What Is the MumBo™? And Why It Helps You Understand Breastfeeding More Clearly

For years I was honestly a bit embarrassed about the way my brain worked. I could only understand something fully if I learned it so deeply that I could simplify it in my mind. I thought it meant I was a bit slow or a bit “simple.” Then one day I came across a quote.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein

And I remember thinking… oh.
Maybe this thing I’d been ashamed of all these years wasn’t a flaw at all.
Maybe it was actually a gift.

Looking back, that ability to simplify the complicated has shaped my entire career. In the early days I was drawn to complex feeding cases. Babies whose behaviour didn’t match the textbook. Mums who had tried everything and still felt lost. Those stories hooked me. Not because I wanted to “fix” people, but because I wanted to understand what was really happening.

I realised something important. Being a breastfeeding specialist doesn’t mean persuading anyone to breastfeed. It means supporting mums who want to breastfeed to understand what is happening in front of them, with their baby, in their real life. Calmly. Without pressure. Without rules.

At some point I caught myself thinking: what would be the most complex challenge I could ever take on?

Create something simple that could help every mum and every baby personalise feeding, no matter their story.

That became the MumBo™.
And it became the foundation of my work.

MumBo™ Definition

The MumBo™ is the Mum and Baby Combination.
It is the unique set of maternal and newborn factors that shape how feeding behaves for you and your baby.

Within the Miskin Method®, the MumBo™ is not a label and it is not a diagnosis. It is a diagnostic lens. A way to stop guessing and start interpreting.

The MumBo™ includes five core elements:

Mum
Breast and nipple anatomy, experience, expectations, and support

Birth
Your unique birth experience and recovery context

Medical history
Anything relevant in the background that influences feeding or healing

Baby
Age, size, weight, stamina, and growth context

Oral cavity
Palate, tongue, cheeks, and how your baby uses their mouth during feeding

This is the starting point. The cards you are dealt. Most of these factors cannot be “fixed” or forced into a standard method. They simply need to be understood, so the right priorities can be chosen for your specific combination.

How the MumBo™ Came About

When I began my career, I assumed the best way to build a framework was to solve breastfeeding problems one by one. If I could solve sore nipples, for example, I would have the model. It seemed logical.

But I kept running into the same issue. Everyone was different.

What changed things was noticing patterns. Not just symptoms, but repeatable patterns across different mums and babies.

Why did some mums experience that short, sharp initial pain when latching, while others didn’t?
Why did mastitis keep recurring in the same area of the breast for certain mums?
Why did the same “advice” help one baby and make another baby worse?

The obvious truth was this. Mums and babies create a unique combination. Two puzzle pieces that sometimes click into place beautifully, and sometimes don’t at first.

I called it the Mum and Baby Combination. Then the mum and baby combo. And one day, joking about celebrity blended names, I said “MumBo.” It made me laugh, and it stuck.

Once I started using the MumBo™ lens, the chaos became readable. Different combinations tended to produce different clusters of challenges. Not because anyone was doing anything wrong, but because feeding is not one-size-fits-all. It is biology plus context.

Why the MumBo™ Makes Breastfeeding Clearer

The MumBo™ helps because it turns feeding from a collection of disconnected problems into a pattern you can interpret.

When you do not account for the MumBo™, information often feels confusing. You can read ten explanations and still not know which one applies to you. You can hear five opinions and still feel no clearer.

That is because breastfeeding behaviour is rarely caused by one single factor. It is usually the interaction between factors.

A MumBo™ lens helps you ask better questions:

Is this mainly a baby transfer issue, or a flow and rhythm issue, or a recovery and healing context?
Is this behaviour consistent across the day, or only at certain feeds?
Is this pattern stable, escalating, or overlapping with other patterns?

This is where judgement matters. Because in feeding, pulling the wrong lever can worsen symptoms. Some changes create trade-offs. What improves one part of the pattern can aggravate another if the underlying driver is different.

Without a full MumBo™ assessment, any well-intended changes can unintentionally fuel the very pattern parents are trying to calm.

That is why the Miskin Method®, developed by Geraldine Miskin, is built around personalised feeding diagnostics rather than generic solutions.

When feeding patterns continue, repeat, or escalate, this is a sign that personalised assessment is required — not further general advice or incremental adjustments.

If symptoms persist, escalate, or overlap, the safest next step is not more tips. It is a clear, individualised assessment that looks at the full MumBo™ and identifies what matters most first.

The truth

If you are reading this because you searched “What is the MumBo?”, this is the key point:

The MumBo™ is not a technique. It is a way of understanding your advantage points and limits.

When understanding is missing, people tend to take more action, stack more changes, and feel more overwhelmed. That is not progress. It is a sign that interpretation is needed.

This is exactly the moment where a personalised feeding assessment becomes the appropriate next step.

But this isn’t where it ends. Once you understand your MumBo™, The 4 Pillars of Breastfeeding Mastery give you a way to make sense of what’s happening and decide what needs your attention first.

A Calm Next Step

If you recognise yourself in this, you do not need to collect more advice. You need clarity.

A personalised feeding assessment with Geraldine Miskin, creator of the MumBo™ and the Miskin Method®, is designed to identify the root driver in your specific MumBo™, prioritise what matters most, and stop the cycle of trying random fixes.

So tell me:
What feels most confusing about feeding right now, and what patterns keep repeating for you and your baby?