To feel that breastfeeding is undermined?

You feel flat because somehow rather than seeing BF as simply the right personal choice you have made for you and your baby, and irrelevant to what other mums do; because it has involved sacrifice and effort, you feel you should be praised and seen as superior to mums who FF. You are mistaking a failure to undermine mothers who don't BF with undermining of those who do. Reassuring mums who FF that they are not harming their babies is an entirely different thing to 'undermining BF'.

We all understand that this can be a sensitive topic, but respectfully, this thread isn't about you. If reading posts about breastfeeding feels triggering right now, it might be healthier to take a break from these discussions for a bit.

Sometimes perseverance leads to success, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes people choose not to persevere for completely valid reasons. All of those experiences are fair enough.

But why has it become so common for people to take personal offense to someone else’s story? Is this just the nature of social media now?

The original poster shared their hard-earned success, and that doesn’t diminish your own effort or experience if things didn’t go as you'd hoped. You should still feel proud for having tried, even if the outcome was different.

I would agree I had so many issues establishing breastfeeding, delays with milk coming in, large weight loss and a tongue tie and was under the infant feeding team at hospital. In the end I carried on combi feeding after I no longer needed to give top ups as the HV persuaded me it would benefit me in the long run he could take a bottle.

The amount of people including family who were so unsupportive saying just give him a bottle now, I'm being selfish and it would be better.

Now he is approaching one and all I have got from the past few months is when are you going to stop, it's weird now. He shouldn't still be waking for a feed if he was on bottles he would sleep through ect.

I trained as a breastfeeding peer supporter with a local breastfeeding charity that helped me. There isn't a lot of support for women and sometimes even just a little tweak with position and latch in the first few days can actually make a huge difference to lots of mums in the early days but midwives/health visitors aren't always great with this.

I’m saying you live somewhere utterly batshit, populated by batshit people if you’re having these kinds of interactions with such frequency.

That, or… maybe you’re reading more into things than is actually there. You might just have that martyr personality type, where other people just get on with life.

As someone who tried very hard to breastfeed and wrecked my mental health in doing so, I find your post incredibly insensitive. Sometimes it’s not just a case of perseverance. YABU.

OP. I just wanted to say that I get it. Solidarity.

Honestly, like I said, this happens in almost any area. People will moan and complain about anything at all that you are successful about unless you simply keep quiet. I have learnt the hard way. Someone asks an honest question? Avoid it, half the time they’re just looking to have a go at you about information they asked you for in the first place.

I'm sorry you're going through such a tough time. The only advice I can think of is to focus on all the wonderful things you're doing for your baby. You're feeding them, cuddling them, waking up in the middle of the night with them, probably making financial sacrifices as well, the list goes on and on. You should feel proud of all your hard work 💪

💯

Not unreasonable OP.

Breastfeeding is apparently too hard for vast numbers of people to do.

But also easy enough that it's not an achievement if you have to try really hard to overcome breastfeeding challenges.

Encouragement to breastfeed is seen as 'guilt tripping and pressuring women'.

But also breastfeeding doesn't actually make any difference to a baby, ergo 'fed is best'.

Nothing makes sense. We live in a culture with toxic attitudes towards breastfeeding.

I do understand this and I’m not in the best mental state, I agree. I didn’t mean to make the OP feel bad, this has honestly been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with and my mental health and my marriage are in pieces over it, and I know I’m not being the best mum because of the guilt and stress.

Sorry to the OP if I’ve derailed this thread a bit. You shouldn’t feel guilty for breastfeeding and you should feel proud that you’ve made it work, I know I would had it worked out for me. I’m sorry you feel you have to defend your choice to others. But please know that you’re doing the best thing for your baby and it’s something that I wish I could give mine

Surely if it’s friends and family you can discuss freely whereas if it’s strangers you can ignore?

I don’t remember anyone asking me why I was using formula although I can imagine if I was on Mn then, I would be criticised for not trying to bf.

General comments about FF that might make FF mums feel a bit less shit about their choice doesn't take away from your achievement.

I FF DC1 as BF just wasn't working out. The judgement was unreal but I have a thick skin. I BF DC2 well over 2 years and was put on a pedestal. I got offered a cup of tea and a sit down during a GP appointment for thrush when DC2 started fussing for a feed. In their room. With a waiting room full of people outside.

I just don't get it when people say BF is undermined. My experience was the total opposite.

You must live somewhere seriously weird if you’re getting this many comments about breastfeeding a 6 month old baby. What a lot of drama over nothing.

This thread has taken quite a turn. I genuinely think we all need to grow up a bit and stop reacting so defensively. It's completely valid to feel disappointed if you tried hard to breastfeed and it didn’t work out, that’s a tough experience.

But that doesn’t mean women who are proud of persevering through their own struggles with breastfeeding should be silenced or made to feel guilty for sharing their success.

Breastfeeding can be incredibly difficult, especially the first time or with some babies. With the right support and information, many challenges can be overcome, but that doesn’t mean it will work out for everyone, and that’s okay.

There are valid reasons why formula feeding might be the better or preferred choice for some families. I completely understand the sadness or frustration that can come with not being able to breastfeed as long as hoped.

For context, I had an emergency caesarean after hoping for a natural birth. Many of my friends had straightforward vaginal births and bounced back quickly. I couldn’t drive for weeks and was in pain during recovery. While I’m endlessly grateful for modern medicine, it probably saved my life, I still felt like a failure for a while. But that doesn’t mean I resent women who had smooth, unmedicated births, it just wasn’t my experience.

Similarly, I’m incredibly proud of having pushed through the toughest eight weeks of breastfeeding, it was painful and exhausting. With a supportive partner and some amazing help from our NCT group, we made it through.

Parenting throws so many challenges at us all, some things go as planned, others don’t. But surely we can celebrate each other’s achievements without taking them as personal criticism. Why has it become so difficult to hear someone else’s success story without feeling offended?

OP the reason it’s gauche for you to moan about BF is because you got everything you wanted while others worked as hard or harder and still didn’t get to do it. Living with the fact that you weren’t able to do the very first thing that’s the best thing you can do for your child is shit, and luckily for you, you don’t have to. Count your blessings and get some perspective.

It doesn’t matter what others think of what you’re doing. If you’re happy, that’s enough. Just because they’re asking, doesn’t mean you have to give them your life story. If they seem like they need to go on about it, maybe they have issues, you apparently don’t, so you don’t need to talk about it or justify. By doing so, and creating a thread on here, it sounds like you do have issues with bf or ff or you want to debate it. You don’t seem genuine.

For me, I just bf. No discussion, no explanation needed because I was happy with my decision so why the fuck did I need to discuss it.

It’s like now, I’m vegan, I don’t get involved with any discussion on it. Anyone that loves me and/or is respectful doesn’t want to question me in a negative way. Those that do, I just don’t get involved with any conversation with. I eat how I like. End of discussion. Other people’s opinions don’t make me feel flat because I’m genuinely happy with my choices, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

As a parent, you need to learn the skill of being genuinely happy with your choice and not caring what others think because there will always be someone judging. Who cares. But I think your thread is more about starting a bf v ff debate in a thinly veiled way.

Hey OP, here are some replies that helped me with the ‘6months and still breastfeeding?’ question without getting drawn into a debate about formula feeding.
’It’s working for us so I think we’ll just keep going until he/she stops or I’ve had enough’
´It’s working well at the moment so switching to formula now just sounds like more work’.
´I might introduce a bit of whole milk in a cup at 12 months and just skip the bottles and formula part.’
You get fewer questions later on (I breastfed til 2years) because it happens less often in front of other people and becomes more something you do at home first thing in the morning and last thing at night. 6-12 months is kind of peak annoying questions I found.
If anyone implied that it was weird or unhealthy to breastfeed past 6months I’d quote the WHO two years thing. But basically I found that making my answer about what was working for me and bypassing the health benefits (which absolutely were part of the reason I chose to breastfeed and to continue breastfeeding) helped to avoid the stupid unhelpful dynamic where everyone ends up feeling judged and inadequate, no matter how they chose to feed their baby.

Totally agree. When you’re in the trenches it seems like such a huge deal. I wasted so much headspace on it during pregnancy. I went to breastfeeding groups (before I even had a baby!!!), I did online webinars about breastfeeding, I read books and prepared as much as I could. But I still couldn’t do it. And at the time I felt bereft. It’s only as time passes that you realise that it’s such a temporary thing, nourishment is available in other ways and that’s a blessing we are lucky to have in this country.

I also agree that the people who boast about how proud they are fucking tedious. Yes it’s a good thing to do, if you can. But also…nobody else cares about your parenting preferences and choices and it’s boring to ram on about them.

When FF mothers are faced with the below fucking message on every single pot of formula, it's in fucking bright red on my current pot, it's no wonder that we come from a defensive place automatically. We're literally being told as we make up a bottle, every single time, that what we're doing isn't good enough.

From my perspective, 2nd DD is currently 6 months, I've been asked (outside of medical settings) precisely once how I was feeding. And that was a friend who knew how much I struggled with the guilt of FF 1st DD. It's never come up in baby groups.

If you had come to me and talked about it I would ask why you didn't give a bottle, because the struggles you went through sound awful, and for ME I wouldn't put myself through that for the small (as I perceive them to be) benefits of BF. It would be curiosity rather than judgement because you made a different choice than I would have done.

That said. Just let it go. If a FF mum asks why you keep going say the benefits are worth it to you. You have an older child (I think from the thread?) So you know how utterly unimportant it becomes when they get older.