I’ve made a wonderful mistake. My twins have been finding it difficult to settle after they feed at night, so I let them fall asleep listening to my heartbeat. Good idea, right? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like they’d get comfortable and make it a habit of needing me to hold them in order to sleep.

So I’ve made a wonderful mistake. But at least we haven’t resorted to driving them to sleep (expensive) or walking them up and around the house (good exercise, but, no).

Since I’ve started this little routine with them, I’ve got pretty adept at knowing when the little ones are hungry; they root and slobber pretty intensely on my chest, but it got me thinking about just how hard it is to breastfeed.

Imagine you’ve waited many months to see the joy of your life. You have set up everything as best you can to make them happy, provide for them, make them feel safe, and then they reject you. Or they aren’t compatible with you.

This is how it feels for some women to breastfeed their child. It can be very disheartening, or even worse.

The best advice I can give to fathers of breastfeeding children, eliminate the word “help” from your vocabulary when talking to your partner.

Think of anything you do to ease the load on the mother as a service to your family. The dishes, the trash, the sweeping up, getting groceries; all these things are what you can do to serve the family.

I think it’s beneficial for everyone to do their own research about the benefits of breastfeeding their children.

The World Health Organisation has a whole website dedicated to breastfeeding research, but I encourage everyone to do what’s best for their babies and family.

I could go into vivid physical descriptions of all the difficulties mothers go through to breastfeed their babies, but I’m not writing an “R” rated movie.

What’s important to realise is that for many mothers, when they lack the proper encouragement and support to breastfeed (especially in those crucial early days), then they’ll be more likely to forgo breastfeeding altogether.

I always try to remember, that as first-time parents we’ll spend most of our time making mistakes and learning how to parent effectively and lovingly.

Kindness and patience in the home will go a long way to smoothing those rough edges as mom figures out the whole breastfeeding routine, and dad learns how to get over himself and only think of what his entire family needs in order to have a happy and healthy life.

Hopefully your strong, plump and happy babies will say “thanks” as one of their first words for all the trouble you went through breastfeeding them — you never know!