeed.

I was an eager member of the Lactation Resource Centre in Melbourne in the early 1990s, after Emma and Tom were born, at a time when you ordered research literature searches on a particular topic, ticked the boxes of publications that you wanted to read, and the relevant papers arrived hardcopy in the mail. How I cherished those heavy parcels of stapled-up publications which were delivered to my letter box, and the faithful work of those pioneering ladies in the Lactation Resource Centre!

Evidence-based medicine was really only becoming a thing around that time. (I wrote about this here). And much of the research that was being done in the field of lactation was still concerned with demonstrating that human milk was best for human babies. This important project continues on, but by the time I had my babies, I'd formed the view that families no longer needed to hear the benefits of human for their little ones - that the adage 'breast is best', alongside the advice to persevere, was no longer helpful, and even caused harm.

The health system problem in advanced economies, I believed, including in my own country of Australia, was a serious lack of clinical skills to (prevent or) repair the many breastfeeding problems which emerged in our late 20th century and 21st century environments, and which were so disruptive of mother-baby and parent-baby neurohormonal synchrony. I could see, from the clinic and amongst my networks, that women wanted to breastfeed their babies, but often faced insurmountable obstacles. I felt that if we could improve the efficacy of our clinical interventions, we'd improve breastfeeding rates. We needed to shift our attention away from women's competence (which became another form of mother-blaming: if only she persisted enough, if only she was committed enough), on to the competence and efficacy of clinical interventions.

I could see how foundational feeding problems were to disruption of mother-baby neurohormonal synchrony, and that of course this made sense from an evolutionary perspective.

I also formed the view at this time that we needed to shift the focus onto enjoyment and ease of breastfeeding - how we could we best help women and their babies enjoy breastfeeding and enjoy each other - and then enjoyment would drive increased breastfeeding rates, quite naturally.

Instead, the baby behaviours which resulted from breastfeeding disruptions (which sometimes also segued into bottle feeding disruptions once women decided they couldn't push on with breastfeeding or needed to supplement) were being widely misdiagnosed as medical conditions (reflux, allergy, lactose intolerance, gut pain, and more latterly, tongue tie).

I attended International Crying Baby Research Workshops. I devoured everything I could find in the research literature on crying babies and could see how this problem was dealt with through a highly medicalised lens, without insight into the impact of breastfeeding and feeding problems on unsettled infant behaviour, including learning.

For much of my professional life I've watched as these inappropriate diagnoses (reflux, allergy) were widely promoted by our breastfeeding advocacy organisations and prominent health professionals aligned with them. It's painful to say this, but I do feel that if we don't bravely and frankly acknowledge our history as breastfeeding advocates, then we'll keep repeating the same mistakes (which happened again with tongue tie from the early 2010s in Australia). ... It would be re-writing history to claim that formula companies have driven inappropriate medical diagnoses in advanced economies; in fact, these diagnoses were widely promoted by breastfeeding advocates - and of course, formula companies eagerly step into the gap.

There was also a growing dominance of psychologist academics in the field of infant crying from the 1990s and 2000s, who didn't understand clinical breastfeeding support or the inappropriate medicalisation of infant behaviour, since these concerns were outside their professional scope, but whose research and programs gave instructions about breastfeeds and feeds anyway (such as regulation of breastfeeds or how to avoid the bad habit of breastfeeding to sleep).

For these reasons, since I considered it so important to maternal wellbeing and to breastfeeding rates, my first series of research publications focussed on infant crying.

It was not easy getting my early theoretical reframing papers into the mainstream medical research journals. I think it's true to say that my publications were the first internationally to bring breastfeeding into considerations of problem infant crying, and then to bring this into mainstream medical journals, culminating in a couple of break-through cover articles in the BMJ and Archives of Disease in Childhood in 2011. It was extremely difficult getting these publications through the reviewers and also editors, who consistently pushed back on knowledge from lactation science, and I regularly compromised what I had to say in those years in order to get a publication out. It was also a time when word limits even for a topic as complex as infant crying were restricted to 2000 words. (That has changed now with open access.)

I think it's true to say that my work was not understood by the professionals who have been prominent in breastfeeding advocacy and clinical breastfeeding support in Australia or internationally over my life-time. I think my colleagues didn't believe that problem infant crying in the first months of life fell within the purview of breastfeeding and lactation clinical intervention and research, even though breastfeeding advocates were leaning heavily on medical diagnoses to explain crying in breastfed babies. But I considered problem infant crying the key to improved breastfeeding rates.

Also, I was profoundly committed to inclusivity, and very disturbed by the kind of internalised guilt or shame women felt when they couldn't make breastfeeding work. I felt any work I brought out needed to be inclusive of all women, whether breastfeeding or using bottles - the latter then needed to be used in as much alignment with the evolutionary normal of breastfeeding as possible (by using paced bottle feeding).

Teaching about paced bottle feeding and including all families regardless of how they fed their babies may be another reason why my work has been misunderstood or met with suspicion by breastfeeding advocacy communities, where (unconscious) ideological considerations often still prevail. This is why I developed up the Possums programs or Neuroprotective Developmental Care in the research literature as inclusive of all, even though the programs arise directly from the foundational domain of clinical breastfeeding and lactation support: I felt it was inappropriate and misleading to separate considerations of breastfeeding from the intimately related domains of sleep, baby's gut and health, sensory motor needs and of course, parent mental health. When organisations identify publicly as specifically focussed on breastfeeding, then these other related matters are typically dealt with in ad hoc, and peripheral way, without the same level of rigorous scrutiny of the evidence - and bottle feeding parents are excluded (no matter how strongly the organisations protest they include everyone), by virtue of name and identity.

I have believed that parents deserve - parents of the future need - a genuinely holistic, complexity-based, evolutionarily-informed approach to early life care, and an organisation with a name that reflects this. I've believed that culturally-determined problems of infant crying, so distressing to parents, reflect mismatch between Homo sapiens environment of evolutionary adaptedness and our contemporary environments across multiple domains of infantcare, all foundationally embedded in breastfeeding. I've also, with the kind of commitment that might have come down to me from my reformist, Non-Conformist forebears (who knows), believed that each of us as individuals is called to step forward and try to contribute to a better world, as best we know how in our own unique lives. This is what I've tried to do with NDC or Possums.