Is breastfeeding seen as a middle class thing?

[Thandeka]

Am genuinely curious. Just heard a local children's centre in a deprived area refused to have a breastfeeding support group in it because only the middle class mums would go.

eh?
And I have heard elsewhere that breastfeeding levels are much higher in the middle classes,
Could it linked with education levels?

I have a feeling in other countries people of all classes breastfeed so why not in this country?

Am not posting this to be controversial or anything and apologies if it has been done to death already- I couldn't find anything before but I just wondered if mumsnetters thought it was a middle class thing? and know any reasons why this is?

It seems that there's not really a consensus but I think the majority say that yes, bfeeding is a MC thing (more so than WC).

But why?

I can't believe it's because MC have more time to sit around bf (as has been suggested) as I don't think that's the case. I've known lots of WC mothers who didn't work or had long maternity leaves but still didn't bf (ditto MC but on balance MC ones were more likely to have bf).

Is it a generational thing? As in, older generations of MC had better medical advice/support than WC and it's those mothers now advising their daughters.

Thinking aloud I would say that it's

• partly peer pressure from MC friends
• partly A-type behaviour
• partly better support both from peers and health professionals
• partly aspirational (like brown and white bread- formula is no longer aspirational because everyone's buying it)
• partly educational

Importance of each factor probably varies from woman to woman.

My gut instinct would be to say that bf is a mc thing but the breastfeeding support group I attend has a slightly higher proportion of wc mums (rural fishing town). But the bf rates fo our area are pretty dire so....

I'm not entirely sure where that leaves us.

(As an aside - I'm a Sarf Efrican and there the bf rates among the mc are abyssmal, my friends at home don't know ANYONE who has bf past 3 months!)

totallyslummymummy
"why has this thread turned into an in-depth discussion on how to prepare formula?"

because a poster said "Didn't find making up the bottles once a day particularly time consuming".

It is important that parents who are formula feeding are aware of how to safely prepare feeds and what the guidance is and why that guidance is in place.

Here is an interesting article "What are the Breastfeeding Booby Traps?": The?Inconvenient Truth? about breastfeeding? Women are being pressured to breastfeed but set up to fail!

I am not sure to what extent the factors in that article would effect WC more than MC mothers.

Have only read a few threads but I am shocked that a bf clinic would be closed just because the punters were all middle class. Bfing support is absolutely essential and should be regarded as a huge investment in the nations's health and the NHS's budgets. I imagine that the purpose of said clinic was specifically to reach people from deprived backgrounds, but closing it because of class? That is appalling.