To wonder how much breastfeeding matters 14 years on?

[ringle]

Genuine question. I bf both my kids with relatively few problems, mostly because I found it enjoyable.

But looking back it doesn't seem that big a deal.

What's prompted this is a couple of people testifying on another thread that their ongoing efforts to bf drove them to depression.

What are the stats?

I think this is true of many things that we as parents fret and wring our hands over, only to look back over time and realise it really didn't matter. Realising that helps me now with my teenage son and I don't sweat the small stuff.

Sorry Ringle, I was just picking up the kids from school and wanted to listen to the More or Less podcast on this.

Suppose we were looking at the impact on IQ, I'd use a multiple regression approach to try and unpick effects of measurable confounders - parents income, IQ of parents, social class, education level of parents, etc

Then how to handle the less tangible confounders...
Maybe instrumental variables? Ie find something that's correlated with the thing we think might be causing the spurious correlation (e.g. Parental attitudes to education) but not correlated with breastfeeding.

Or approach it from the other angle - see if desire to breastfeed is correlated with higher IQ. Again, simplified, if we look at mothers who intended to breastfeed but couldn't and the IQ of their children, we might be able to pick out the impact of some of the confounding factors.

god I love More or Less.

That Lancet abstract is interesting.... they manage to squeeze a lot of advocacy in a few lines... I need to click through to the whole article (paywall?)

People who don't breastfeed have fabulous bonds too. The best thing about your daughter having a baby is that she breastfed her baby for a long time too? Why? It's up to her how she feeds and seems a strange thing to concern yourself about. It's her baby. Not yours. Would you have been just as proud and fabulous about her if she'd have turned round and said she was never going to breastfeed? If you would, then fair enough. It's personal choice/circumstances and nothing to do with being "right" or "wrong.
Sorry, that's patently, blatantly incorrect. Human beings produce live young and their bodies provide milk to feed them. That is what is supposed to happen. All the rest is just talk. You can't get round it, you can't excuse it, there is nothing that is so 'right' as breastfeeding. It's a wonderful thing that formula is available for those who can't or won't breastfeed, but the right way is the way that nature has provided. Spit all you like. I'm right.

the right way is the way nature has provided

I'm assuming you live on raw food that you have hunted / gathered from your local park PlasticPatty?

As my kid was a lazy little shit 14 days overdue and was only going to be 2 weeks old when I had an overnight North Sea ferry crossing, I breastfed for convenience. Then I carried it on for 6m because the weight dropped off, I was saving money and didn't have the nightly rigmarole of sterilising bottles. He's tall and skinny because he has his father's physique and is an epipen carrier who is also allergic to his beloved cat. We have a very close bond because we share a slightly warped sense of humour. I breast fed for the convenience. Put him on formula to return to work and health visitor commented that his slight weight gain was because I was now "artificially feeding him". Her words didn't bother me because I and other mothers already realised she was a not very nice bitch. But to a more emotionally vulnerable mother, her words could have been damaging.

Lancet article is free, though you do need to register to access it.

:)

Its funny you should say that @rightnowimpissed as I ff from birth both of mine and always was worried that they didn't have the chunky look of friends bf babies . ds1 is 3 and only ever been to doctors once ds2 once also. Mine arent generally I'll children and have no allergies etc
I will also say I am a HCP and made my decision after reading a lot of research. I also witnessed a lot of hospitalised babies and distraught breastfeeding mothers in my job so perhaps that swayed my decision slightly.
I fully stand by my decision and have no regrets.

It's not impossible that the continued banging on about the importance of breastfeeding is actually motivated by misogyny. Remember that it started being a big deal again around the time where women were making a lot of gains in terms of equal pay, autonomy, etc.
Breastfeeding is not instinctive and natural or there wouldn't be such a need for 'support' to enable mothers to do it - and there wouldn't be so many miserable, guilt-stricken women who tried and found it impossible. When birth and childrearing are left up to 'nature' rates of maternal death and infant mortality are a fuck of a lot higher.
Breastfeeding also ties the mother to the baby and decreases her ability to go out, continue with work, have any time to herself.
Sure, some women find it easy, and some women find they get the hand of it pretty quickly, and it probably is marginally better for babies, all other factors being equal. It's fine if you want to do it and it's all working out.
But do bear in mind that a lot of the 'advice' given to pregnant women and new mums has little or no bearing on scientific facts about babies' wellbeing, and is driven by some social groups' obsession with controlling women (most of the stuff about what to avoid eating/drinking/doing in pregnancy has a lot more to do with removing women's rights than with public health: it all has roots in US anti-choice campaigning).

I did intend to BF my DS. I reckoned it would save money if I didn't have to buy bottles/teats/sterlizing stuff/formula milk. But it didn't work out, so he was FF and that did mean I could get nights and days out and leave him with someone else. It shouldn't be a big deal, and should be up to the woman concerned (and let;'s not even get started on men who get all overinvested in 'natural' childbirth and breastfeeding even when their partners are in dreadful pain and psychological distress...)

Sorry, that's patently, blatantly incorrect. Human beings produce live young and their bodies provide milk to feed them. That is what is supposed to happen. All the rest is just talk. You can't get round it, you can't excuse it, there is nothing that is so 'right' as breastfeeding. It's a wonderful thing that formula is available for those who can't or won't breastfeed, but the right way is the way that nature has provided. Spit all you like. I'm right.

Some irony there in your 'all the rest is just talk' remark when you've served up nothing but rhetoric.

ReanimatedSGB, I agree.

I'm formula feeding (by choice), and currently have a stinker of a cold and feel really rough. If I was breastfeeding, I'd have much less chance to recuperate, for example. I can (and do) take it in turns with my husband, and instances like now, he can do it all whilst I feel sorry for myself and drown in my own snot.

I did some combi feeding at the start, but I love bottle feeding. I love that I am free to feed without pain, and that I can go out, that we can take turns. I love that I know how much my child is getting.

Breastfeeding is often used as another tether to tie women to the home, and set up another generation of inequality. If it works for people, great, but there's too much pressure into what should be an individual choice.

I drove myself mad trying to BF the first one, managed to keep going for 6 weeks, through mastitis, and felt a total failure. I still feel angry when I remember how the health visitor made me feel.

Second baby, took to it like a duck to water, no issues at all.

Had third baby when second baby was just 12 months, BF fed them both but third baby decided he was giving up after 4 months and just refused. I gave him a bottle in desperation and he loved that!

Second baby carried on BF until he was 2 and a half even though third baby had given up.

Interestingly, the BF baby is now 16 and has only been to the GP twice in his life. He just never gets ill, he is also very sporty and competes at national level in his sport (rowing). His brother and sister are generally healthy enough but catch every bug going!

I tell them it's their own fault.

Being fed with love is quite enough be that by breast or bottle.

Purely and simply mums choice and no one else's bloody business.

And op it doesn't matter it really doesn't.

Being fed with love is quite enough be that by breast or bottle.

Purely and simply mums choice and no one else's bloody business.

And op it doesn't matter it really doesn't.

In the interests of fairness, I should add that if you are going by IQ my non BF kids are doing far better than the one who was BF for 2.5years.

So it's a feminist position to encourage formula feeding so as to free women from the home and increase equality.

With research like that Lancet example, is it possible to identify how the misogyny pervades the research? I guess it's something that is a hidden bias in the researchers analysing the data. Their beliefs are misogynistic to begin with so that affects their interpretation, assumptions and conclusions.

Well there's the file drawer problem - if you find something especially something that fits everybody's prejudices you're likely to get it published, if you find nothing it ends up at the back of your drawer because journal editors aren't interested. (Meta-analyses can help spot if this is going on).

Similarly, if you didn't get the effect you expected you might be tempted to rummage about in the data a bit more than you would otherwise, control for a few extra things, control for a few fewer things, rely on a secondary outcome you didn't originally intend to be your main measure, etc etc. The problem with this is it makes it much more likely you "find" something that actually occurred by chance.

The problem with the Lancet paper (if I'm looking at the right one) is that it pools all the data from high and low income countries meaning that large effects in low income countries may be swamping low or nonexistent effects in high income countries -i.e., you can't really tell much about high income countries at all. It also doesn't attempt to control for the fact that wealth is a massive predictor of health and also of breastfeeding in high income countries. These are the kinds of things that are only not queried at the peer review stage if everybody basically accepts your premises in the first place.

I can't see that encouraging either is a feminist position. The things that are feminist are: giving women accurate information, giving support where necessary, not shaming and putting in place the legal framework so women can breastfeed anywhere they and baby are both allowed to be. Otherwise, as infant feeding takes place in a wider patriarchal culture, there's no position that can't be influenced by sexism.

I think the feminist question is really interesting and important. Certainly any view of scientific studies as wholly neutral and apolitical is flawed, insofar as every discourse has some 'bias' to it. No one speaks in a moral, ethical or political vacuum.

I wonder though whether it could also be a feminist position to seek to so normalise the process of feeding and caring for a child that women would not be excluded or marginalised as a result of this. What I have in mind is that UK exclusive bfeeding rates were something like 17% at 3 months in 2010 and 1% at 6 months. Thinking then about even just the first 3-6 months, can't it be a feminist position to say that where a mother chooses to bf (or in general chooses to take even a short amount of time to focus solely on childcare) there should be a whole society approach to supporting that? Then instead of saying to women they need to ff to free themselves we could say they can ff or bf and their freedoms will be supported and protected by society as a whole. Isn't that something worth working towards?

Clearly the Lancet article doesn't ask that question but maybe advocacy for bfeeding and a feminist perspective aren't incompatible?

The problem is, that freedoms and breastfed can often be contradictory. You are not free to go out as you wish, without your baby. You are not free to work if you wish. You are not free to recover in peace when being ill. You are not necessarily free to eat and drink what you want. You are not free to be the one that gets a decent night sleeep whilst your partner feeds. You are the default parent because feeding your child means you have to be.
nome of that is anti feminist if it's what you choose, but to push women into it, to only ezplore the benefits of one side, to try to alter their wishes on feeding, that is anti feminist.

That great Allhallowseve , just posting about my experiance and the points that are common for FF babies, like i said before it makes no difference as long as babys are happy so what!

BF was right for me and my babies, im not a better mother than anyone else, everyones doing their best (I hope).

Bluesky Some people do choose this and hey should not be barretted for that either.

Interesting.

The origins of the La Leche league seem very feminist to me (fighting to put a woman-centred approach back in place).

But I think that something that's good for women doesn't stay good for women in the same way for 50 years. Powerful men always come and capitalise on it and so it's impact can change and become more mixed.

rightnowimpissed, you know where I said it's a choice that's because it's a choice...