To think you're not allowed to be proud of breastfeeding any more....

[TheatreJunkie84]

NOT a breast is best thread.

I've had the journey from hell. Tongue tie, painful feeds, thrush, not gaining weight, shitty latch, literally everything except low supply....but here I am 3 months in still going, on a combination of formula, pumped milk and boob.

I posted on a local baby group today a picture of me feeding, with a caption about how proud I was to still be going at nearly 3 months despite all the crap...thanking my local group and its peer supporters for their role in keeping me going and encouraging others to seek their help as they were so lovely and wonderful.

It started off well...messages of congrats and other stories of the peer supporters helping out new mums. Suddenly out of nowhere I got called arrogant and told I should have some respect for all the mums that choose to formula feed and I shouldn't throw be throwing it down everyones necks. Before I knew it loads of other mums all joined in, basically saying breastfeeding is nothing to be proud of and I should shut up. Things along the lines of 'big whoop you can feed your baby I cant so this makes you better than me? Piss off.'

I quickly deleted it, feeling really ashamed of myself. I'm on the verge tears now every time I think about it. Am I being unreasonable here? I honestly wanted to give up so many times....but the local group kept me going and if posting about my success can encourage other mums to seek their help then that's surely only a good thing?

I don't know.

[quote Wolfgirrl]@Janejones12

You're doing the usual trick of trotting out all the amazing benefits of bfing without quantifying them. The differences between a ff baby and a bf baby really are negligible.

I was ebf, I am a type 1 diabetic. All my family bf yet we all have autoimmune conditions.

OH was fully ff and has the constitution of an ox, is never had anything worse than athletes foot and never gets colds.

I know that's not how statistics 'work', but to make out there is even a noticeable difference just is not correct.[/quote]
The health benefits are enormous. Medical databases are full of them. Low breastfeeding rates are a health crisis. Your positions are anecdotal.

On a public health level. Breastfeeding is a high impact area of the Healthy Child Programme which Public Health England commissions for Health Visitors. Millions are invested in trying to support it but unfortunately people cannot receive this when they need it still. The long term health of the nation would be improved as a result of increased sustained breastfeeding
That isnt to say that Debbie next door who was formula fed is fit and fine whilst Julie on the other side who was BF has asthma. On a large national scale bases the evidence demonstrates BF lowers risk of allergies and lowers long term risk of heart disease. Formula is more difficult to digest meaning in prem babies it increases the risk of severe necrotic bowel conditions due to it not passing through the gut as quickly. It is simply impossible to say there is no evidence on the absolute benefits of human made milk. It's liquid gold in many ways. It also stays sterile longer than formula due to human cells within it keeping it purer for longer. Its a living substance.

I think there is way too much emphasis by parents put on how babies are fed.

I honestly couldn't give a shit how anyone else feeds their baby as long as they are fed adequately.

I chose to formula feed from the start with both my children. I had no desire to breast feed. If anybody has questioned me or tried to make me feel guilty they would get short shrift from me.

It's 6 months to a year then it's over or falls into the background while other things become the focus. I think some people must really cringe at how much they cared what other parents were doing and how much gushing and going on with themselves they did over how they fed their baby.

Anyway back to the OP - You can be proud of yourself without putting a post online. Not saying they were right to be unkind but you are throwing yourself to the wolves really posting that kind of thing in a baby feeding Facebook group

It probably would have been more beneficial and would have come across better if you took your own personal feelings of being proud of breastfeeding out of the post and focused on how helpful and supportive the group have been in your journey.

Better if everyone left everyone alone to make their own decisions as to how they are going to feed their babies. No one is more right than another.

Oh bore off @Janejones12 (and the OP) and stop making us formula feeding mums feel shit about ourselves.

@Janejones12

Sigh but nobody said it has 'no' benefits, Jane. We have said it has some benefits, but not as much as people would lead you to believe just by saying 'it protects against x, y and z'.

There is not a single thing it offered complete, or near-complete, protection from. And there is actually evidence that bf babies are more likely to have allergies than ff babies.

I know you're going to yell at me for this, but I see so many posts on MN that would have you believe breastmilk is the elixir of life and that simply isnt true. It is ever so slightly better than formula in terms of health impacts, but not enough to be noticeable on a person-by-person basis.

OP you asked if you were being unreasonable posting what you did on a public group. Many pp have said you can rightly feel proud, but it's understandable why some mums in the public group were defensive against your post. So ultimately, yes you were unreasonable to post what probably came across as a stealth boast post in a group not specifically for breastfeeding.

However, you now seem to be implying that you don't care if you made other mums feel bad. That's their problem and you can say what you like. So you came on here to say how upset they made you, but you're happy for them to feel the same. You're all as bad as each other!

It's one thing to be proud about breastfeeding...quite another to crow about it on the internet when there are women who wrongly gelieve they are lesser for not doing it/ loving it etc.
By all means be proud but why the need to see it as a badge of honour?

Believe.
I am also against banning advertising ff. Women need to have choices here.

@peasoup8

Oh bore off *@Janejones12* (and the OP) and stop making us formula feeding mums feel shit about ourselves.

😂 is this satire?

@malificent7

Believe. I am also against banning advertising ff. Women need to have choices here.

Even without the advertising most women manage to know formula exists and manage to buy it as most babies are given it. Awareness around the existence of formula is really not the issue here. Culturally, formula is the norm.

The problem with any row about 'evidence' to support breastfeeding is that there is very little. There is very little study into the benefits, and these kind of studies are very difficult to execute anyway, hence why we don't know what the optimal diet for all adults is either.

There is also very little evidence to show exactly which kind of breastfeeding support interventions work, for which problems, and how well. This may be why so many women felt they were being told to 'just try harder' when the techniques they were told to try didn't help them establish breastfeeding.

The concept of nipple confusion is quite vague, a bit made up and more prevalent in the UK than elsewhere, for example. There is little evidence to support formula top-ups to treat jaundice too. Both concepts/regimes are promoted heavily on post-natal wards and we wonder why our breastfeeding success rates are so low!

Using the 'its not evidence-based' stick to beat women with about anything to do with breastfeeding, when there is so little research done into it for deeply ingrained misogynistic reasons, is highly problematic.

I can't run a marathon but I don't belittle runners for being proud of their accomplishment.

@Rikalaily That’s completely different. Whether you run a marathon or not (or bake a cake or not, as per your second analogy) you’re not actively disadvantaging your children’s health either way. That’s what’s hurtful about the breast is best stuff - it implies that if you don’t BF you’re damaging your child by setting them up for a lifetime of health issues.

@TheatreJunkie84. I didn’t find breastfeeding easy at all. Note that I said I was up at night expressing. This was because DC1 had an undetected tongue tie and couldn’t latch. The ward nurses were completely unhelpful and told me I was doing it wrong surrounded with posters stating ‘breast was best’. DC lost a lot of weight, became ill and I was a mess. By the time they’d fixed it DC would only bottle feed so I had a double breast pump pumping like an industrial dairy cow to give them 100% breastmilk. It was exhausting and I did this for 5 months before I mixed fed then went to 100% formula as my milk dried up. I found it HARD.

I recall some of the looks I got from some women in baby groups when I whipped out a bottle. They didn’t know it was breast milk, they just assumed I was one of those women who ‘just didn’t care enough about their baby’. I couldn’t be arsed to correct them or explain myself. In my area, the judgement is towards FF mothers.

Nevertheless, the only people who know how hard it was for me were DH and a couple of other mothers who were struggling who I was close to, not nosey, competitive randoms, who asked me how I fed DC. I deliberately did not get into any competitive conversations about BF verses FF as to be honest there were some smug new mothers who appeared to think that now they were not in the competitive world of work, they had to find this new thing to be competitive about. It was so dumb and cringe.

DC2, I mixed fed immediately. Actimel was my friend. I was happy to let DH do more of the feeding. DC2 just as healthy and smart as DC1.

Parenting’s a marathon not a sprint and when your child becomes a toddler you’ll realise all this angst women give each other is bollocks. FF and BF kids are as smart and healthy as each other. Feeding your kids enough nutrients so they get satisfactory nutrition to grow is basic stuff even more basic than keeping a roof over their heads. It’s what you’re supposed to do, nothing special. DC1 is in primary school now, nobody questions feeding apart from whether they have packed lunch or school dinners because they want to copy their friends. Nobody cares about the comparisons between BF and FF anymore.

When you or your kid wins singles championship at Wimbledon or finds a cure for Coronavirus then be all over social media with pride. That I can 100% get behind.

@Wolfgirrl I agree with you that many benefits are overstated, and also agree that low blood sugar when struggling to establish feeding etc etc likely outweighs any benefits of it, just like having a mother with PPD struggling with feeding doesn't benefit either of them. So I don't think bf is the be all and end all by any stretch and the overall better solution for some will be ff which I'm open minded to for the next

But I think it's too early to say whether or not it makes a difference on a person by person basis in the long term, as part of a whole load of different factors. We're only just starting to learn about epigenetics and methylation profiles etc. But it is likely to be a very small factor among many far larger ones with regards to disease susceptibility in later life (and who knows - maybe we'll find ff leads to more adaptive changes in some instances than bf!)

Breastfeeding for 2 years is all very well...i did this wity a great deal of struggle but then I didn't have a job to get to...or a life in fact!

If you are a working mum ff is so much easier.

@malificent7

If you are a working mum ff is so much easier.

Depends when you go to work. I was a breastfeeding working mum. I went back when baby was mostly eating solids and only feeding morning and night. I could easily continue that while working.

I breastfed for over 2 years, it wasn’t a ‘journey’ it was tough to start with and got easier. I don’t expect a medal for it. I don’t class it as an achievement that needs recognition. It would feel like a dig at women who can’t or choose not to breast feed.

it implies that if you don’t BF you’re damaging your child by setting them up for a lifetime of health issues

Generally speaking, I haven’t seen a culture that suggests FF actively damages your baby. Maybe there have been a few extreme posts here but I have never seen anyone say that anywhere else. Does this notion really exist?! And if it does exist, where? And how do we stop it?

I don’t understand why posters are arguing about whether there are benefits of breastfeeding and how extreme those benefits are. There are benefits of breastfeeding: end of. They don’t have to be huge, they don’t have to be just health related. But women who want to reap those benefits and overcome hurdles to keep going are well within their rights to, just as women who either start straight on FF or decide to move to it are well within their rights to.

The aim of most BF initiatives is to ensure any woman who wants to keep going is giving the support to do so.

Also: I’m not even sure “breast is best” is ever used in a formal setting anymore. So people saying it’s rammed down their throats... I’d like to know where? And if it was Betty down the road then we all know to ignore Betty down the road anyway.

'The health benefits are enormous. Medical databases are full of them. Low breastfeeding rates are a health crisis. Your positions are anecdotal.'

Yes usually from WHO who as we know advice internationally.

In a first world country where sanitation is not an issue and people can access sterilising the figures all become blurred.

I'll tell you what is a 'health crisis', obesity. Now if only some of the overweight breast feeders paid quite as much attention to that and brought their kids up to be healthy right through to adulthood that would have a much greater impact on public health.
I agree bf is ideal I managed 2 our of 3 fine but in the grand scheme of things in our country it doesn't really matter that much. Economic and social deprivation is of far greater concern. Leave new mums alone they dont need judgement!!

When you or your kid wins singles championship at Wimbledon or finds a cure for Coronavirus then be all over social media with pride. That I can 100% get behind.

Oh there will be plenty of posters lining up to rain on your parade if you dare to be proud of your child winning Wimbledon or curing Covid .

OP, you achieved something that was important to you and took grit and perseverance, of course you can feel proud. As said by the more sensible posters, your achievement is not someone elses failure (unlike winning Wimbledon, actually ). Enjoy your moment - parenting is a long and sometimes hard road with peaks and troughs - why shouldn't we celebrate the peaks?

One of the most cringe ‘proud BF’ announcers I’ve seen recently was a hipster dad. He was standing outside a restaurant with outdoor seating, pushing a pram back and forth, talking REALLY loudly on his mobile so every bystander could hear about how ‘well Louise was doing with the breastfeeding’ and how he thought it was ‘much better for the baby’.

There is no way anyone other than Louise’s breast feeding counsellor would’ve been interested in that info so it was clear it was just something he had to publicly shout about. The person probably just asked how Louise was getting on. Nobody cares!

Bet they’ve already bought the kid a Ramones T-shirt.

I’m not even sure “breast is best” is ever used in a formal setting anymore. So people saying it’s rammed down their throats... I’d like to know where?

Ok I’ll give you an example. If you go to a formula manufacturer’s website to, for example, look up correct preparation instructions, before you can enter the site you have to click through a disclaimer confirming that you understand that breast is best and formula is an inferior substitute. It’s printed on formula tins and bottles. They’re required to do this by the government. That one is particularly galling when you’re trying to feed your baby who you had wanted to BF to be confronted with that every time you go to feed them. Because no formula feeding mum is going to look at a tin and think “breast is best, eh? Wow I’ve never heard that before, I’d better put this bottle away and lob a tit out”. It’s totally unnecessary.

YANBU - you should feel proud, breastfeeding is hard work.

I've fed my LB for 2 years and 3 months (and he has just stopped in the last 2 weeks). He had a severe tongue tie, I had severe mastitis (i was hospitalized for a week!) And he was diagnosed with a dairy allergy at 8 weeks old and as he was reacting to the dairy protein in my milk I had to eliminate all dairy from my diet for the best part of 2 years!

I am bloody proud I kept going!