Breastfeeding is Best?

Yesterday's discussion about gender equity and childcare spun off into an interesting discussion both here and Crooked Timber. I thought I would sum up the arguments and start a new thread on this topic.

We here at 11D are firmly committed to the notion that childcare should be, in an ideal world, a 50/50 proposition. Men and women should equally split the responsibilities for the kids, because it is good for both parents, good for the kids, and the only way that women will have the time and the energy to compete in the professional arena.

What does the choice to breastfeed do towards achieving that goal?

Siobhan pointed us to an article in Atlantic Monthly by Hanna Rosin that points out that the research that supports the notion that breastfeeding makes kids smarter and healthier is highly flawed. The benefits are marginal, and it is difficult to tease out the data from socio-economic variables and other factors. She questions the huge advantages of breast feeding the babies.

And when I look around my daughter’s second-grade class, I can’t seem to pick out the unfortunate ones: “Oh, poor little Sophie, whose mother couldn’t breast-feed. What dim eyes she has. What a sickly pallor. And already sprouting acne!”

All that work for a questionable pay-off results in a huge cost to women. Rosen writes, "This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing."

Breast feeding has a huge impact on gender equity. Even if you make deals, like he deals with the output, while she deals with the input, things are still off. Every time that baby cries, people declare "he wants the boob" and that kid is in your lap. Breastfeeding is time consuming, painful, and dads lose out on the bonding process.

I would be hesitant to completely disregard the benefits of breastfeeding. When it comes to your kids, I think it is best to hedge your bets. But why can't there be a middle ground? Why do we have to go to extremes in these matters?

Sometimes breast feeding is easier. Sometimes bottle feeding is easier. It is possible to do both. That nipple confusion stuff is bullshit. When our kids were born, they were primarily breast fed except for the 3:00am feeding. Steve administered that feeding with formula. He got to bond and I got to sleep. Pumping is a Middle Age torture device, and after one tearful attempt, I refused to do it. Then we gradually increased formula until month six or seven when we went entirely to formula. 

Those first few years are overwhelming. We're thrown into a world of guilt and extremism. The books present a one-dimensional uber-mom that we're all supposed to aspire to, and they fail to prepare us for the realities of combining childcare with other goals like work and shared parenting. And as Harry and others say, they don't prepare us for the realities of C-sections and kids who won't breastfeed and sickly babies.

On the other hand, there's the equally ridiculous backlash literature, which states that kids are resilient and actively encourages us to neglect our kids to pursue our own goals. 

There needs to be a middle ground, people. We need to do the right things for our kids, while dividing up the labor correctly and having a life outside the home. One good thing about getting past the baby stage is that you stop reading those books. There are still many pressures that wreck havoc with achieving a good balance, but thankfully the breast police have checked out. 

UPDATE: Profgrrrrl shares the really lovely part about breastfeeding. When it works out well, breast feeding is cozy and warm. And check out Wendy's excellent post. She thinks that women are encouraged to stop breastfeeding too quickly; she defends attachment parenting. Mamalooper thinks that the breast is best.

UPDATE 2: Here's Rosin on the Today Show.

UPDATE 3: Tim Burke writes, "What I really want is for us to get to a place where modest incremental benefits can be argued for using modest incremental rhetoric, where experts don’t feel the need for overcompensatory alarmism or feel they have to circle the wagons in order to get attention or bludgeon an uncooperative public into change."

Comments

[Siobhan]

Speaking of avoiding extremism, I found pumping to be just fine. Not cheap, though -- it cost $80/month to rent our pump, while formula feeding exclusively would have cost $40/month.

All this was before I, like harry, cast aside the parenting magazines and did my own review of the medical literature. If we have another kid, it's formula all the way.

[MH]

"That nipple confusion stuff is bullshit."

We wasted a great deal of worry on that and found no problem switching back and forth.

[albe]

I practically ruined my life struggling to breastfeed my twins. They nursed for 7 and 8 months, respectively, before they refused entirely. I never made enough milk for both, despite nursing and then pumping 6 times a day (for SIX MONTHS), and when I look back on all of the time I lost due to pumping, lost time to just enjoy my kids, it makes me shudder. I really wish I could have let go a little bit and accepted that 50/50 breastmilk/formula wouldn't have killed them. Instead I did everything I could think of to shift that ratio to 75/25, and in the meantime nearly lost my mind.

I did it because I read all of the breastfeeding extremism literature and I bought into it.

I often think about how weird it is that breastfeeding extremists don't put much energy into worrying about what kids ingest when they start eating solid foods. There is so much energy that goes into arguing about the merits of breastfeeding, but if what we REALLY care about is the child's health and well being, why aren't we then getting all worked up over feeding kids non-organic food, and milk with bovine growth hormone, and fast food? Why so much concern over breastfeeding and not the same amount of extreme concern over other foods that the child consumes?

The main reason I can think of is that feeding the child one type of food over another doesn't have the same effects on a mother's freedom of movement that breastfeeding has. The debates over breastfeeding are intimately tied to a mother's role in relationship to family and work. I believe this is a hidden agenda that drives much of the breastfeeding-related vitriol of some groups of people.

[bj]

"That nipple confusion stuff is bullshit. When our kids were born, they were primarily breast fed except for the 3:00am feeding."

Again, this is a question on which one's mileage varies. I have two children. I gave up on breastfeeding the first, because neither I nor she learned to develop the breastfeeding relationship, and because for both of us it was a steep learning curve. Some babies and moms are better at it than others. For my second, I persevered, and succeeded. I am an example of someone who can successfully breastfeed, but only with encouragement and support (and without 3 AM feedings taken over by others during the new born stage).

Now, I was very aware of the statistics behind the benefits of breastfeeding, and do regard them as vastly exaggerated, when applied to individual children (as I do for any other feeding choice, from organics to milk to meat to . . . ). But, I also think there are public health benefits. a .05% increase in obesity is very small, and can't be weighted very heavily when making one's own decision, but when making public health policy, the small benefits are relevant.

(I do, incidentally, believe from my review of the literature that there are small but significant benefits to breastfeeding, when it is not contra-indicated).

Oh, and I think there's just as much extremism over the other food that children consume.

[Wendy]

"I often think about how weird it is that breastfeeding extremists don't put much energy into worrying about what kids ingest when they start eating solid foods. There is so much energy that goes into arguing about the merits of breastfeeding, but if what we REALLY care about is the child's health and well being, why aren't we then getting all worked up over feeding kids non-organic food, and milk with bovine growth hormone, and fast food? "

Straw (wo)man. All the "breastfeeding extremists" I know put a lot of energy into thinking/talking about those issues.

[Siobhan]

albe, I agree with Wendy -- the people who are terrified of formula tend to morph into the people who are terrified that their child will taste refined sugar (or even juice). I think your point still stands, though, as it's rarely fathers who are expected to monitor every morsel that passes their toddler's lips.

[albe]

I agree that those who are very concerned with breastfeeding are also often concerned with the quality and type of food their kids eat. (I am one of them). What I meant to say, however, was that I haven't seen the same level of discourse on the latter issue in relationship to mothering. Maybe that's because my children are smaller and I've been more steeped in the breastfeeding debates? But I certainly haven't seen the same amount of energy or the same levels of vitriol or just the sheer volume of discussion on the types of food children eat versus the breastfeeding debates.

[MH]

My wife does set the rules about what our son gets as far as organicness and whatnot. For some foods, it has to be organic or we don't eat it. For others, it doesn't matter. As far as sweets go, we held-off (with the exception of the haircut bribe) until after he was two. We did the same for TV. Our pediatrian was very concerned that we didn't let him watch TV till that age and we only did it once (again, so we could cut his hair).

[harry b]

I completely agree about the backlash literature (but Rosin is not in that camp at all). My objection is not to breastfeeding but to the message that that is the only thing to do, and you are doing something wrong if you don't do it. I posed this, I think, in terms of the impact on gender equality, in your original thread. But I realize that some marriages aren't going to be egalitarian, and that some people don't want that, and also that other marriages (like mine) can manage to be egalitarian despite breastfeeding.

But I also think that there are real mother and baby health issues. The studies (which I distrust) focus on physical health. But emotional health and development are at least as important (more important once some threshold of physical health is reasonably secure). Breastfeeding is VERY stressful for some mothers, and the feeling that one must persist despite any difficulties may contribute to a descent into depression (I'm convinced I've seen that happen a couple of times) that is bad for the mother and for the baby, especially if the baby is being cared for mostly by the mother. This possibility is not discussed at all in the parenting books/magazines I read during #s 1 and 2 (didn't bother to read anything for #3, maybe that's why he is so happy and energetic and hard to deal with), and often gets left out of these discussions.

Wendy may think that albe is constructing a straw man, and albe may be, but albe's own story is quite familiar to me, and there's no question that numerous smart well-educated women who are confident in other areas cede to the experts on this question rather than acting on what would be their own judgment, taking into account their own emotional needs, as well as those of their babies. (Even non-twins sometimes seem not to get enough food).

As for breastfeeding being a well-evolved system that must be better for all children -- well, that might be true for all children whose mothers wouldn't, in nature, have died in childbirth, but my first was born by emergency C-section, and the second would have been if she hadn't been scheduled for a C-section. Nature would have rendered them motherless, and I don't see that nature has a mechanism for making breastfeeding the best thing for children whose mothers it tried to kill.

Next post - C-sections.

[Anonymous (for this thread)]

Straw (wo)man. All the "breastfeeding extremists" I know put a lot of energy into thinking/talking about those issues.

Not straw. I personally know an LLL member who BF her son until past age 2. Said 4-year-old now only consumes protein in the form of chicken strips from chik-fil-a.

[bj]

"My objection is not to breastfeeding but to the message that that is the only thing to do, and you are doing something wrong if you don't do it."

See, I don't think the "breast is best" manthra says, that, though some who say it certainly mean that. But then, those are the same people who would object to my kids eating ice cream before dinner.

There's a lot of practical pressure *not* to breastfeed, because it takes practice to get it to work, because it requires the mother (preventing outsourcing of care), because it's more difficult to measure success, . . . . The social pressure to breastfeed is designed to counteract that practical pressure to use formula.

So, I think it's an important public health policy initiative to tell people that breastfeeding is better (when it is -- and although I distrust the overblown conclusions, I don't distrust the individual studies). I would never apply that to an individual person's decision about how they feed their child, though. It's not grounds for taking someone's child away, or throwing them in jail. It's not even grounds for shunning.

What are some grounds for shunning? I'll put one on the able that will annoy many people. I am distressed when people do not vaccinate their children, enough that I would consider, though probably only if it were convenient, shunning them.

[Russell Arben Fox]

I personally know an LLL member who BF her son until past age 2. Said 4-year-old now only consumes protein in the form of chicken strips from chik-fil-a.

Our you alleging a causal relationship here, or just dinging a passionate defender of breastfeeding for turing out to be a lazy parent when it comes to subsequent nutrition issues? If the former, I don't see the connection. If the latter, well, lots of people who support good causes are inconsistent and foolish in matters related to, but not the same as, their original cause--that's not an argument against their point.

There are, I think, very reasonable (egalitarian and otherwise) arguments that can be made against the advice of an LLL wingnut who is convinced that all American mothers should breastfeed their children for 25+ months. But make them on the merits, not by sniping.

[Russell Arben Fox]

One good thing about getting past the baby stage is that you stop reading those books.

Yes!

[MH]

Forget what the kid eats. I want to go to chik-fil-a.

[Anonymous (for this thread)]

Our you alleging a causal relationship here, or just dinging a passionate defender of breastfeeding for turing out to be a lazy parent when it comes to subsequent nutrition issues?

Neither. I'm defending albe from the charge of posing a straw man.

I also observe that a lot of energy and attention goes into the solid foods this particular child eats -- foods in plastic containers are toted to restaurants and other events, special meals get cooked at home, etc -- so I'd hardly call the parenting 'lazy'. In this particular case the stated rationale is 'pickiness' rather than health/organics. I'm sympathetic--you never know what someone else's parenting experience is--but it is still a (single) anecote that backs up albe's generalization.

[Alison]

Hey, I nursed my baby while working -- velcro on breasfeeding pillow, hands over the baby and on the keyboard. I guess I'm an extremist. Hold on while a steal a pringle from my 4 year-old.

[jen]

bj, shunning! Wow! I have never considered what would cause me to shun another but I find it an oddly compelling idea!

Although this doesn't go to the level of shunning, I will confess to actively avoiding La Leche zealots. ("La Leche, you say? Interesting! Waddayaknow, looks like I need to refill my wineglass ...")

[Timothy Burke]

First, the basic principle that kids are resilient needs to come back into force big-time. I completely agree with this. I think the post-boomers have become incredibly fussy, overworried parents who overthink almost everything and are inclined to overattribute life results for their children to isolated dimensions of parenting.

Breastfeeding is one of those things that gets overanalyzed in this way. We agreed that it seemed a good thing to do in general. Then at our parenting classes, they allowed a La Leche representative to come in when almost everyone in the class was getting close to term. She was, to put it mildly, a fanatic who basically made the rest of the health system out to be full of villainous plotters who would do anything to corrupt our pure determined will to breastfeed children. She explicitly told people in the class not to trust anything a doctor said about formula, not to deviate ever from breastfeeding.

Neither of us cared for that. And yet, it got under our skin some in those days after my daughter was born, when you're confused and tired and worried about every little thing. We were both surprised at how difficult it is for babies and mothers to learn how to breastfeed. So about two weeks in, when we were all tired and it was difficult, I finally said, "Screw it, we're going to do at least one night feeding as formula, so I can do it, you can get some sleep, and we're sure she's getting a good meal". This turned out to be totally sensible: breastfeeding supplemented by formula worked, it allowed me to take on a greater share of the feeding responsibility, it helped us both get some sleep, etc.

Breastfeeding extremism is not a "straw woman". We both encountered it in person, and it's real, if as all extremism, not the same as the more sensible advice that other people give. The most sensible thing someone could tell a new parent, however, is "go with what works, use your own judgment, evolve your own style as a parent in relation to the kind of person your child is, and above all, don't overthink this and don't act as if every small decision is a battleground on which your child's ultimate future might be completely determined".

[Craig Lawton]

We've had twins, and just recently given breast feeding the flick, and gone solely with bottle.

Whilst mother still does most of the feeding, I enjoy the times I get to have a go; their two heads in my lap, those four eyes looking up at me, the extreme tiredness, the bike tire smell of their burps, and the cuddles before sleep.

[Mrs. Ewer]

Like breastfeeding, pumping has a learning curve, but isn’t that big of a deal. I have the Avent hospital grade mechanical pump that converts to a pocket-sized hand pump and I can (and do) pump anywhere. It’s a painless, 10-minute routine and the pump cost $219 on Amazon.com.

Bottles are time-consuming: there’s an awful lot of mixing, bottle-scrubbing, heating up and carting around bottles and extra runs to the store. Giving a baby a bottle requires two hands, but I need one or no hands to nurse and can type away on my laptop or monitor e-mail on my phone (ie further my career) at the same time. During the first six months of my son’s life 90% of the writing I did happened while I was breastfeeding.

Also, formula feeding today means feeding your infant a dairy and/or soy product (two major allergens that doctors otherwise recommend against introducing before age one) mixed with corn syrup (known to be contaminated with mercury) in a BPA-containing can that’s possibly also contaminated with melamine. That’s a diaperload of potentially serious health issues.

I had a emergency c-section (placental abruption), a preemie with suck/swallow issues, and I work outside of the home part-time and travel tons. Yet my one-year old has never had a bottle of formula and still nurses frequently. That’s meant some perseverance and a willingness to pump/nurse in some strange places – but nothing heroic, extreme, or medieval. Seriously.

[Wendy]

Tim, I (personally) never said BF extremism is a straw (wo)man. The idea that BF activists are crazed extremists who care only about their kids ingesting breastmilk and nothing about their ingesting other nutritionally deficient food *is* a straw (wo)man, despite the existence of a few anecdotes.

I'll have to go to my blog for a response to this one (eventually--don't have the time right now). I'm hardly an extremist, but 5 years after stopping BF, I guess I've become more "extreme." Ftr, I nursed 1 till 11 months, 1 till 14 months, supplemented with formula with both.

I just really find the tenor of many of the responses here and at CT to be pretty offensive. So dismissive and insulting to people who are trying to make BF to seem more like the norm and less like a gross imposition.

[Amy P]

"Pumping is a Middle Age torture device, and after one tearful attempt, I refused to do it."

Laura, are you talking about a cheapo retail pump or a hospital rental? I've had one unpleasant experience with a retail pump, and some very nasty gumming episodes, but the hospital pumps were fantastic if the suction was set correctly. I did approximately a year of pumping for each child, which meant that for my first baby, it was quite a while before I actually had much to do with her. My husband gave her a bottle while I ran the pump and listened to books on tape (how else would I ever have gotten around to Madame Bovary?). I'd reformulate your quote to "Babies are a medieval torture device, and after many tearful attempts, I refused to do it."

It cannot be said too often that pregnant women and new mothers are often CRAZY. It's nothing personal, it's just the hormones.

[Amy P]

One more thing: there's a reason why they invented wet nurses.

[Janice]

And, as I watch the hurt feelings flare in the comments, I realize, once again, why parenting is such a parlous blogging topic. Breastfeeding may work for one family with one kid; formula feeding may be right for another child in another situation and some combination of the two might work best for another.

You're not automatically a better parent because you breast or formula feed. You're not getting a gold star if you use the family bed OR Ferberize. Right? Right.

Of course, what I haven't touched on in this comment, so far, is how very gendered 95% of the parenting discourse is. It's all about mothers and how bad they are for doing this or that, at least from what I see. *sigh*

[dave.s.]

I actually know something here - or think I do. I did a review of breastfeeding results medical literature in conjunction with a paper on chemical contamination of breast milk (a real problem if the mother has been exposed to contaminants, very big in some of the 'Stans where pesticide use has been extreme and in Inuit women who eat polar bear and aquatic mammal organs, some problem in Michigan-Minnesota women who eat lots of local fish).
Anyhow: after reading all those papers, there is some positive effect (not huge) on kids who are breast fed up to six months, there's no particular virtue to exclusive breastfeeding even up to six months, and it's hard to find effects from feeding from the breast versus other food after six months.
My wife made a fairly big effort to breastfeed all of our kids for first three months, with poor success for the first (who spent his first week in the PICU and never really got the hang of it) and good with the second and third. Some years later, they all seem fine.
We all slept in the same bed when they were infants, so it was really easy for her to take the younger two to the breast at 3 am. I did a fair number of 3 am formula feedings for the first (as did she) and it was more disruptive for both of us, but had some sweet moments.

[harry b]

Wendy, it could be that we are responding to very different micro-social-environments. Rosin's comment about the chilly reception she got from saying she would quit was completely familiar to me -- having read the "breastfeed only" manuals, and being familiar with people who really do look down on people who don't. But, of course, I can imagine other environments in which people are very cavalier about things and in which more positive reinforcement of the decision to breastfeed would really be beneficial (well, I don't have to imagine it, two of my nephews have been raised in such a micro-environment). I don't think anything you have said has suggested that you are in that camp, and of course not everyone who promotes breastfeeding is. (So, to give concrete examples, all three of my family doctors while I've had kids have promoted and supported breastfeeding in exactly the way you think is normal -- "do it if you can, stop if it feels wrong to you"...etc). And I don't want to suggeste there;s anything wrong with doing it, far from it -- I think it is fine to do, and probably better for many kids and many mothers, and, in addition, I think that if you enjoy it that is a good reason to do it. But I have witnessed people making what seemed to me unhealthy sacrifices of their mental health because they were led to believe that doing it was far more important for their kid than, I suspect, it really is. And others (and this is autobigoraphical) who have not had the strength of will that Tim had to do what seemed intuitively the right thing (supplementing once or twice a day) because the advice they got was that any bottlefeeding would jeopardise the breast feeding.

Anyway, I apologise (honest) if the tenor of my writing has caused offense. I hope that if we'd been talking in person I'd have managed to avoid causing offense. Its worth talking about these things, but probably only worth doing so if one can do so civilly and collaboratively.

[laura]

I used a store model for pumping. I don't think it was cheap. $100 or so. I just couldn't do it. But I know others who had no problem with it. This thread really shows that different methods work differently for different people. We all have to be careful about prescribing the one right method. (Myself included.)

I come from a family of midwives. In fact, my aunt was the president of the American Midwife Association a few years ago. She is really skeptical about any hardcore philosophy. In fact, she told me to have a glass of wine every night when I was pregnant, after the first trimester.

Harry b, do that C-Section post. Nature tried to kill me the first time around. I was completely unprepared for that experience after nine months of book reading. (It also took five days for my milk to come in, because my body had been nearly destroyed.) One of my neighbors just had a baby with a serious birth defect and wasn't adequately prepared for it with all the classes and books.

[Amy P]

A $100 breast pump is a cheap one. The hospital pump cost around $1,000 new, but rents starting from $1 a day.

[Madeleine]

It took me five days for my milk to come in also, Laura, and I had a fairly normal delivery. A friend of mine tried to breastfeed for 6 days, still no milk, so that was that. (I don't recall if she had a C-Section or not.)

When I was pregnant in 2000, I got bombarded with the Breast is Best stuff. "Enough already," I thought, "I get it. Breastfeed. No problem."

But when my daughter was two weeks old and the pain from thrush made me cry every time she nursed, I started to understand why that message was delivered so forcefully. It isn't easy (for some families) and it takes a lot of work to get established (for most families) and there are various social pressures against it in some communities (though that wasn't true for me). So, as Wendy said, there is a tendency to over-encourage to meet those hurdles.

[Amy P]

Five days is pretty standard for milk coming in.

[Wendy]

So, to give concrete examples, all three of my family doctors while I've had kids have promoted and supported breastfeeding in exactly the way you think is normal -- "do it if you can, stop if it feels wrong to you"...etc)

I'm not sure who "you" is here. I don't think telling someone "stop if it feels wrong" is the "normal" thing to do (well, I think it's is normal, in that it happens regularly, but it's not the normal, meaning reasonable, thing to tell someone).

Plenty of things feel wrong sometimes. We do them anyway, because eventually it will stop feeling wrong. We have such a low threshold of "wrong" these days, and I think that threshold is somewhat based on misogynist/sexist views of women, parenting, and work.

"I'm not supposed to feel like a cow!" someone might say. Well, actually, yes, you are, at first. It's ok. The kid will grow up and you'll stop feeling like a cow. But heaven forbid a woman should feel like a cow for one second! Heaven forbid a woman should look like a cow for one second, or no one will find her attractive/womanly/acceptable!

I'm about to finish up a much longer post at my blog.

[B mama]

Breastfeeding is great, but I agree that the health and bondedness of children does not have to do with whether or not she was breastfed. I think there's a definite bias in some circles against using the bottle. As an adoptive mom, I bristle against the notion that my kids are not going to be as smart or healthy because they didn't get breastmilk. I also think we need to have access to really high quality organic formula. I sometimes think those who are pro-breastfeeding dismiss formula as being "poison" without giving thought to making it better for those of us who need and want to use it, and deserve to have it nourish our children.

Oh, also? My mom breastfed me until I was 3, and I've been plagued with weird, random health problems my whole life. Though I am smart.

[Ben Brumfield]

I think that Harry B's "micro-social environments" couple with the personal experience Janice points to to make this an extremely difficult conversation to have in a national context.

When we were expecting (2005, Austin TX), we went to prenatal nursing classes in addition to birthing class. When my daughter couldn't suck enough, we used the hospital lactation consultant, and hired a private consultant as well. Nothing but a bottle seemed to work, so we switched exclusively to pumping. My wife woke up in the middle of the night to pump while I fed the baby, so neither of us got any sleep, but at last our child started gaining weight. We gave up on nursing after 5 weeks, but did pump-and-bottle for the next four months. My daughter had nothing but mother's milk for nearly 6 months, since we had a freezer full after we returned the pump.

Once we switched over to formula in defeat, I felt like we'd been had. Everything I'd been told -- from the supposed expense to the effects on diapers -- turned out to far off base. Formula worked, and was cheap and easy by comparison. The agony of those first couple of weeks, when everyone was afraid to suggest bottles for fear of nipple confusion or somesuch -- even while our baby remained below her birthweight -- it could have been avoided. If we have another child, we'll try to breastfeed again, but I can guarantee you we'll make our decisions differently.

This kind of experience makes it very difficult to have an unemotional conversation with someone whose personal experience was easier, or whose social environment is very different. Obviously, I don't think my own peer group needs any more influence from "people who are trying to make BF to seem more like the norm". However, it's easy to imagine precisely the opposite side -- someone who has gotten zero support from their employer or family for their efforts to breastfeed. Or someone who knows people who never bothered trying for silly reasons. But put me in the same anonymous comment box as a person who's received cutting remarks about nursing in public, and any conversation that departs from the details will probably be impossible. We all have such different baselines, and it takes more caution than I usually possess not to generalize.

[harry b]

Wendy,
what I meant was that the doctors all were pro-breast-feeding but not fanatically so (which is what you implied was normal -- forgive me if I misinterpreted). I should have added that two of them knew my wife very well (still do, one is a family friend), and are good enough doctors to calibrate their advice to her personality. (ie, knew that it would take a lot, perhaps too much, pain and inconvenience for her to stop). Oh, and all were women, the two we know well have several children between them.

[harry b]

Laura -- wendy's warned me off the C-section post. I'm going to consult a statistician (but not a physician) before doing it. dsquared, perhaps.

[laura]

Wendy - Just reading over your past comments and thinking about them. I guess we're all looking for some balance here between those who say that BF is gross and shouldn't be done in public and those who make us feel wicked for not going to whole 9 yards.

BF was both a joy and a pain for me. It did make equal parenting more difficult. But there was nothing gross about the experience. In fact, I was very sad when that period of coziness was over. I saw BFing as a cool life experience and I'm glad I got to do it. But if it didn't work out for me, it would have been okay.

RAF -- great comments over at CT on this topic. And congrats on getting the promotion. I meant to leave at comment at your blog.

Harry b -- you sure know how to stir up the blogosphere, don't you?

[Doug]

Harry, *please* interpolate dsq's comments into any C-section post that develops! That sounds like pure gold...

[dave.s.]

Formula can be absolutely dreadful. If the formulator leaves out an essential vitamin, or if they put in melamine, or if it's made up with water which gives the kid giardia, game over. If the Nestle rep has given the mom free samples which tide her over until her milk goes away, and then she doesn't have the money to buy formula and puts the kid on solid food too soon, also a problem. These are mostly 3rd world problems, but they contribute to the general cloud over formula, and to the self-righteousness of the breast milk zealots. There's been a certain amount of mysticism about special virtues to breast milk which formula cannot match. I'm inclined to think breast feeding is good, if reasonably possible, for the first six months, but my view of 'reasonably possible' is not all that demanding, and from my reading in the literature I'm not sold on the idea that exclusive breastfeeding is all that much better than partial - assuming quality formula and safe water, which 1st world types like the readers here have access to.

[Laura/Geekymom]

Interesting conversation. I think YMMV on this issue and it seems to me that Breastfeeding is the first of many parenting issues about which parents start to feel guilty. Is feeling guilty a good thing for either parent or child? I don't think so. I had one good and one bad BF experience. In the first, it was primarily because I had to go back to work at 6 weeks (as the family's only income and because I'd already taken 2 weeks of my time off without pay). I didn't have *any* support. Neither my mother nor my mother-in-law had BF; my mother was almost as clueless about formula feeding. In another time, I think my mom would have opted for a wet nurse. One friend who'd had a baby 6 months earlier had had to give up BF because her baby wasn't gaining weight. She was completely distraught over this. Another friend outright refused to BF because she was squeamish about her boobs. Seriously. I've seen this happen more than once. We've sexualized breasts to such an extent that I've seen plenty of women just feel weird about it. So, when BF wasn't working out for me, I really didn't have anywhere to turn for help and I was freaking tired and Mr. Geeky was willing to get up in the middle of the night since I was the one who had to harch into work.

The second time around, I found the Internet. Seriously, it was 4 years later, enough time for the Internet to have spawned many more communities than it had in 1995. I joined a BF while working email list and it saved my life. Plus, I was in a different location and surrounded by plenty of other women who'd successfully BF. Ironically, this was in a less "progressive" location, but was completely supportive of mothers BF. And, of course, I was older and wiser and more patient about getting it to work. I had a c-section for this one and Mr. Geeky got up and brought the baby to me. I BF lying down and both me and the baby just drifted off to sleep.

Had it not worked out the second time, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. I might have been a bit disappointed, but as far as I'm concerned, I have my own needs too. Ignoring them wouldn't be healthy for either of us.

[Timothy Burke]

I think if you want a straw man in all this, it's the idea that there's a strong force out there that's trying to demonize breastfeeding or make it feel abnormal. Who's trying to make breastfeeding seem abnormal here or at CT? You've got a bunch of people reporting on their own experiences in which they were determined to try and breastfeed, who then found that there were various hybrid or flexible feeding practices which worked better for them. They're not saying, "Stop all breastfeeding".

At some point, you take repeated experiences of basically good-willed people seriously and say, "Ok, so there's an issue here". One of the repeated themes I see when this question comes up, in fact, is the gap between people's lived experience of trying to feed infants and the canned, statistical advice they get from medicalized advocates of exclusive breastfeeding. So it's a bit of a flashback to see the complexities of people's lived experience waved off as merely anecdotal.

[Wendy]

Tim, I explained my concerns at my blog post. Too long to go into here.

[Wendy]

Just one other thing: I think Harry is right and that our microenvironments have some effect on us. I was living among Long Island's middle class when I gave birth the first time. Hicksville is not exactly a bastion of BF support.

And that's the kind of microenvironment that most people in the US live in, fwiw.

[laura]

Wendy, I understand the need to support women who choose to breastfeed in unsupportive environments. (I have had to breastfeed on a subway, so I know about those environments.) But isn't it equally important to tell the truth about breastfeeding, which is that there is no scientific evidence that it helps your kid all that much?

[Amy P]

"I think if you want a straw man in all this, it's the idea that there's a strong force out there that's trying to demonize breastfeeding or make it feel abnormal."

Back when I was on the big Washington DC mother's list-serve, there was at least one episode of mothers on the list organizing a "nurse-in" (or whatever you call it) at an establishment after a nursing mother had gotten insensitive treatment at the hands of some clerk. That's the background. I just turned up this youtube from 2006 about a nurse-in at National Airport in DC that was prompted by a nursing mother's being kicked off a plane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARZbnJgQtew

[JennG]

I breastfed exclusively, and, being Canadian, I took the full year's maternity leave. But my husband and son still created a strong bond and at this point (3.5 years in; I'm back to full-time work) I would say we parent equally.

So I'm not really sure, anecdotally, that breastfeeding is to blame for inequal parenting AFTER the first year. Certainly breastfeeding takes a lot of time during the first year, but that's a short time in the whole life of a child.

I find it interesting the debate turned to just about how to get the baby fed and the question of father bonding fell off the comments.

[Wendy]

"But isn't it equally important to tell the truth about breastfeeding, which is that there is no scientific evidence that it helps your kid all that much? "

I'm still just astounded by this. As I said in my blog post, it seems to me that people are taking the word of Hanna Rosin (who obviously has a lot of resentment over BF) over the statement by the AAP (whose job it is to ensure that children grow up healthy). Don't you think that's weird?

As long as I'm pissing people off today, I think I'll write a blog post on how offensive I think it is that women change their names when they get married. Similar issues at stake, believe it or not. And I kind of want to get out of thinking about BF today for reasons that are complicated to go into.

[laura]

I'm not really sure why you doubt Rosin. I've read those statistics elsewhere, too. Here's one of the studies that she cites: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1361236

[Wendy]

Laura, that study says "This study provides persuasive evidence of a causal connection between breastfeeding and intelligence." I'm not quite getting what you're saying. Rosin's "evidence" seems to suggest the opposite of what she's saying.

A friend has posted another friend's response to the Rosin article (long story, blog-unsavvy Original Author). It's here.

[Russell Arben Fox]

the canned, statistical advice they get from medicalized advocates of exclusive breastfeeding

I don't know if it's because we're members of a pretty tight-knit--but pretty mainstreamed, all the same--religious community which dictates many of our social interactions, or if it's because neither of us ever felt any draw to the innumerable parenting/birthing/whatever classes out there, or if it's because we're close enough to our mothers and grandmothers to find in them primary sources of advice, or what, but all I can say is that after checking with my wife, I can confirm: we can't think, through four children in three different states (Virginia, Arkansas, and Illinois), of ever having anything like a close, intrusive encounter with even a single person who matches this description which Tim gives.

As he says, we should take the "repeated experiences of basically good-willed people seriously," and hopefully I do. I'll happily grant that there are LLL wingnuts out there who try to make every new mother who uses a bottle feel like a failure, and I add my voice to those who would argue against them. But if we're speaking from our respective "micro-environments" here, then here's ours: we have no personal knowledge whatsoever of the existence or power of a "you must breastfeed" brigade. I don't think they're straw men; I mean, hey, we can read, the testimony is out there, they clearly exist. But honestly, I just don't know where you find them.

[laura]

Well, that study states that that breastfeeding does not decrease allergies or obesity -- claims we hear all the time. The study and others say that there might be some correlation with IQ but it only 5 points, which a normal variation in any IQ test and can be chalked up different parenting levels for siblings (ie. the first born always get more attention). Like I said, I've heard these numbers quietly whispered about. I know a pediatrician who only breastfed for 2 weeks, because she said there was no evidence that there were any benefits for going beyond 2 weeks.

Like I said, I chose to breast feed to hedge my bets and because it was a life experience that I wanted to try. I would never try to argue that one should or shouldn't breastfeed. I just think that we have acknowledge these studies.