How important is breastfeeding?

[badboobs]

I won't be able to breast feed.

Please tell me honestly, how bad will it be for my babies health / bond with me?

It will be fine. 3 children, 1 not breastfed at all. Bond is the exact same.

I only bonded with my DD once I stopped bf around 5 weeks.

She is 3 now, rarely ill, bright as a button and generally an awesome little human.

I'm due again in August, and will give bf a go, but will be much quicker to move to formula if I am finding it tough. We had a great experience with bottle feeding!

I wanted to desperately it didn't work out sadly, but my boys growing nicely, reaching all milestones slightly early, hasn't been ill as yet and loves me.

End of the day all babies need food and love, fed is best.

It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. I couldn't bf mine and i wish i hadn't spent so long worrying about it. I bonded with mine incredibly well, they had a dummy for comfort which they gave up at 2 with no problems at all, always been healthy as horses and they're ahead of their peers. If you're worried about feeding and bonding you could just restrict feeding to you and your partner for the first few weeks but i don't honestly think it makes any difference.

Absolutely fine. Nutrition is important, not so much the source. You can cuddle just as much on a bottle.

It's far too often made out that mothers will bond better if they breastfeed. This might be the case for some but it is certainly not a rule. I breastfed my first for 5 weeks. For me, those 5 weeks were torture, I hated every moment of feeding, dreaded every feed and ended up in tears virtually every time. Switching to formula was the best thing I did. With my second baby, I never even attempted breast feeding. My bond with both children is the same. There are so many other ways to bond with your baby.

Breastfeeding, Formula fed, or tube feeding, sometimes people dont have a choice and society makes parents feel bad for not being able to/wanting to feed a certain way, either way as long as baby is fed, happy and healthy, it doesn't really matter in my opinion, i didn't breastfeed and it didn't affect me and my child's bond, or his health, i actually asked the health visitor what was the best formula to give my baby and she said aptimal milk was the next best thing, it might of changed now but its worth asking your health visitor.

I tried and failed to feed two of my babies. Their first few weeks of life was a living hell as I had no milk but gave into pressure to carry on trying (from HCP and family), almost bankrupting myself with special supplements and diets. Ended up with starving, thin babies, screaming round the clock who I resented.

Like a PP, I didn’t start bonding until I gave them formula.

I’m pregnant again and won’t even be attempting to breastfeed. I refuse to put myself and another baby through it.

It’s really not the be all and end all.

It's the biological norm and feeding in other ways introduces marginal, negligible risk.

But really, how many things do we do that aren't natural or the norm on a daily basis? Driving a car doesn't have the natural health benefits of walking but it can get you from a to b with nobody being able to guess how you did it, it can be made as safe as possible and it has myriad benefits. Formula feeding is the same but we don't attach the value judgements or the guilt to driving. It will nourish your baby with likely no discernible difference. Bonding comes from cuddling, smiling, playing, rocking, soothing, singing, bathing, cooing, snuggling and on and on.

I wanted a natural birth. Would it have been better or safer? Probably? Did I have a choice? Well yes, not having a live baby. Has it made any measurable difference. Nope.

It will be absolutely fine. There is no telling on an individual level that there will be any health advantages. On a population level, yes, there is, but that doesn't say much about individual differences. I wasn't able to bf my first baby. My friend who had her baby at the same time bf for 3 years. My dd has been a picture of health and rarely ill, while her dd had all sorts of issues, was in hospital a few times a year with some infection or other. Didn't develop as quickly as mine did. There's so much more to the picture of health and it's so much more complex than just one small variable.

That said, I did exclusively bf my other baby and I would say that if you are able to bf and it goes well, it's massively easier than ff. Purely for my own sanity and stress levels, I would definitely want to bf if I had another baby (I'm not having any more babies) because formula is a bit of a pain. But you have to do what you have to do and I have no guilt at all about not bf my ff one.

A fed baby is the most important thing.

I breastfed for the first 3 months and it didn't help with the bond, I struggled with motherhood for the first year of DS's life. Breastfeeding was cheaper and more convenient but I switched to formula when DS stopped gaining weight.

I only breastfed my middle DC (I have 3DC and breastfed for 5.5 months), it made no difference to bonding.

I'm one of the only people in my circle who bf and everyone bonded great! Their children just slept better. Honestly own the fact that you're not going to bf (whatever the reason) and enjoy parenting! It's the guilt and focus on that issue that will get in the way of bonding. Enjoy xx

ShowofHands puts it well - we do lots of things that aren’t absolutely optimal! It will be fine :-)

I've BF all of mine well over a year. None of them have ever had formula.

You can not pick out anything special about them. They are exactly the same as their peers. You could not pick which ones were BF and which were FF.
I did it solely for me. DH worked nights. I didn't want to have to get out of bed.

Your baby will be absolutely fine.

I bottle fed all of my three and have no regrets. We never had any problems bonding.

If you can, it’s important.

If you can’t, it’s important to remember you can’t and you’ll do exactly what you can for your lovely baby. Nothing is more important than that

It's not important. I had no desire to breastfeed, my daughter never once ever tried to nuzzle in. She was born 5lb 3oz at 37 weeks and is now 11 months old and is a chunk! Always loved her formula and now eats anything and everything. Don't worry.

I’d say it’s important enough to give it a try but not so important to stress if you can’t. Since you’ve said you can’t already don’t stress about it. Your baby will be absolutely fine.

I managed to bf all 3 of mine till 1+ two of the 3 have health issues. My siblings didn't bf any of theirs and none have health problems.

I'd say bond's form through physical contact that's why all new parents are encouraged to do skin to skin contact.

Formula fed babies bond just as well as bf babies. Please don't worry as long as they are warm, fed and loved you can't go far wrong.

@ShowOfHands and @ThunderRocket are spot on.

On a population level, there are some benefits conferred by breeastfeeding, but the magnitude of those effects is generally small once you adjust for confounding factors like maternal health literacy and socioeconomic status.

If breastfeeding works for you and your family, those health benefits are a nice perk. But if there are other reasons why breastfeeding doesn't work for you - be those physical or mental - then those health benefits are not worth torturing yourself about.

Breastfeeding research is absolutely full of confounders - you can't randomise people to breastfeed (even the much cited "breastfeeding RCT", PROBIT, didn't randomise mothers to breastfeed - it randomised breastfeeding education).

I couldn’t breastfeed ds1 because of complications I had during the delivery. I was so upset. I’d been brainwashed by nct classes and midwives into thinking breastmilk was the most important thing my baby needed and I was devastated I couldn’t give it to him.

It really isn’t that important. 3 years on he is an absolutely perfect, healthy, happy little boy, very rarely ill, fit and active.

I loved bottle feeding, it is really how I bonded with him, snuggling him, smelling his little head it was just so lovely. Especially in the middle of the night and it was just me and him and I felt like we were the only 2 people in the world, i have such happy memories of bottle feeding him. I chose to bottlefeed ds2 when I could have breastfed him because it worked best for our family.

Don’t worry, enjoy your baby. A healthy, happy mother is a much greater benefit to the baby than the very small amount of benefits of breastfeeding.