Ashley Graham has spoken about her decision to stop breastfeeding her 13-month-old twins, Malachi and Roman, while alluding to the judgement mothers can face for doing so.
The 35-year-old model appeared on The Daily Show this week and told host Chelsea Handler that she breastfed her twins for five months and has since opted for formula.
Acknowledging the unwelcome opinions some mums can face when they choose to stop breastfeeding, she said: “There’s this whole thing with people telling you how to feed your child. With my first kid, I was like, ‘I could only breastfeed. This is the right way.’
“Then I had the twins, and I was like, ‘I’m not doing this.’ This is not working here. Both of you want both of [my breasts]. This is a lot of work.”
She jokingly likened feeding her sons to “feeding a nation” and continued: “These little guys are so strong and so happy, so I don’t think we should be telling people how they should be feeding their kids.”
Graham, who also has a two-year-old son called Isaac, has been incredibly candid about her breastfeeding journey and revealed last year that she had been combo feeding her twins breastmilk and formula.
In an interview with People, she revealed that the first week of breastfeeding her twins had been “so hard” because she was trying to figure out how to position them and latch them on.
After a week they got into a rhythm, but then that was snatched away from her too. “All of a sudden it was like we didn’t want to do it anymore and I felt defeated. I felt like: what am I going to do? How am I going to feed my babies?” she said.
In the end she opted for combo feeding to help ease some of the pressure, before stopping breastfeeding entirely.
“I’m so glad that I decided to do combo feeding because it was a stress that was lifted off of my shoulders and it relaxed me enough so that I was able to breastfeed the twins with more ease and it wasn’t such a stressful situation for all three of us,” she previously told People.
Last year Graham became the first ever parent to be shown combo feeding on a billboard when she took part in a campaign for organic formula company Bobbie.
While breastmilk is a great source of nutrients for babies, the logistics and demands of feeding can take a lot out of mothers.
According to the NHS, some twin mums can feed two babies at the same time, while some prefer to feed one after the other. Others feed whenever their babies seem hungry. For more advice on breastfeeding twins, check out La Leche League.
While breastfeeding twins is certainly possible, and can be extra beneficial for twins born prematurely, the NHS acknowledges that some parents might want to combine formula with breastfeeding, or feed solely formula.