To feel upset about sil not breastfeeding?

[wheelygirl]

hi, new here so pls be gentle!

My dh's brother and his wife had a baby boy four days ago. She said she had a lovely birth and was out of hospital the next day.

We visited them yesterday at home and sil was bottle feeding. Now, I don't give a shit how people feed their children, I don't have any kids (am pg)But I got quite upset because her ds kept trying to breastfeed from her. He was refusing the bottle and kept nuzzling into her chest. Her breasts were leaking as well and she told me she was hand expressing and chucking it away. I asked her why she didnt give it to her ds and she told me that she doesn't want him to get used to breast milk. He had the formula milk then vomited it back up five minutes later. He was really crying and it made me feel awful when he was turning his head to her breast and opening his mouth.

She then went on to tell me that he hasn't even had colostrum because it was too much of a faff to get him to latch on. Colostrum is the important stuff right?

Why do I feel so upset about this? I felt her ds was doing something so instinctive and she should at least have tried to breastfeed. I understand that some women have great difficulty breastfeeding and formula is a more than adequate alternative but at least try and do it.

Aibu?

It's a shame this has turned into (yet another) bunfight.

People have good reasons for choosing not, or being unable to BF. Plenty of bad (or rather miserable) ones too imo.

But back to the OP - this was a brand new baby, fresh out of the womb. Whatever reasons the new mother had, it is sad that she couldn't give her baby colustrum or at least give BF a go. And it's sad the baby was ploned in a seat being rocked with a foot like that. On Day Four.

The baby will be fine I imagine, no harm done. But it doesn't sound as if the mother was enjoying her baby right then (possibly the company wasn't helping - I had dozens of visitors and loved it but they were easy to please) and that's a shame too.

pilchardnpoppy - im not giving too much details on here just incase someone knows me but basically theres a hereditary thing in my family and i have to be treated as having it in labour because if i do have it labour can be fatal and can cause major problems. the treatment was to take pressure from my blood vessels i'm guessing the duiretics where for that? maybe blood pressure though? nothing was explained, only found out week before i had my son about this hereditary thing and went into labour before i could speak to my consultant so the way to treat me was made in a phone call to a neurosurgeon at 3am in the morning.

why?

very sensible and measured post by tiktok round about noon yesterday

though I still think it would be harsh to judge a new mum with 10 visitors in the house for not choosing that particular moment to interact with her baby

hairfullofsnakes Mon 18-Jul-11 23:48:52
"i simply stated that i dont get it, that's all. at the end of the day, i am happy that i gave my children breastmilk and i will be proud to tell them i did so because of the benefits and i love the enjoyment they got from breastfeeding"

Can you give me a proud and happy message for my dd too? The one who ended up in hospital because I insisted on breastfeeding when she was clearly too weak to suckle? The one who looks like a little skeleton in the pictures? The one who had to be syringe fed back to health? Under those circumstances, it's a little harder to know what to tell them...

Some conditions cause salt to build up in the blood vessels causing blood pressure to rise, diuretics are used to stop this happening

does it really matter why salad had to take the diuretics? why is she being asked to disclose her private medical history on a bfeeding thread?

or is it so someone can try and say, 'actually you didnt need to take them, or you could still have bfed whilst taking them'

maybe i am being cynical, but thats usually the way these discussions go

my mum has a heart condition that she takes diuretics for, so you can take them for all sorts of reasons, whatever salads reasons/needs were are her business.

and i feel sorry for the sil in question, 4 days after birth, ten visitors all at once! i had similar after some of my births and then insisted with no4 and 5 that that was NOT going to happen!

cory, thanks. In the post you like, I do specifically say it is not right to judge the mother, though.

This is a really interesting article and pretty much sums up my views.

www.babble.com/baby/baby-feeding-nutrition/benefits-of-breastfeeding-baby-formula-feeding/

No time to read the whole thread but will just say YAprobablyBU but understandable given your hormones at the moment.

Razzle - I'm sorry. I think that article is dreadful. The writer is not a scientist and seems to have looked very selectively at the evidence. I think the worst part is where she talks about toxins in breast milk - what the heck does think formula milk is made from?? Oh yes cow's milk...which would be subject to the same environmental toxins. And no, i shouldn't think for one minute the manufacturing process eliminates of all of these. It's also unbalanced as it talks about the emotional costs of brestfeeding but not the emotional benefits.
I've read some very good articles that support FF but that is not one of them in my view.

Well put zimm, I see people are still desparately clutching at straws when clearly breastmilk is best.

Cory - why take what I say personally? This is not aimed at you and you clearly had a lot of problems with breastfeeding. I know a few women who has similar problems... Two of them expressed for nine and twelve months and another one tried to express but the supply kept failing so of course it doesn't always work out. But they tried and that's great just like you did.

Well if you don't like that one there are hundreds more you could choose from

Joan Wolf (the author of the article linked to by razzle) is right to point out that cultural factors make some women feel that breastfeeding over-rides every other parenting activity.

What she does not go on to say - and for a feminist this is a huge gap in her argument - is that breastfeeding needs cultural, economic, social support and when it goes well, it should not be down to the individual woman, and when it goes badly it should not be down to the individual woman either.

Another thing she fails to acknowledge is that the desire to breastfeed does not solely come from what women read or are told by their HCPs. It comes from the heart - many mothers want to do this, because they recognise it is a lovely thing they and their babies can do together. They are sad if it doesn't work out not because they have been duped by research but because they feel they have missed out on something they might have enjoyed.

She is also writing about a society (US) where maternity leave is virtually zero; where breastfeeding often means long-term expressing with is very difficult to sustain; where to some people, the idea that the state might take some of the burden is frowned on, politically, and where everything is your own responsibility/fault. I think this colours her views and makes them less applicable to other cultures, too.

Her reading of the research is very poor, and her presentation of the arguments highly exaggerated. She says, "I wanted to understand how breastfeeding has come to be perceived as the holy grail of health and formula-feeding as the equivalent of giving a baby nicotine." This sort of melodramatic language does not belong in a sensible argument.

tiktok - i like you, and i think the way you post you can tell you know how to talk/deal with people.

what environment do you think cows live in zimm? hardly sat smoking 10 b&h's lol

haha clutching at straws??? no one as said breast milk isn't best??? bizzare thing to say imo

Happy you like me, salad :)

I think the toxin argument has nothing to do with whether cows smoke or not .

Toxins are in breastmilk, and there are more PCBs in it than in cows milk because we are at the top of the food chain. That does not mean formula is better than breastmilk - in fact there is biochemical evidence that breastfeeding gives protection against environmental pollutants so choosing formula instead of breastmilk on pollution grounds is illogical.

Breastfeeding being something that is enjoyable is often overlooked - I would have chosen to breastfeed ds even if there were no health benefits at all just for the amount of pleasure it gives him (and me). Plus the ease, convenience and cost - health is just one part of the picture and one aspect of women's desire to breastfeed.

but this is it, actually i do think breast milk is best but i'm just stating that someone mentioned about cows milk and toxins and actually cows have much less crud in their system than us but whether thats a good or bad thing i don't know?

The thing is rita every baby and mother are different and it is not enjoyable for everyone. You were very lucky that both ypy amd your dc found it enjoyable.

An interesting article for those with an open mind by Professor Sven Carlsen in the Department of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim:

'Breastfeeding is not as beneficial as once thought'

www.ntnu.edu/news/breastfeeding

Yes that is true Mrsxstitch, and many women find it difficult at the start. I don't think it is lucky to find breastfeeding pleasurable though, it is designed to be that way for mother and baby.

Please, Klad - you are out of your depth here. The Carlsen paper has been widely derided, for its science, its methods, its conclusions. Just do a bit more reading and a bit more homework before trawling the web and pouncing on something that appears to back you up.

To people in the field, the very fact you quote Carlsen reveals a risible lack of understanding of the issues on your part.

salad, I think its PCBs that are higher in humans, but my understanding is that the baby gets most of his share (!) in utero - during pregnancy.

I really don't get why some people are so bothered about how other people feed their babies, maybe I am missing something here. As I said yesterday because of my having had an organ transplant and my subsequent medication, BF just wasn't a permissable option for me so I FF. People have reasons why they choose to BF or FF and really it is no one elses business how someone chooses to feed their child. It may be just within my group of friends, but until I was expecting my own baby, I hadn't thought to ask my mum how I or my siblings were fed and my friends were also unsure. Life is so short and I know this from experience from having received a double transplant from a 19 year old boy, why worry about what doesn't affect us there are enough other worries in life that we have/will have without stressing ourselves over whether some of the other mumsnetters have BF or not? There are so many poor babies out there born into very difficult circumstances whose last worry would be their method of feeding. Perhaps some of the most judgemental and critical people on here would be better in putting their energies (as they are obviously very passionate) in helping some of these children in some way.