AANHPI Breastfeeding Week: Inviting Communities to Tell Their Stories in Their Own Words
By: Tonya Lang, MPH, CHES, IBCLC
As part of National Breastfeeding Month, we celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Breastfeeding Week from Aug. 15 through 21. Started as a local event by the Los Angeles County’s Asian Pacific Islander Breastfeeding Task Force (APIBTF) in 2020, AANHPI Breastfeeding Week is now organized by the USBC AANHPI Caucus as a national observance.
This year’s theme is “Telling our stories. Elevating our voices.” You may notice that this is the same theme as last year. Members of the USBC AANHPI Caucus chose this theme again because we felt that it is still relevant for this year. We are not done telling our stories, as some of our community voices have yet to be heard.
AANHPI communities are often invisible and labeled as a singular, monolithic group. In reality, various heterogeneous groups comprise the AANHPI community, each differing in culture, diet, language, ancestry, and religion. The diaspora across the United States is as diverse as the reasons that led us and our ancestors to migrate to this country.
Stereotypes, such as the “model minority” myth, continue to harm our communities by perpetuating the idea that we are all quiet, obedient, and polite.
We have all achieved success in life (whatever that means) through natural inborn talent and a pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps immigrant mentality. We are the “good” ones who are able to assimilate into mainstream American culture, while also being viewed as perpetual foreigners in our own country.
Model minority status has silenced us, making it difficult for us to speak about our own marginalization, and has pitted us against other communities of color.
AANHPIs are also being silenced and rendered invisible by the lack of data. It is difficult to paint an accurate picture of what breastfeeding, chestfeeding, and human milk feeding look like in our communities. The little data we have are often aggregated into a general “AANHPI” category, and masks the diversity of our communities and the disparities in health outcomes. At best, we see data disaggregated into Asian and Pacific Islander categories.
But what does it mean to have breastfeeding data for “Asians”, when the continent of Asia includes over 48 countries? What about data on “Pacific Islanders”, when Pasifika consists of thousands of islands that cover a geographic region broader than the United States?
In the past three years since the creation of AANHPI Breastfeeding Week, we have made some progress.
The in-hospital breastfeeding initiation data from the California Newborn Screening Program are now available by Asian subgroups. State and county-level data are available for nine different subgroups plus a multi-ethnic Asian category for 2010-2021. Access the data at https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DMCAH/surveillance/Pages/Breastfeeding-Initiation.aspx.
Several resources for AANHPI families have also been developed:
- With funding from Friends of La Leche League, the Asian Southeast Asian Pacific Islander Breastfeeding Taskforce (ASAP!) in Alameda County, California, created an AANHPI social media toolkit that provides culturally appropriate lactation educational messages for AANHPI families for social media use. The toolkit contains ready-made images for Instagram with positive photos depicting AANHPIs nursing and pumping. There are six different educational messages regarding nursing and human milk feeding. Messages and captions are translated into 11 different AANHPI languages: Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Farsi, Hindi, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Download the toolkit for free at https://acphd.org/acbreastfeeds/asap/.
- ASAP! has also created a culturally tailored prenatal toolkit for Chinese and Vietnamese families with funding from NACCHO to implement the Continuity of Care in Breastfeeding Support Blueprint. You can download the toolkits in English, traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese here: https://www.breastfeedingcontinuityofcare.org/coclibrary.
- The Asian Pacific Islander Breastfeeding Task Force based in Los Angeles, CA created user-friendly supplemental materials for the Dietary Guidelines for Infants and Toddlers in Chinese and Vietnamese including handouts and social media posts. You can download these materials for free here: http://bit.ly/earlychildhoodnutrition
- The APIBTF collected photos and videos through their photo/video project which features stories of AANHPI parents and their infant feeding journeys.
Photos: https://www.breastfeedla.org/aapi-breastfeeding-task-force/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=asianbreastfeedingstory)
Now is the time to tell our own stories and control our narrative. Rather than allowing our voices to be silenced and our communities to be defined by others, we call on our allies and co-conspirators to step back, listen to our voices, and lift up our communities — during AANHPI Breastfeeding Week and every week.
The USBC AANHPI Caucus will be hosting an AANHPI Lactation Community Forum on Friday, August 18 from 1:00-3:00 PM PDT. Join us to hear from AANHPI community members and their journeys to becoming lactation support professionals. The presentation will be followed by a discussion on how we can further build capacity in our communities around supporting our AANHPI families. Reserve your spot here: https://tinyurl.com/AANHPI-Lactation-Forum
We will also have a coloring contest through the end of August. More information on our activities can be found on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AANHPIBreastfeedingWeek
Please join us as we share our tradition of breastfeeding, chestfeeding, and human milk feeding in our communities!
About the Author: Tonya Lang, MPH, CHES, IBCLC, is a co-founder of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Lactation Collaborative and a member of the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee’s AANHPI Caucus. She can be reached at tonya.lang@gmail.com.
