Breastfeeding difficulties refers to problems that arise from breastfeeding, the feeding of an infant or young child with milk from a womans breasts. Although babies have a sucking reflex that enables them to suck and swallow milk, and human breast milk is usually the best source of nourishment for human infants, there are circumstances under which breastfeeding can be problematic, or even in rare instances, contraindicated. Difficulties can arise both in connection with the act of breastfeeding and with the health of the nursing infant. Breastfeeding problems
While breastfeeding difficulties are not uncommon, putting the baby to the breast as soon as possible after birth helps to avoid many problems. The policy of the American Academy of Pediatrics on breastfeeding instructs to, "delay weighing, measuring, bathing, needle-sticks, and eye prophylaxis until after the first feeding is completed." Many breastfeeding difficulties can be resolved with research based hospital procedures, properly trained nurses and hospital staff, speech pathologists and lactation consultants. Another source of information is the volunteer-based breastfeeding promotion organization, La Leche League. A variety of factors and conditions can interfere with successful breastfeeding:

Ankyloglossia (tongue tie)
Formula feeding
Distractions or interruptions during feeds
Long separations from the mother
Tachypnea (rapid breathing) such as in transient tachypnea of the newborn, surfactant deficiency, respiratory distress syndrome or other infant medical conditions
Presence of an actual physical barrier between mother and infant
Swallowing difficulties such as with prematurity and coordination of sucking, swallowing and breathing, or gastro-intestinal tract abnormalities like tracheo-oesophageal fistula. Pain resulting from surgical procedures like circumcision, blood tests, or vaccinations.
Whether it is better at this time to set the level at which risk starts to increase or at which there is already substantially increased risk will be up to local decision-making groups. However, for international comparisons and to facilitate the etiology, it is critical that a commonly agreed-upon set of criteria be used worldwide, with agreed-upon cut points for different ethnic groups and sexes. There are many people in the world of mixed ethnicity, and in those cases, pragmatic decisions will have to be made. Therefore, an international criterion of overweight may be more appropriate than ethnic specific criteria of abdominal obesity for an anthropometric component of this syndrome which results from an excess lipid storage in adipose tissue, skeletal muscle and liver.The previous definitions of the metabolic syndrome by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) and the revised National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) are very similar, and they identify individuals with a given set of symptoms as having metabolic syndrome. There are two differences, however: the IDF definition states that if body mass index (BMI) is greater than 30 kg/m2, central obesity can be assumed, and waist circumference does not need to be measured. However, this potentially excludes any subject without increased waist circumference if BMI is less than 30. Conversely, the NCEP definition indicates that metabolic syndrome can be diagnosed based on other criteria. Also, the IDF uses geography-specific cut points for waist circumference, while NCEP uses only one set of cut points for waist circumference regardless of geography.