To think mums using formula are shamed more than breastfeeding mums?

[Mumtoboy123]

Before having children i didnt realise how big of an issue this seems to be. Everywhere you go you hear "breast is best" and yes, this is the case for some, however, i had my son 7 weeks ago and i was never too fussed about breastfeeding. I knew it would hurt, take a lot of time to get right and i would be the sole provider of feeding day and night. I knew that for me, this was a lot of pressure, that i would rather DH have the chance to feed DS and get that connection with him and we could face night feeds as a team. I also suffer from chronic fatigue and knew 2 hourly BF by myself would kill me or cause low feeling and possible PND.
When DS was born, i was rushed to surgery following the birth. Before this happened, because i felt i had to, id said i wanted to try and breastfeed for the first few days of colostrum at least. This meant that while i was being prepped for surgery, a midwife was 'panic expressing' in an attempt to get DS to latch on. Quite traumatic. DH then had to give DS a bottle while surgery took so long and we carried on from there.
Since having DS ive had aot of people assuming im breastfeeding, ignoring me saying im formula feeding and continuing to tell me their BF stories and advice, and i get funny looks wherever i bottle feed out of the house, especially at mum groups.
Surely feeding my child in the best way that suits our family is better than BF and my bond with DS suffering because of the hardship, or worse, not feeding at all?! There seems to be a lot of focus on supporting BF mums because of the opinions related to getting breast out in public but no support for those who have chosen to formula feed for whatever reason, if anything, when you say you are formula feeding you get a bit of a look and an "oh right" comment... then a silence. Its got to the point where i see another formula feeding mum in costa and i want to run up to her and high-5 her!!
Just to clarify... i have nothing against Breastfeeding at all... especially in public.

from me too

oh vox you haven't failed. please don't think that. you've done the right thing for you and your baby x

@voxnihili please don’t feel bad, I totally totally understand that you will and how it might have come to that. These threads can be extreme/fanatical and brutal. Please know that you tried your best but that so many things in parenthood are out of your control, feeding is one and it won’t make any difference to your daughter in the long run.

For what its worth I was BF and my younger brother was FF. He has three degrees and has just cycled round the world for charity. He also gets ill a lot less than me! Anecdotal yes but stories like this abound.

Your NCT pals are twattish for excluding you from conversations. Know that having had this difficult experience you will never be insensitive to an FF mum or make them feel bad, and that’s a really good thing. Also know that NCT groups are a bit of a bubble and don’t always relate to the real world! And like pp have said , the BF chat will pass soon enough. Awful for you though.

Having a small baby is such a hard hard time anyway, and when you’ve been set on BF and it isn’t possible it puts a huge dent in your confidence - especially reading MN (also not the real world - people come out with totally guff on here and sometimes the more strongly opinionated are the really persistent and pushy posters).

Please enjoy your gorgeous baby and, hard as it is, try to let BF and all the guilt that surrounds it go. There will be plenty more opportunities to feel guilty as a mum, and a lot of the time you can’t win!

Do you need any advice in particular with the sort of feeding you are doing now? Xx

You haven’t failed. It was a shitty shitty post from @fourcorneredcircle and it’s no wonder FF mothers can feel like you do when people make comments like that. But she’s talking horseshit and trying to make other mothers feel shit about their parenting in order to feel smug that she was able to breastfeed. Please ignore her. However you’re feeding your baby, I don’t doubt you’re doing a brilliant job and giving them a fantastic start in life

After reading this thread I feel more sympathetic towards judgemental bf mums that I meet. If bf didn't come easily and involved a significant amount of sacrifice then admitting ff (in the UK) is almost as good would probably be very upsetting.

I'd advise the OP to think along the same lines. When people are judgemental it says more about them and their own hangups then about anything you're doing. (And that applys to bf mums who feel judged as well.)

I have had support feeding my child and it has been invaluable. Including a lot of support checking I didn't feel guilty not to be entirely breast feeding. I didn't as I couldn't but this thread has made me realise why that support is given. I'm not sure how you can access similar support independently though.

Whoever said BFing was free? It really isn't. I combi fed for first year (50/50 breast/milk) and the BFing cost me far more than formula, it's just that the cost isn't obvious from your supermarket receipt. Once you factor in the increased food costs (for me this alone equalled the price of the formula), a few nursing bras, I bought a few secondhand nursing tops, needed a pump to get supply going initially, two tubes of Lansinoh (= more than cost of four weeks of formula), travel to the BFing support group etc. Not to mention the emergency taxi trip to hospital with a seriously ill EBF baby as my milk hadn't come in. In my case the year of BFing cost about 3 times what the year of FFing did.

And for a woman on a very low income, a lot of those are sunk costs - you buy the stuff, maybe can't access the support, so BF doesn't work out, all that money (which you probably didn't have in the first place) has been wasted.

I do think BFing rates would actually be higher if women were given more realistic information about it. The awful BFHI antenatal class I went to said that the only problem we might have was too much milk. They told us all women could do it. They did tell us about cluster feeding but portrayed it as a lovely snuggly excuse to watch a boxset. It was all presented as very cutesy. The benefits were really over-sold - there were people leaving the session thinking their kid wouldn't catch colds if they were BF and the mum wouldn't get cancer. I was expecting this amazing bonding experience.

The reality was so different - seriously ill baby in SCBU with hypernatraemic dehydration, BFing stopping us bonding because I hated it so much, the sheer hell of cluster feeding, the struggles with round the clock pumping to get and make my milk come in and then increase.
If it hadn't been so oversold as this amazing thing then I wouldn't have been so disappointed with how it was. And decent preparation would have meant I avoided PND and the whole of our first year would have been different.

RidingMyBike I can't agree with what you've said about the costs. I've breastfed 2 children, the first for 11 months and the second I'm 17 months in still going strong. I've added up and I have spent £100 on a pump, £20 on two bras (I wore normal bras after the first couple of months) £20 on 2 tubes of lanolin. I've never bought a special item of clothing to breastfeed bar the 2 bras. So in 28 months £140. We don't buy more food, I don't particularly eat more, I guess I did shed the 2 stone I put on each pregnancy very easily without actually doing anything.

If I had fed my 2 children formula for the first 12 months it would cost maybe £10 a week for at least the first 6 months so £260 plus maybe a little less for the second 6 months, at the very least it'd be £400 so £800 for 2 children. My youngest still feeds so we buy less milk even now.

Sounds like you had a bad experience. I've found breastfeeding brilliant, I've had a few bumps in the road with mastitus and finding the lack of freedom sometimes a little hard going (my second child was a bottle refuser until 14 months old, wouldn't even have expressed milk) but overall it has been great. Every person is different obviously but I've found it great and very cost effective.

@cadburysflake yes, but that's the uncertainty of it. I was expecting it to be free, especially after being told this at the BFing antenatal class so it was rather a shock when we realised it wasn't. Since it happened to us I've asked around and some friends found it was 'free', whereas others incurred costs like mine. One friend doesn't wear bras and just used a two layer clothes system but I was too uncomfortable without a nursing bra.

Our food bills went up by at least £5 a week to buy extra food for me (and I do mean 'proper food' not that I was buying cake in cafes and that was the extra cost) and the formula (she was half formula fed) was £5 a week. I had developed diabetes in pregnancy which meant I had to go on a very restricted diet and got thinner and thinner as the bump got bigger so weighed a lot less immediately after the birth than before I got pregnant! I found that I struggled to keep weight on whilst BFing so it was a constant battle to find the time with feeding and pumping to actually get the calories in that I needed.

And even you aren't saying that it is free though. The original post I was querying was about how low income could be BFing for free, but you've made it clear that there are costs involved in buying things for it.

@Ridingmybike several of my FF friends had to try a few different brands to find the one that suited baby. So wasted a bit shopping around. You also haven’t added the cost of bottles and a sterilizer. There were also times when do to travel or logistics they had to use the liquid premade which is more expensive.

Isn't formula subsidised if you're on a low income anyway?

And bf really isn't free, or not how most people do it, which involves buying a pump, tubes of lansinoh and suitable clothing (even if this is only extra strappy tops, but lord help you if you need something more formal).

@LaurieMarlow a lot of maternity clothing is also nursing suitable. I bought items that worked for both. I doubt most women are back straight into pre-pregnancy clothing right after giving birth.

You can save a bit by buying second hand clothing but I agree it's a bit simplistic to say BF is completely free.

Vox, you will have hundreds and hundreds of more opportunities to do best for your child throughout their life and one of these 'best' will inevitably be not to try too hard, not feel guilty when you don't, and learn that what might be best for one child might be the worse for yours.

BB is only one of many things that is best for your child and depending on your circumstances, that benefit might be so marginal, it becomes meaningless compared to everything you do every day and probably take for granted. It's all that media frenzy that has lead you to believe you are failing your baby.

If you speak to older adults who were 100% bottlefed, you'll come across many who will be highly educated, slim and healthy. Let's smile at this, can you tell of your friends which were bottlefed and who were breastfed from their lifestyle? Of course not!

@brookshelley I had to use a pump to get my supply going and I was using bottles and steriliser for both expressed milk and formula so I didn't count those in the costs of either BF or FF. They aren't exclusive to FF though as even a EBF baby will need bottles and steriliser if the milk is expressed.

It was about an extra £30 for those items (secondhand steriliser) which still doesn't take my FF total anywhere near my BF total - so still WAY more expensive than formula.

@cadburysflake wow! I wish I'd spent just 140 quid on BfIng!!

I dread to think how much I spent... lactation consultants, pumps, galactogogues (fenugreek, goats rue, mothers milk tea), an endless supply of chocolate (seriously... I think this was the main thing that kept my supply up), nursing bras, extra scrappy tops (I didn't wear any special clothing to be honest, and double layered a lot), I also had to formula feed as my supply was so shit, so had milk, bottles, steriliser...

gah! So expensive! It would have been cheaper had I decided to formula feed tbh! Breastfeeding when it works is lovely and cheap, but when there are problems it becomes expensive. So i can understand low income families who have problems switching fast to formula!