To remove the toy baby feeding bottle from my dd's new doll bath and feeding set?

[Springfleurs]

I was brought up to think that breast feeding was a strange and rather disgusting thing to do.

Luckily managed to overcome this myself and b/f both dc for 5 months and 14 months respectively.

Took dd to a toy shop today and she chose a doll bath and feeding set. Unpacked it for her when we got in and there is a feeding bottle in there. I know it might seem a bit precious but it irritated me slightly, as though it was a mandatory piece of equipment for all babies/dolls.

Or

I am taking it all rather too seriously?

It's like if you had a lot of traffic outside a school at dropping off and picking up time and some parents decided to look at how to reduce the traffic and make it safer. They'd be interested in all the factors that were making people drive - could be convenience, not enough buses, having to get to work - all sorts of things. They'd be interested in how to reduce the number of cars, somehow. Imagine starting up a discussion about whether not having enough buses was making traffic worse near schools, and hearing nothing but "you just want to make people who drive feel guilty" thrown back at you - it makes no sense, it's a complete red herring, and it's the same when it crops up in bf debates.

But peppered in that case the equivalent Op would have been "I want to ban cars".

People keep trying to shift the question away from what the actual opening post said.

Leonie - I will say it again.

£35 million spent per year in England and Wales on formula induced gastroenteritis is a LIE, and a rather nasty one at that. And anyone who believes it is rather silly. I don't have to prove it is a lie because it is quite self-evidently a lie, and I am not the one pretending to myself and others that it is 'fact'.

no it would be AIBU to discourage my DD from playing with cars

Can someone tell me where the posts are where anyone has said "you didn't try hard enough" to anyone who has failed to breastfeed? Because I have not seen any.

It is true that many HV, Maternity Nurses and even doctors are woefully underinformed about breastfeeding, I will once again wheel out my "Nursery Nurse fed my ds a bottle of formula the day after he was born because he needed to feed" story. What a load of crap, she seriously undermined my breastfeeding and was totally uninformed by terrifying me with her "HE HAS TO FEED!" stance.

If you were misinformed then it is sad and I am angry for you, but no-one as far as I can see is blaming anyone.

Leonie in her experience was misinformed by medical staff as to whether her medication would interfere with breastfeeding, she researched and found this information to be invalid. This is her experience and she is offering it on her as something to think about. I don't really think she is attacking anyone, just offering alternative viewpoints.

Alas it seems there are to be no alternative viewpoints on this thread, without it being viewed as a personal attack.

LT so you are asserting it' a lie without bothering to prove it
Right

LT so you are asserting it' a lie without bothering to prove it
Right

Peppered - I agree for a driver to say they are being made to feel guilty in a discussion about reducing traffic at a school would not make sense at all. No-one ever said a driver is going to ruin the roads by using them for the purpose they are designed for did they?

Surely you can see why a FFer would feel guilty when they are constantly being told they are putting, or have put, their babies at risk of whatever by not BFing?

THIS link suggests the cost (in 1992 though) of hospital admissions for babies with gastroentiritis was £12 million. That's for all babies, not just ff, so we can presume 10-20% of that was spent on bf babies

StealthPolarBear - ok: the moon is made of cheese. It is. Somebody said so. Here's a link to them saying it.

If I said that, you would all rightly round on me and say 'but that is rubbish, is doesn't make sense'.

As I am the one making this rather strange and at first sight ludicrous assertion, you would ask me to back it up. You'd be surprised if I said 'no, YOU prove that the moon isn't made of cheese!' Which is what wossername was doing.

How is it helpful to offer advise about research and BF and the medical profession to someone who didn't BF on medical advice more than a decade ago?

Unless you are suggesting some very advanced relactation exercise I suggest that it was just a nasty thing to say.

This link discusses the additional healthcare costs associated with babies being fed infant formula (US statistics).

(Extract)
"In 2001, the USDA concluded that if breastfeeding rates were increased to 75 percent at birth and 50 percent at six months, it would lead to a national government savings of a minimum of $3.6 billion. This amount was easily an underestimation since it represents savings in the treatment of only three of the dozens of illnesses proven to be decreased by breastfeeding: ear infections, gastroenteritis, and necrotizing enterocolitis."

I don't think having a baby bottle as a plaything will make any difference in the long run to how a particular child chooses to feed her baby when she grows up. But I do think it is part of "normalising" bottle-feeding and, in that sense it contributes to lower breastfeedning rates in ths country as a whole.

By "normalising" bottle feeding, I dom't mean that bottle-feeding is freakish or strange. What I mean is that, for many people, it is seen as the default feeding option, with breastfeeding seen as an added (but unecessary) "bonus". Many supposed bf difficulties arise because people judge their bf experience against the typical behaviour of a formula-fed baby - for example, cluster feedning or protracted feeding times are falselt interpreted as being as indicative of "poor supply".

You - on those figures the cost to the NHS would be £12,000 a year - not £35million. Bit of a difference eh?

you, you and Nancy should have a chat, she knows peoples thoughts too.

I bought a doll and bath set for it, there was a bottle in it, I felt irritated by this bottle and I thought I will ask on MN what they think, I even gave an out by asking if I was being precious. Do you imagine I went searching around looking for something like this bath set with which to launch an attack on formula feeders. Did I sit here giggling evily into my Pinot Grigio at the chaos I had unleashed on MN? Don't be so ridiculous.

Your opinion says more about you than it does about me.

Excuse the typos {blush].

Just like to say, I am pregnant with number 2. DD was BF for about two weeks but unfortunately we couldn't make it work.

Was intending to try BF again when this one is born.

But - the attitudes of the BF people on this thread make me want to run screaming towards the nearest bottle. What is the matter with you people??! Why are you all so sanctimonious?? (Pepperedmackarel - not meaning you, I thought your post was very insightful)

Aren't we mothers supposed to support each other? And where are the stats that show babies in the UK die through being FF??

Hold on.

The $3.6 billion seems to be the total amount spent on treating "ear infections, gastroenteritis, and necrotizing enterocolitis" in the US. Not that these cases are all a direct result of FF. Or even that they are all cases in babies/children.

But Sunfleurs - there is another thread with you saying something like you hate to see new borns with bottles of sweet sickly formula in their mouths....hardly innocent sweetheart...

Like I said, jmo that you have to be a certain kind of person to start a thread like this in AIBU. Same as the WOHM/SAHM etc threads, if you've been on MN for any length of time, you just KNOW it's going to end badly.

Fine, if that's the reaction you're looking for from the OP. Equally if you truely didn't know. But the fact that you felt the need to state;

'I was brought up to think that breast feeding was a strange and rather disgusting thing to do.

Luckily managed to overcome this myself and b/f both dc for 5 months and 14 months respectively.'

.... before asking your question, smacks of attention seeking to me, rather than asking for genuine opinions.

SouthMum - you say: "it makes me ultra sensitive when I see things like "FF babies die". Its just a bit unnecessary IMO and as I said earlier if the aim isn't to make people who choose to FF feel guilty with phrases like that then I don't know what is."

I understand completely how sensitive you must feel about that. But why did you want to bf in the first place? Presumably because you believed it would make a difference. If it does, then it's worth making that information well known - telling the truth about it even if it's uncomfortable. Hearing that is irrelevant to you because you're past that stage and it makes you feel sad because you ended up not being able to bf. I can completely understand that. But covering that up does nothing for all the mums and babies who still have feeding journeys ahead of them, and they are important too. I hope this doesn't sound harsh - but don't let what happened to you lead to other women having unhappy bf experiences. Every voice calling for people to soft-soap the basic research about bfing - the stats showing how much more illness happens if babies aren't bfed - because it makes mums like you feel upset, is working against more bfing happening. It's making it more likely that more women will end up more unhappy, in an endless vicious circle...

OK, I've found these figues about the economic costs of formula feeding:

The $35 million figure refers to Australia, where it was estimated that if the prevalence of bf at 3 months could be raised from 60% to 80%, the savings from reducing necrotising enterocolitis, gastro-intestinal illness, eczema and insulin dependent diabetes would be more than £35 million (Drane, 1997).

In the UK, diarrhoea is 5 times more prevalent in bottle-fed than breastfed babies. The cost of treating gastro-enteritis in bottle-fed babies is 12 times that of breast-fed babies. A 5% increase in breastfeeding rates could save UK hospitals £2.5million per year (WHO, 1996). (These cost savings refer to the costs of gastro-intestinal illnesses alone).

Source.

Peppered - initially I read your post as being a little pedantic but from your other posts I don't think that was the aim as you must not have read any of my other posts (how dare you!!)

I have already said a few times I wanted to BF due to the various benefits, but for various reasons (one being safety) I chose to switch to FF. What I didn't like was the reaction of he HV and MW that I have basically already killed my baby by FFing.

I think its important to promote BFing absolutely, but I don't think that making FFers feel they have done something evil is the right way to go about it.

At the end of the day I really don't understand why it is such a big deal, and I honestly feel that yes I can say that having both BF and then FF.

So Unicef say £35million, the NICE say £1million, that baby milk lost say £12,000 and WHO are going with £2.5million - which just proves it's all guess work.

Ok, I will leave you to sense of persecution. Only I can know what I felt or thought so will leave it there.

And yes I do hate to see tiny, new born babies with bottles of formula hence not wanting it to be encouraged from the outset in the form of "toys".