Molly Baker writes at Playgroup with Sylvia Plath and is a freelance reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer
Voici son opinion:
^I do not resent breastfeeding, my children, or my nearly perfect husband. I do resent the expectation that after carrying a baby for nine months, American women should surrender control for six more months.
Because it?s not just the physical and time commitments that breastfeeding requires (which at 6 to 18 hours a day is, no doubt, significant). Being a nursing mother overrides everything. It dictates what you do and don?t eat and drink, your sleep schedule and where you can go, when and for how long. It even holds sway over what you wear. For an entire six months.
If that weren?t enough, the real rub is what women give up psychologically during that time. There?s the illusion that you can return to any previously held status of equality at home or in the workplace, and that others? perception of you, your value, and indispensability will not be affected. Well, that notion is a four-ounce Avent bottle of expressed milk gone bad.
An entirely different, more compelling study was released just last month: You Can?t Be Happier than Your Wife: Happiness Gaps and Divorce. I know, sounds like complete common sense, but I love a good study by German experts in "economy and well-being." And here?s what they found: the happiness gap increased when the wife handled most of the housework. As they say in German, "duh." But they also discovered that unlike other benefits in a marriage, happiness cannot be redistributed between spouses. You can share happiness. And be happy for one another. But his happiness cannot become her happiness.
Its conclusions? "When spouses 'agree' on too unequal a distribution of welfare, this puts the durability of their marriage at risk... public policy should avoid giving spouses incentives that lead to diverging levels of happiness. Individual income and employment have been shown to be among the main determinants of happiness; policies that affect the division of labor inside households should keep this in mind."
In a word, be careful what you wish for. Blue-ribbon breastfeeding goals could in the extreme lead to increased lead to increased divorce, depression, and long-term damage to the delicate ecosystem of gender roles in our families, workplaces and society. At the very least, the effort sanctions the message to women that their children and domestic duties come first. For women and researchers for whom long-term breastfeeding is the answer, the question certainly needs to be asked: at what cost?^