Antibreastfeeding?

[Redebs]

Having just browsed some of the 'Help articles' on here, I'm shocked at how Mumsnet is discouraging breastfeeding.

There's one on how normal it is to wean off the breast at two months because of all the 'problems you will have'.

There's one on 'combi feeding', which is about giving formula feeds to breastfed babies - the surest way to reduce your milk supply in reality.

There's another one about packing dummies and bottles in your hospital labour bag. This is definitely going to interfere with newborns getting colostrum and learning to latch. If a baby needs anything, the hospital will provide it in reality.

I know some women choose to formula feed, but these are insidious, supposedly helpful, undermining tactics aimed at new mothers trying to breastfeed. Most of these are sponsored by the baby bottle manufacturer MAM.

If formula companies were promoting this, they would be, rightly, in contravention of advertising rules.

All medical and scientific advice is to give exclusively breastmilk for the first six months and to continue to at least twelve months or longer.

This.

I also think the massive “breast is best” push is counterproductive. It means a lot of bottle feeders don’t feel able to simply say “I didn’t want to” for what ever reason.

I had so many people get defensive about their decision to bottle feed. I had people say they “tried but couldn’t” and go on to describe perfectly normal cluster feeding as having no milk or some such situation where good breastfeeding support may have helped had they wanted to continue.

many women rely on other mums advice and experience to guide them, and there just aren’t the women out there who ebf. So usually they’re being guided by bottle feeding mums, whose experience is completely different. Different feeding patterns, different weight gain patterns, different poo consistency.

I was told cluster feeding wasn’t normal. That the liquid poo meant my milk “wasn’t agreeing with her”. That she shouldn’t need feeding again, and that maybe something was wrong with my milk.

then as pp have said the comments about having done it long enough, you can’t keep feeding in public, you need to give formula so you can control the amount she gets all started.

fortunately between a good HV and kellymom I managed to figure out all the “advice” was bollocks and my baby was feeding perfectly normally.

It might not have been awful for you but it IS for a lot of women so you might want to stop invalidating those who DID find it awful.

Or are we not allowed our opinion on breastfeeding as it isn’t “it’s the best thing ever”? How dare we share our reality huh?

Yes and being taught about pumping/syringing. When Dd was born early and struggling to bf, the ‘next option’ was formula. A couple of days in i remembered about pumping and asked for a pump which it turned out they had but hadn’t thought to offer me DD had milk from me from that point onwards and the odd bottle, and breastfed normally from a few weeks old until 8 months. Even during that time she had the odd bottle if I was going out or exceptionally tired and needed sleep.

@Emmamoo89 did you know that you wouldn’t count in the 1% ‘exclusive breastfeeding’ number because your son has had a sip of formula? It only applies to babies who have never had any ever. Not doing you down, I’m showing how misleading the statistics can be and how misrepresentative they are of the situation. You’d be counted as a ‘mixed feeder’.

This is UNICEF's research. Ireland and France much much worse.

I say worse but what I mean is lower

I'm sorry but that's bullshit. My son is 10 months in 3 days and only been poorly 3 times. He recovered so fast I was gobsmacked. And guess what you wouldn't have even known he was ill because he was still his smiley happy chatty self. And I know it was down to the extra milk I gave him.
Something is bullshit that’s for sure.

Bit of ‘first time mum with young baby thinking she’s cracked the whole thing’ going on here 😬

I would say a 9 month baby being ill 3 times is pretty average, or on the higher end if they’ve no siblings and have never attended nursery.

Like I said DD was never sick once (bar post immunisation temperature) for 14 months, not even a cold. Then she started nursery and BOOM!

I feel like BFing is really uncommon. I was the first mother in my family to BF in over 70 years, my grandmother's didn't, mum or aunties or cousins, not sure about great GPs. There was a stigma about it being hippyish and weird even though its the most natural thing. Honestly though, I bfed out of laziness and being frugal.

I would like to point out that dummies do not interfere with BF at all. Babies know the difference between a rubber dummy and a nipple, especially when they are hungry.

As I said upthread, the NCT course that I attended - which was very pro-BF - did not mention cluster feeding once. Nor did the midwife at the hospital who only seemed interested in whether he was latching properly (there was literally no guidance on what to do once we left hospital, which lead to baby becoming jaundiced but that's another story).

When DS started feeding almost constantly from 5-10pm I was convinced that something was wrong with him or me.

If I had relied on Dr Google or family members (who either hadn't BF at all or had 30 years ago) my BF journey might have ended early as I started to worry whether I had a low supply, well-meaning family members suggested we start topping up using formula.

Thankfully though two of my close friends (who had BF in the last few year) told me this was completely normal and it would pass.

There would have been nothing wrong if I had decided to stop BF during the cluster feeding stage. I know someone who did, because it was affecting their MH, and I completely understood that. But I didn't want to stop BF and had I been fore-warned about cluster feeding it would have saved a lot of stress and self-doubt.

Everyone in my NCT breastfed initially and we were all under no illusions about the importance of it all!

The majority of us continued to at least 8 months ish, only 2 didn't.

I stopped at 8 months, totally fine.

All the babies are equally fab.

Personally I think that a standardised feeding appointment pre- and post-birth should be part of the care of the midwife received during pregnancy and after birth, which covers all feeding options.

As I said, I did NCT, but firstly, this was paid for so not accessible to all, and secondly, I found it to be very pro-BF (barely no mention of FF or combi) and yet bizarrely left out some really key aspects of BF e.g. cluster feeding.

Sadly this leaves a lot of people relying on Google, which is a hive of misinformation, or family members, who, in my case, can give out inaccurate advice.

I'm glad you enjoy breastfeeding and it's all.gong well.and your son is healthy and happy ,but i don't recall either of my bottle feed babies being ill very much as babies in fact they are 16 and nearly 13 and I can count on one hand the times they have been I'll ( other than winter colds)

Oh and my 16 year old has h ad Covid twice ,the first time he complained of a sore throat and vomited once ,and was well.within 48 hours and the second time he just had a scratchy throat .

Quite. Anecdata is meaningless. My child didn’t get sick at all until he started Nursery at 18 months.

Agree with this. There’s so much misinformation floating about. Our NCT class teacher said she ate too much chocolate when cluster feeding and it made her milk chocolatey so weaning the baby onto vegetables was tricky?! An NHS helpline when DD was screaming suggested it was because I’d eaten chilli the night before and had made my milk spicy?! (It turned out DD was just a screamer.) MN threads are forever talking about milk being low-quality or low supply in the evening to explain cluster feeding.

I’ve been very lucky both times with BF support, though: first time was trickier as DD had a tongue tie that went undiagnosed til 17 weeks but midwives, health visitor and GP were all keen to keep me EBF and we got there eventually, but it did take some private consultation. This time around tongue tie diagnosed at birth and snipped in hospital the same day, round-the-clock feeding support in hospital til we were all happy he’d got the hang of it, home visits from midwives included checking his latch and resolving minor issues, etc.

I think tongue tie is a huge problem and not enough are promptly diagnosed, resolved or followed up on – the tie can reattach. Both my children had hard-to-spot posterior ties and lip ties, issues latching, and incredible wind as a result, which then impacts sleeping. Having the tie snipped in the hospital second time around has made a world of difference Vs having to track down a distant clinic the first time. Plus less blood and pain for the baby doing it on Day 0.

I mean, the actual data says that breastfed babies have on average fewer illnesses -particularly gastrointestinal illnesses and ear infections, but it’s more fun to patronize women who believe breastfeeding probably helped their own baby by countering with your own anectdata about how healthy your formula fed baby was, right?
bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887-019-1693-2
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6860885/

Of course they do, as part of wider studies. But the effect on an individual child is very small and an ‘example’ of one 9 month old baby with no siblings that has never been to nursery is hardly reliable is it? Neither is the ‘example’ of my mixed fed child who was ill a lot less.

And antibodies in breastmilk is a real observed phenomenon.
bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-022-04945-z

You’re right that it’s impossible to know if one child’s small number of infections in the first months of life was due to being breastfed.
But you are wrong in thinking that this means the impact of antibodies in breastmilk on one individual baby must always be negligible.
If your baby is exposed to a nasty virus or bacteria and the antibodies in your milk her her to avoid that infection taking hold, it could make an enormous difference, you just would never know about it.

But you are wrong in thinking that this means the impact of antibodies in breastmilk on one individual baby must always be negligible

Well where’s your study to disprove this?

it could make an enormous difference, you just would never know about it

Convenient. There’s no one thing breastfeeding protects against completely. It has a small benefit in terms of ear infections and gastric illness in small babies, but that’s the biggest impact.

I’m really not trying to be horrible, like I said I breastfed myself for 8 months, I’m pregnant again and will breastfeed again if it suits us both. But all this talk of ‘amazing benefits’ is a bit misleading, when the numbers show there is only a small beneficial effect.

I agree.
With my first I had bottles, dummies and formula because I was told by multiple people I'd likely not be able to bf.

My second is 8 days old and I bought no bottles, no dummies and no formula. Funnily enough, my supply is much better this time and my son barely lost weight and is already putting back on. Something which didn't happen last time.

Me too! In fact I felt bullied to continue which was awful as my MH was so low

Agreed

Do you not understand what averages are?
On average, breastfed babies experience fewer respiratory, gastrointestinal and middle ear infections. That’s what the first two studies I linked found. The first had a sample size of 6681, the second was a meta study - combining the results of multiple other studies. So big number. The positive impact of breastfeeding on the likelihood of developing one of these infections will not have been spread evenly among the kids in the study. There will be a bell curve. There always is once the numbers get big enough. Which means it’s likely a few kids in that study would have become very sick if not for breastfeeding.

That’s not how it works at all! I’m beginning to wonder if you really understand it. They have simply taken a bunch of kids, got the mum to document the feeding method and recorded how many times the kids got sick and with what.

That doesn’t mean that a handful of them would’ve become seriously ill if not for breastfeeding. What nonsense! Anyway as breastmilk is a very similar composition from woman to woman, it’s silly to suggest it has a magic effect on some kids but not others.