Partner desperate to feed expressed milk from a bottle

[ruthymay]

Hi all,

I am pregnant with my first child and have always been a massive advocate of breastfeeding, my mother breastfed me and both of my sisters and I have grown up around it. I plan on breastfeeding when my baby arrives and my partner is supportive of this. The only problem is that he is desperate to be included in the feeding and wants to feed the baby expressed milk from a bottle. This is not an idea I am at all keen on as I think it is best straight from the breast and don't want to enter the realms of nipple confusion etc.
My partner and I have both done a lot of research on breastfeeding so he is totally clued up about it but still feels like he wants to help out with the feeding. Has anyone else experienced this or have any advice on what I can say to him to help him understand how much I want to exclusively breastfeed?

Please do consider this, once breastfeeding is established then one bottle per day should be fine and you may even find that you appreciate the rest it gives you. If your partner gives the 10pm ish feed for example it means that you can get some sleep in order to cope with doing all the night feeds. Most of the mums in my circle do this and all are successful breast feeders, our babies are 7 to 8 months old.

He needs to get over this, because it isn't about him, it is about what is best for the baby.
The last thing you want is to create a feeding problem where there needn't be one, and expressing can be tiring and time-consuming which is again not desirable when you have a new baby!

Get him to read a book by Armin Brott called 'the new father' or something like that, it is available for very little on Amazon. Basically it encourages fathers to view their role as supporting the mother at this stage, and to look at other ways of bonding with their child without pushing to intrude on the BFing relationship.

Ps, I mix fed from the beginning due to dd being in scbu and nipple confusion was never an issue. Most of the stonger babies in scbu were being breast fed by day and bottle or tube fed overnight and it didn't seem to cause any problems.

I found expressing a complete faff, not particularly comfortable.

DH was very hands on with both our babies without giving them bottles of EBM. He bathed them, changed and dressed them, carried them in a sling, cuddled them, soothed them.

DH says something ruder, but wouldn't want to offend.

How great that you have a supportive partner who wants to get involved. It is completely understandable that he might want to help feed the baby. I would suggest that the best thing to do is wait and see what happens and don't make any decisions yet.

Babies are all different - some bf babies won't take a bottle, while others find it hard to latch on to a breast, some will switch happily between breast and bottle happily. Some women can't express, others can express loads.

You are right to want to wait to establish bf before attempting to feed with a bottle though.

It was my MIL who tried to dictate that she wanted to do this in our house!! Needless to say, I did not give in, but I would have done it for DH if he had asked. In fact, I used to express a bottle a day for him to give DS during the night so that I did one night feed and he did the other. I found expressing very easy though, and I know this is not the case for everyone. I certainly didn't have time to express each day when DS2 came along! I did both feeds in the night and DH got up to do one of the 90 minute reflux/winding sessions after it.

Some women find introducing a bottle a slippery slope towards the end of bf, the find that once dads have got over the novelty of bottle feeding and gone back to work, that it is the mums that are left with all the washing bottles, sterilising and making up feeds.

Its far to much work for you to express enough milk for a whole feed just so he can sit with a bottle for 10 mins. Its not about him, the baby comes first, then you. Its not difficult to understand that a breastfeeding mother has enough to do without arsing about washing breastpumps several times a day. It can also damage your supply if you start to miss out feeds which is fine if you are mix feeding but not if you are bf.

Thanks for the responses, i'm obviously not making any concrete plans left, but thought it would be easier to have the conversation with him now and try and sort things out nice and early to save arguments later.
I realize breastfeeding is probably not going to be as easy as I hope but when I think about feeding from a bottle it makes me feel sick, so I am trusting my instinct that it is probably not something I am going to feel comfortable with. I will definitely try getting him to read the book though and hopefully that will help.

FWIW, I don't know a single person whose breastfed baby has experienced 'nipple confusion' as a result of being offered a bottle. If I have another baby some day, I will offer him or her a bottle of expressed milk ASAP and ensure this happens every day.

My DD would accept a bottle in the early days (from 4 weeks or so) but then our fridge broke and the new one wasn't in stock etc and we ended up with no fridge or freezer for several weeks and I stopped expressing as I had no storage for milk. By the time the new fridge freezer arrived DD would no longer go near a bottle - guess she was about 3 months old by then.

As a result, I was pretty much unable to do anything at all without DD until she got to about 9 months old and began to eat more solids and accept milk from a beaker. It took her a long time to drink from a cup without spitting it all straight back out again.

Gosh that was long. I guess I am trying to say that you might be grateful if your baby can have the odd bottle of expressed milk - I would have loved to be able to have a nap, a hot relaxing bath lasting more than three minutes or even just a walk round the shops by myself in the early months. It can feel very suffocating if you are unable to take a break.

Bottle feeding makes you feel sick???

hope you find breast feeding a breeze then else you're going to be in all sorts of trouble.

also suggest you keep that opinion to yourself in RL.

emsyj you've only got to read a few of the threads on here to find examples of

• babies that develop 'nipple confusion'
• babies that suddenly refuse to drink from bottles after having had a bottle a day for months and months

op - my dh was like this and it drove me mad! there are many many other things a new dad can do to bond with his child. If you feel like expressing is worth the extra faff, time, sterilising, fitting it in round feeds, then that's great but don't feel under any pressure to 'perform'. most definitely don't make any promises you'll be held to later. wait and see. you might welcome the break and it might work for all of you, or you might decide you don't want to, in which case, that should be fine too. remember there's all those marvellous moments bonding over a nappy change for a start

it's also a great excuse to get your partner to do all the food stuff from 6 months on instead so he can have the joy of watching porridge being smeared everywhere

So much else he can do with the baby apart from feeding though. And of course the very important job of looking after you.

I expressed with our first child, less so DP could be involved in feeding and more to 'give me a break'. I found expressing relatively easy, but still the whole process of sterilising and bottles and stuff is a bit of a faff. I didn't bother with bottles at all for the next baby, and won't for the next one!
For me one of the attractions of breastfeeding is that you don't need any stuff for it. There seems to be so much stuff with such a tiny person between the car seat and the pushchair and the nappies and whatever else that I am very glad not to have any more kit. Also, it occurs to me that though there are a million and one studies which compare breastfeeding with bottlefeeding, I don't think there is much or any literature which compares bottlefeeding expressed milk, bottlefeeding formula and breastfeeding. It is possible that some of the risks associated with bottlefeeding (increased risk of ear infection is the one the springs to mind) may be associated with feeding from a bottle as opposed to whether it is formula or breastmilk in the bottle. May be talking nonsense here though!

I am happy doing all the feeding until they are old enough to drink from a cup at 8 or 9 months though, not everyone is comfortable with this or can manage enough time off work.

Talk about it now, but you can always revisit it later.

I've never seen a thread on here about nipple confusion. Not that I'm saying that I don't believe you, I just haven't ever seen one. And I spend way too much time on here!

OP, I am not an expert on bf so you should take proper advice about nipple confusion and not listen to me, I am just saying what my experience has been (and I only have one baby, so my experience is limited).

I think you are right in thinking that your partner should find other ways for bonding with the baby. If you have done the research, you should know that feeding is not so much the be-all regarding bonding anyway. Not the act of offering the baby food. It's more the holding, cuddling, the intimacy that often goes with the feeding but can be established in other ways too.
On the other hand, I think you should worry less about anything that could go wrong. Relax and go with the flow! Nipple confusion is a possibility, but if you wait for a couple of weeks, and keep your baby on the breast (not exclusive bottle feeding), you should be safe.

Due to circumstances, we were expressing, breastfeeding, feeding the expressed milk by bottle for every single feed when DS was 2-4 weeks old. Slowly weaned him off the bottle, were bottle-free at 9 weeks. I started regretting it at 13 weeks when I wanted to go out, for one single evening. DS had done with bottles and it took me until he was 8 months old that I and DS could be away from each other for any length of time (half a day or so). It gets tiring.

emsyj, for me that feeling rather 'suffocated' in the early days of having my first baby was really to do with the bizarre experience of becoming a mother and having 24 hours responsibility for another human being, rather than because I had to do all the feeding (because I did express, but still felt like that)
I didn't feel like that at all with my next baby, having already gone through the process of becoming a parent
Probably different for different people, but once I'd adjusted to the idea of having a baby with me pretty much all the time for most of a year then I really found it OK

Yeah maybe I will be more relaxed about it next time (if there is a next time). As another poster mentioned, there will be less time to express and faff with bottles etc if i had another baby.

It is still quite tying tho as DD won't go to bed without bf so I cannot do anything that requires being out of the house between 7 and 7.30pm. DD is 1 on Wednesday and I really need to get her off the boob!!

He might find that when the baby arrives he will feel more secure and bonded with his child anyway than he realises without needing to do a feed. Its hard for dads when they aren't carrying the baby like you are and they can't picture how they'll get involved but DH could settle DD to sleep lots better than I could for ages. He cuddled her loads, it wasn't all nappies and winding!

My DD never had a bottle cos I couldn't be bothered with expressing, sterilising etc and the one time we tried she couldn't get the hang of it at all and screamed and screamed and it seemed cruel to put her through it for no very good reason. She had a cup from about 8-9mo and I wasn't bothered about doing all the feeds til then.

I second what Alibabaa said and I'm going to c&P her post.

"He needs to get over this, because it isn't about him, it is about what is best for the baby.
The last thing you want is to create a feeding problem where there needn't be one, and expressing can be tiring and time-consuming which is again not desirable when you have a new baby!

Get him to read a book by Armin Brott called 'the new father' or something like that, it is available for very little on Amazon. Basically it encourages fathers to view their role as supporting the mother at this stage, and to look at other ways of bonding with their child without pushing to intrude on the BFing relationship."

The book is 'The New Father; A Dad's Guide To The First Year' by Armin Brott.

There are 850 million other things that a father could do that would be far more useful for everyone. This one aspect of it is not only not useful, and not selfless (and selflessness is called for when baby arrives), but it is potentially a bone of contention, capable of driving a wedge between mother and father, and stressing the mother out in a situation that is already fraught.

(Continues with slight hijack, sorry)
emsyj, have you tried going out and getting your DH/DP to put her to bed? I kept up morning and evening breastfeeds for well over a year and at this kind of stage DP could put them to bed if I wasn't there. Sometimes he reported a bit of crying, but nothing too hideous.

emsyj I like your style I too have probably spent way too much time on here than is good for a person. to be fair, people probably are not writing about 'nipple confusion', I always take it to mean 'I started giving one or two bottles and now they won't breastfeed any more' or even sometimes 'they won't bottle feed any more and only want to breastfeed'
every time it's different isn't it - with my third I found expressing an absolute doddle and did it every day for months but that was for a milk bank, not for the baby! with the first, I hardly got anything and it was almost depressing to see how little I'd 'achieved'. I had both dh and my mum waving bottles of formula in my face (pretty much literally, it was actually the cans of formula un-made up) threatening to feed ds1 - aaargh - still makes me cross now

oh just before I go, I have to disagree with maryz based on personal experience, although of course our dh's may be very different! don't make any promises now - keep it vague - you will see how things go and how you feel and can't make any promises either way - or it will be held over you!