The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding

[lightreads]

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding

Hey, did you guys know that just a single sip of formula is dangerous?

Oh, and! Did you know that mothers who complain about how their babies don't sleep through the night must be bottle feeding, because bottle feeding is so difficult and terrible. But if you breast feed, you can accept multiple night wakings no problem. And if you can't, well, you need an attitude adjustment and then you can greet the new day "with a smile."

Did. You. Know.

Comments

[cahn]

Nine-years-ago-me would like to punch the author of this book in her face on behalf of my week-old baby who would not stop crying because guess what, the poster in my hospital room about how colostrum is enough for your baby? WAS NOT TRUE of my baby, who was literally starving because she needed more. And guess who had lots of hormones and lots of guilt about giving my baby even a little supplementary formula and let her suffer a day more than she needed to?

At least I learned my lesson and kid #2 got supplementary formula as soon as it turned out he, too, wasn't getting enough on my colostrum. Both kids are FINE.

(I then went on, both times, to produce quite a lot of milk and never had any problems with milk production after that, so all of the hype about how you might not be able to produce enough once supplementing etc etc was also total baloney. My personal feeling, unsupported by data, is that it's correlation rather than causation.)

Wow, I still have a lot of rage about this.

(Not even touching the sleeping through the night thing, because I would like to come down from the rage plateau at *some* point, but let's just say... NO.)

[lightreads]

Wow, I still have a lot of rage about this.

legit.

[readerjane]

Everything Cahn said.

[cathexys]

ROTFL!!!

I was a huge breast feeder, donating milk and what not. That doesn't mean I need to guilt anyone into breastfeeding as this moral imperative. What BS!!!

That certainly deserved a DNF!!!

[thefourthvine]

Yeah, this one was recommended in my breastfeeding class, so I bought it. It was completely worthless. Like, did it address a SINGLE breastfeeding problem I had? No. But it did say a lot of patently false stuff!

[castiron]

I'm trying to remember whether this was the one that had the anecdote of the pediatrician talking to a group of mothers and saying "if I can get out of bed at midnight for kids' medical emergencies, then you can get up in the middle of the night to breastfeed your own child." My reaction was "yeah, you're getting paid six figures to get up in the middle of the night for strangers' kids; if I decide I want to feed my kid formula so they sleep longer, that's my business".

The whole formula vs. breastmilk thing is yet another example of framing a "generally very good vs. generally extremely good" issue as "always horrible vs. always perfect". If formula were as terrible as these folks say, we'd have evidence in the epidemiology by now.

[lightreads]

Yeah, and at the moment the evidence is trending solidly towards there being only minimal difference between formula and breast milk, and that the differences lie only in the short term (e.g., slightly fewer bouts of digestive upset for bf babies). There's very little credible evidence of any long-term difference for the kid. Though the evidence for the benefits to mom -- like the reduced breast cancer risk -- are still worth considering, probably. There's an interesting chapter on this in Emily Oster's most recent book.

[melita66]

Ugh. I had twins at 45, with several connected health issues, and was never very high energy. I set up for breastfeeding but my milk didn't come in and I didn't try super hard to change that. I was given an herbal supplement but luckily I checked the label because I was allergic to the main ingredient.

I was going back to work once they were around 3-4 months old. Formula worked fine and it meant any of the 3 adults around could feed a baby at any time. It made the first year not bad at all.

The prenatal class I attended was run by a nurse from a religious hospital. She had 5 or 6 kids and was trying to convince her husband for another one. She stated she had been continually breastfeeding for like 15 years. I'm sorry but that's not a goal I could aspire to.

[cyphomandra]

ARRGH. I greeted each new day with a panic attack, actually, but no doubt this was because I mix-fed my twins (the early days were like a Dantean circle of hell with breast-feeding, bottle-feeding, pumping, cleaning everything and then repeat) until they were on cow's milk and then breast-fed them til 2. It was an important achievement to me at the time and I don't think anything would have actually made my two sleep through the night (melatonin worked but I didn't try it until they were four) anyway, but it was a pretty high price.

[norah]

I did know!

I mean, I knew that people believed this utter bullshit.

Sigh.