Calling zoologists/anthropologists/biologists-does breastfeeding break down in nature?

[DrSeuss]

So, as of today I am officially a failed breastfeeder. Please be gentle as I am very sensitive about this. I have tried for 13 days to feed DD but she just will not do it. Have seen every expert, tried every hold and technique and was quite determined to do it having previously cracked DS, who was a nightmare to feed. Sunday saw us sent to hospital as DD was so underweight. Nothing like a day spent in the Paeds ward, holding down an eight day old baby while they have four goes at a blood draw. Nothing wrong, just underweight. Tuesday we were sent to Paeds outpatients for a further check having given formula top ups after every BF just to try to gain the weight. But feeding has always been a fight, she just flails her arms at me, twists when latched to the point where she tore the skin, chews me till I bleed and often just refuses to try. Today, I reluctantly reached the decision that since I was exhausted, I have another child who also needs attention and she just wasn't getting any bigger on feeble attempts at BF, she should go onto formula. I have spent much of the day in tears about this, feel she is getting short changed and wish it could be any other way. However, she is now so much calmer and happier.

My question to the science wonks out there (I'm allowed to call you that since I'm the wife and daughter of scientists!) is, why is BF so damned difficult for humans? I grew up in the country and so know that lambs get rejected sometimes and have to be hand reared but most mammals just seem to get on with it. In nature, my child would probably have died. I was brought up to believe strongly in evolution but surely we evolve in a manner that benefits us, not causes us to fail to feed our young? So wonks, what about it?! La Leche Leaguers need not apply, I feel crap enough, thanks.

Sorry to hear this. Please don't think of yourself as a failure, you are doing the best for your baby. I hope now you can enjoy your precious new baby.

No I don't think your baby would have died in nature, babies who couldn't feed from their mother were given alternatives such as wet nursing. Fortunately now in our society we have an adequate, safe alternative to breastfeeding, and that is formula milk.

I don't know from a scientific background BUT recently we went to visit friends who are sheep farmers. Based on the number of "pet" lambs they had (those that mother rejected or were too weak to be left with mother or 1 or 2 from triplets) they had (30+ from each lambing - they do them in 2 two week goes) I would think that there must be problems in nature - certainly sheep reject their young.

And we saw the dead lamb that had been crushed to death by it's mother and the one she nearly killed because she was laying on them because her udders/breasts? were too full and hard and the lambs feeding from her caused her too much pain.

I hope I have reassured you rather than upset you. And if it helps, I did 6 weeks with dd1, 10days with ds1 and then over 6mths with dd2 and ds2 - I think a lot depends on the baby...

I have reread my post - I am NOT suggesting you have rejected your daughter - NOT AT ALL!

Thanks for the sympathetic replies. When I said nature, I meant if she had been a monkey or other mammal and feeding had broken down, she could not have survived. It doesn't make sense to evolve in a manner that makes feeding infants more difficult when it's such a vital thing to do.

Not sure what the problem with La Leche League is

I'm not a scientist either, but our society has got to a point where we are very removed from nature and our natural instincts. So births are interfered with, newborns are manhandled rather than self-attaching etc etc. Monkeys work purely on instinct whereas humans have all kinds of cultural elements that come into play.

DrSeuss - but as humans, we are highest on the evolutionary scale, so you simply cannot compare us to other mammals. The very fact that we do not reject our young, and search for other methods of feeding, is something that has evolved, and that is what makes us human.

I asked a similar question a few months ago DrSeuss! It just doesn't make any sense does it? When I was pregnant and worried if BF would work this time I comforted myself by looking at the hundreds of children at DS'S school and thinking that there is know way of telling which were BF'd and which were not and they all looked great to me. I hope you ad your family can get on with enjoying DD now and watching her thrive. Congratulations on your new addition

Even worse- think of childbirth if it's left to nature!

Listen, your hormones will be really playing on you now if you have just stopped. I felt horrendously guilty with DD1 at 16 months because of those!

You've done everything you could, there is a safe alternative, perhaps time to move on and worry about something else now. Honestly not worth beating yourself up over.

Thanks, I'll try not to dwell on it although it's difficult. Still would love an answer from a scientist concerning BF and evolution though, just because i want to know. Why would we evolve to experience such difficulties?

Lots of baby mammals die in infancy in nature. If the baby isn't feeding properly or gaining weight they would be rejected as the 'runt' of the litter.

Even human infant survival rate was relatively poor until fairly recently. Many many babies and small children died for all sorts of reasons. Many were malnourished too.

Presumably some of these babies may have been malnourished due to feeding difficulties, and would have died of malnutrition or illness due to being too weak to fight it off. And if they didn't die they would be small and weak and vulnerable.

Also humans evolved to live in small communities and would have helped each other out. If a new mother was having difficulties feeding, a more experienced mother from the group (possibly a relative) could have fed their baby for a bit (women would be constantly pregnancy and/or breastfeeding so they would be plenty of other mothers in the group).

If the more experienced mother was a relative of the baby (an aunt for example) it would make evolutionary sense to help the baby to survive, as the baby would share the same genes.

Basically what I'm saying is: nature has a way of ensuring only the strongest survive and go on to reproduce, therefore ensuring that only good strong genes are passed on to the next generation. So 'weak' babies would have died. 'Strong' ones would survive.

Also we have evolved to cooperate with each other and help each other out, especially if we know the person we're helping is a relative. Or may help us out in return when we need it.

Hello DrSuess, sorry to hear you've had such a difficult time with breastfeeding. Am not sure if I can make you feel any better apart from to extend my empathy as a fellow breastfeeder who had huge difficulties before switching to formula.

In nature things do break down as well but I am not a scientist so will leave that to them.
What I wanted to say is that most mothers and babies are able to succeed at breastfeeding with the right support at the right time and I know you've had help. Not sure what it breastfeeding was like initially but I have seen babies whose first few attempts at feeding were ruined by some heavy handed midwife or other trying to force the baby onto the breast when they were not ready. You can recognise them a mile off as those are the babies who arch their backs and pull away when the Mum tries to get them latched on.

In other cultures where breastfeeding is the norm, women are surrounded by breastfeeders and absorb all the minute details of latching a baby on - almost without realising it. They sit and latch the baby on, if it's not right they take them off and continue in the same way until it's right. We just don'yt have that same experience here.

Also some babies ARE difficult to feed, my son was a nightmare and had no coordination with sucking and swallowing. Even with formula he was a nightmare. Now 8 years on we know he is dyspraxic and those early difficulties make much more sense.

And you have managed to persevere for 13 days, no mean feat when it's difficult, painful and soul destroying.

Oh and before I forget - CONGRATULATIONS to you for your DD.

dilly's post is great - exactly what I was going to say - and to back up what rita said too - we've just become so far removed from our natural instincts etc etc. We haven't evolved away from breastfeeding, we just don't see it as the norm and take on those little nuances/gestures etc that are steeped into other cultures.
I think you did brilliantly to persevere for so long and it was the system that let you down, nothing else.
You have a gorgeous baby in front of you - and it's going to go VERY FAST, so enjoy every second. well done you

Sounds like you've had a pretty rough breastfeeding experience .
I'm a LLLer and not a scientist to boot but IME while some mothers have physiological problems the problem is often a)they've never seen a baby being BF and don't know about postioning and b) Many mothers have completely unrealistic expectations about babies fullstop but frequency of feeds in particular.

I'm going to ignore the slur on LLL and assume that you are hormonal and have heard bad things or maybe met a single crap LLLer (member not leader) and are basing your opinion on her.

never been called a wonk before, however I'm a proper scientist (physics/chemistry)

FWIW OP I didn't read that as a slur to LLL.

So sorry that things aren't going well.

Agree with what others have already posted but wanted to add that bf is obviously important to you, have you considered expressing?

With (admittedly) some hard work & perhaps medication you could provide most if not all of your baby's milk and still continue with skin to skin/ co bathing and biological nurturing.
When your DD has gained weight and with your supply kept going, she may still get the knack of breastfeeding

I hope that wasn't what you meant by 'LLL types need not reply' but just in case it's something that hasn't already been suggested.
In non developed countries where formula isn't easily available babies are wetnursed or given expressed milk if they cannot feed eg cleft palate

I am an immunologist not a evolutionary biologist but would say - yes, in nature your baby probably would have died. So might mine, 15 days overdue and absolutely no signs he wanted to come out - so would probably the babies of all women who needed caesareans. Just look at tudor kings and queens to see how many babies do die in nature!

It doesn't seem to me to be a breastfeeding thing. Nature just doesn't care about individuals. As long as enough babies survive to ensure the species does, nothing else really matters. Horrid, isn't it.

Op-congratulations on your LO!

Regarding mammals and feeding-there are lots of reasons why "bfing" doesn't work, and many that die or are "wet nursed" because of it. Reasons include physical problems in mum or LO eg cleft palate or wonky/ damaged teats, human or predator interference, illness in mum or sam, inexperience dam running off etc etc. Hell, rabbits will eat their young If disturbed.

Luckily we didn't evolve that! My point is, alot of bfing does fail because of problems with mum and babies, and if we were still monkeys in the wild, yes, some of those offspring would have died. Luckily we have a fantastic alternative in formula and can bypass many issues. The reason for such a high level of formula feeding in humans is not for biogical reasons as such, but socio-economic.

People like your self who desperately want to bf but can't are unlucky, but as belgo said , you are not an evutionary failure, just unlucky After trying really hard, now have a happy cAlm baby on formula.

Go easy on yourself, it is still early days and fantastic mums bf and formula feed - it's not how your LO will judge your love for them :)

Hi there, so sorry that you're going through this but happy that your baby is now happier and feeding well. I'm an anthropologist and worked in a community where breastfeeding failure is unheard of (not to suggest it does not happen - it must sometimes - but just that it is not something that is recognised as a problem by women). As others have said I suspect part of the problem is that here we grow up never seeing breastfeeding and not holding babies very much. There, girls (and boys) hold siblings and neighbours as soon as they are able. Girls pretend to suckle other animals (like birds) as a game. I suspect (although never saw this) that teenagers latch other babies both to sooth them and to learn how to do it long before they have their first baby. then, of course, some babies would have failed to breastfeed adequately and either other women feed it as well or it would die. Indeed, many babies do die in this society and perhaps failed bf contributes. This might have happened in your case.

I'm trying to make people who have 'failed' to bf feel bad by suggesting that it was their fault - far from it. My point is that it is very difficult to bf in our society for cultural, rather than biological, reasons.

DrSeuss - begone with the language of 'failure'....'failed breastfeeder', pah!

Breastfeeding itself is very robust in nature, but some infant animals are not strong enough to make their mark among a litter and suffer that way, as some posts have pointed out.

You are looking for explanations why things have been so difficult/impossible with both your babies. Honestly, just based on the info here (which may not be the full details, obviously), one factor may have been the responses to initial difficulties in getting your baby attached, which may have been overcome without 'every expert, every hold, every technique' being tried. Among all that, there is likely to have been someone/some people who overhandled you and/or your baby and when a bad experience occurs, that makes it worse.

The struggle to get bloods drawn would have added to the difficulty - stressful for you, stressful for the baby, and of no help whatsoever to bf (they were probably trying to get a blood sugar reading, I suppose?).

The flailing, twisting and chewing and refusal is often a sign the baby finds bf stressful because of a whole load of interventions :( :(

If you could turn the clock back, several days in bed, in the quiet, snuggled up with your baby, doing nothing else but that, straight after birth and for as long as it took to get things going, with hand expression if the baby was taking a while to learn to bf, might have helped - I say 'might' because we cannot tell for sure. Doing this is not always possible anyway, because of other circumstances.

You tried and tried and tried - and in the end, love is the important thing and you tried and tried and tried because of love.

I'm NOT trying to make people feel bad!! oops - typing while bf! I dont think we evolved to do that..

Sorry to PMSL as this is a very serious thread and I really feel for you, OP, but honestly claire that was a funny typo . Very interesting info, and what I'd expect, too.

But seriously, OP, what Tiktok says is what I was thinking too. Be gentle on yourself. You tried really hard and what happened is nothing to do with you "failing". Indeed you succeeded in working really hard to feed your baby.

Who were the experts you had helping you? Sometimes people we assume are experts (such as midwives) actually aren't trained in bfing support.

Thanks everyone. Last night I expressed on one side (got nearly a full feed, so supply was never the problem it seems.) and gave her that. DH offered to do an early hours of the morning feed and to sleep in the spare room with her and I actually had about 6 hours continuous sleep! Haven't done that in months and now feel like a human being again! Expressed on the other side this morning and had enough for a feed and to freeze some. Madam, however, would only suckle for a minute or so and then give up. I had been determined to buck the cultural trend- it was the BF counsellor who kept drawing the curtains round my hospital bed, not me and was planning to be a Martini Mummy and get them out any time, any place any where! But she is so much calmer and more settled. She has even stopped scratching her face, something I hadn't realised was BF related, I think she was just hungry, cross and frustrated. No, she will not wear mitts. She bites on them then rips them off!

LLL-ers, sorry, didn't mean to be rude but one of your number gave me a telling off last week for the two days I used nipple shield on breasts with open, bleeding wounds where I had been chewed. It was shields or formula because both the pump and latching on were so painful, so I went with shields. I know that's not ideal but I really didn't need to be told that I was doing it all wrong right at that moment. To give you an idea of what she does to my nipples, DD several times ripped the shields right off me despite them being wetted first.

Anyway, better now. Still broke my heart when she tried to nuzzle against a boob last night although why she would do that when she rejects them the rest of the time I have no idea.

From a scientific point of view, maybe it does just come down to survival of the fittest and she would have fallen by the wayside.