Becoming a new mother comes with a lot of other new experiences. Chief among them? Breastfeeding.
It’s a new skill for both moms and babies, so it makes sense that it requires a little training. With more than 4 million babies born in the United States each year, more than 70 percent of women choose to begin breastfeeding in the hospital but find they need help and support to keep at it. According to the Center for Breastfeeding, “Many women who choose to breastfeed are not achieving their own goals for duration and exclusivity.”
That’s why, even before you give birth, it can be a good idea to take a breastfeeding class if breastfeeding is important to you. Once you’ve had your babe, you can also look into drop-in clinics (babies welcome!) or other group classes.
And if one-on-one support sounds appealing, lactation consultants (LCs) are an incredible source of information. They can give insight into how to position the baby for feeding, how long to breastfeed, and how to communicate with your little one and pick up on signs they’re giving you. They have expert-level tips and tricks for breast tenderness or infections, milk production problems, and weaning.
Essentially, their role is to make you and your baby’s nursing experience as enjoyable and successful as possible. But choosing the right LC for you can often look like an alphabet soup of acronyms, because there are lots of different certifying bodies and training methods for lactation consultants.
Two of the most common acronyms are IBCLC vs. CLC—International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) and Certified Lactation Consultant (CLC).
What’s an IBCLC?
IBCLCs, or International Board Certified Lactation Consultants, are healthcare professionals whose expertise is in breastfeeding clinical management. IBCLCs are certified by the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners and provide support to breastfeeding mothers by offering leadership, advocacy, research, and professional development in several settings.
IBCLCs undergo 90 hours of approved breastfeeding education that covers human lactation and breastfeeding topics before testing their knowledge in a multiple- choice test that may last up to five hours. They participate in clinical practice in lactation to support, educate, and advocate for breastfeeding mothers before their exam to get firsthand experience with the education they’re consuming.
What’s a CLC?
Certified Lactation Consultants take a 45-hour course modeled after the WHO and UNICEF 40-hour breastfeeding counselor course. In it, students must demonstrate and adequately pass tasks in lactation care, like the ability to offer information and education to breastfeeding women, address physical and psychosocial aspects of the mother and baby, incorporate evidence-based approaches, and more. At the end of the course, they take written and multiple-choice exams, proctored by the Academy of Lactation Policy and Practice, a national nonprofit organization that provides the certification of lactation consultants to support breastfeeding families, that take upwards of two and a half hours.
The exam covers breastfeeding education and competency, and students also need to demonstrate lactation support skills that “are governed by the scope of practice and the code of ethics while working with patients and clients,” according to the Center for Breastfeeding. This educational and training foundation allows CLCs to practice tried-and-true, education-based guidance and skills, guided by WHO and UNICEF standards.
IBCLC vs. CLC: Why the distinction?
Lactation consulting is a largely unregulated industry, and most states don’t actually require a license for someone to practice professional lactation consulting. Just four states do: Rhode Island, Oregon, Georgia, and New Mexico. And in Georgia, only one certification is approved: the IBCLC.
Among the lactation consultant community, there’s some back and forth about the equity of IBCLCs vs. CLCs. CLCs purport that their training qualifies them just as much as IBCLCs to help breastfeeding women. This blog post from a doula with both CLC and IBCLC designations, says they’re really not the same.
For one, IBCLC requires thousands of hands-on clinical hours working with breastfeeding moms under mentors. One commenter on the post writes: “I went through the CLC course as a [segue] to IBCLC. … I often compare it to the nurse’s aides vs registered nurses. Both can do bedside care but who would you want to administer your IVs or blood [work]?”
However, the CLC course has value, too, because it ultimately improves access to the certification process. Its requirements are more digestible, affordable, fast, and readily available for those wanting to become LCs. This article describes a CLC like this: “The individual has taken a course—usually about a week long—and given a certificate. No prerequisites or prior learning required. Great for teaching classes, and for helping with the normal course of breastfeeding, but not for consulting with moms/babies with challenges that don’t resolve quickly. CLC is not the same as IBCLC.”
In contrast, to become an IBCLC, you need to either already be in the medical, nursing, or clinical field with a degree to support your role, or you need to have taken and passed the following prerequisite courses: biology, human anatomy, human physiology, infant and child growth and development, nutrition, psychology (or counseling or communication skills), introduction to research, and sociology (or cultural sensitivity or cultural anthropology).
In other words, you need to have some extensive education to even be eligible to begin coursework and clinical hours for the IBCLC qualification. On top of that, IBCLC training isn’t available in all states yet. No wonder CLC certifications have “taken off,” as one commenter put it.
Overall, both CLCs and IBCLCs do provide competent expertise and knowledge to new moms, although they’re trained in vastly different ways and have completely different levels of experience.
IBCLC vs. CLC: How do you decide whom to work with?
Many doulas, nurses, childbirth educators, nutritionists, doctors, counselors, and mothers who want to help other mothers have lactation certifications to support women and babies with breastfeeding. Often, too, hospitals have lactation consultants and counselors on staff to guide new moms through the process of learning to breastfeed successfully. However, as with so much in the mom world (!), public and professional opinions about IBCLCs vs. CLCs vary widely and are quite polarizing.
You might hear, for example, that CLC is the entry-level certification, while IBCLC is advanced. It’s important to note that both types of lactation consultants undergo significant training and education. Both practitioners are generally expected to perform the same tasks: assessment, education, advocacy, and counseling.
Both CLCs and IBCLCs aid women in achieving their breastfeeding goals. The presence of each in the healthcare field is crucial, especially as many women face difficulties with their breastfeeding desires. The CLC certification is far less cumbersome, more widely available, and more affordable, and they certainly have their strengths in the breastfeeding education world. However, IBCLC participants go through a far lengthier education, clinical training, and certification process that position them as experts in especially challenging or unique situations.
Because they both have their strengths, the most important thing to consider when choosing your lactation consultant is the validation of their credentials, their experience, and personal fit. Just like choosing any medical care provider, you want to do your research and check out how long they’ve been practicing and whether they have specific experience with something that might be troubling you. And, since breastfeeding is an intimate and important endeavor, you want to connect with them and trust them. Just like many things with motherhood, to a certain extent, you’ve got to trust your gut.
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