Any mw from 30 yrs ago?

[BettyBoo246]

I'm just intrigued really..... My dm and many other woman of her age (65ish) often tell me when they had their dc's they stayed in hospital for a week and the midwives would have their dc's on a routine of 4 hourly feeding within that week??? How on earth did they do this!
My dm tells me they that they would bring me or my db to her every four hours for a feed, change, cuddle etc and then take us away and bring is back 4 hours later, what did these midwives do with the babies inbetween is what I want to know?!
My ds would certainly not have waited 4 hours in his first week :)

Watching with interest as I get the same tale from my dm! Oh and apparently babies were allowed 20mins per side, nothing more, nothing less either. I mean how, exactly?!

I know I am baffled - these mw must have been miracle workers

The babies were out of earshot of their mothers, so could be left to cry. It wasn't a great time for breastfeeding rates, as doing it by the clock suits next to no-one.

Longer hospital stays we're common. In 1950s it was 10-14 days as the norm, with baby in a night nursery. So at least the mothers got to sleep, and the babies probably cried it out.

One of my special interests is history of infant feeding and advice and practice related to it.

Your description of what was done is pretty accurate, though things were changing then in some maternity units.

Four hourly feeding was still recommended as the norm, even though research had shown it seriously undermined breastfeeding.

Babies were kept in nurseries and were left to cry between feeds. Mothers fed them in the nursery every four hours. The usual routine was 10 mins a side, not 20 mins a side, but you worked up from that, starting at a couple of minutes only on the first day. The babies were normally only brought to the mothers if the mothers could not get out of bed.

Use of formula top ups was very frequent, either between feeds or after feeds. Earlier than 30 years (say 40s and 50s) milk was not formula, but diluted and boiled cows milk with sugar added.

I have old midwifery textbooks which describe these rules.

Breastfeeding rates fell considerably, with the introduction of almost universal hospital birth in the 1950s and 1960s, largely because it could not succeed when these strict routines were placed on it. Mothers soon lost heart because it was just not working, and if their babies were not happy on 6 feeds in 24 hours, 10 mins a side, they assumed they did not have sufficient milk (and they probably did not).

Yes, crying was regarded as "exercising their lungs" and not something to be pandered to . Things being baby or child led is a relatively recent phenomenon.

i think from what i understand is that a lot of mums went home and milk dried up or was never enough! our ds who is 2 was in special care and away from us a bit, much more than i would have liked, i think sadly they give up getting upset, so although the idea of four hour routine sounds very relaxing i would much rather have a limpet baby who knows i am there if he needs me.

My dm told me one night a nurse woke her up by mistake too early before my feed was due and this nurse was told off by the mw saying "you shouldn't wake her she's just had a baby!"
It sounds like heaven :)

Very interesting tiktok

I had DCs early 80s - you got fanjo shave and enema on arrival - nice. Went back next year for DC2 and they'd stopped all that (thanks partly to Esther Rantzen's prog on TV). I felt like yelling 'Thanks guys, for all the embarrassment and discomfort you've unnecessarily inflicted for the last x decades' still cross now--

And agree not nice if the reality was your dc's were left to cry it out :(

oops, got carried away with ----s

We didn't stay in that long, maybe 3 days, and babies were left with you unless you wanted to sleep then they'd take them away. Breastfeeding was halfheartedly encouraged.

Well im 35 and my mum had me with her, they still encoraged them to go 4 hours between feeds.

I cried alot for the first two weeks until I was given a bottle. Mum always talks about how she didnt produce enough and was starving me.

I havent got the heart to tell her it was down to the 4 hour feeding routine

I think my dm was lucky then- she continued to bf both of us till around 6 months

When I had ds1 19 years ago there was still a lot of talk about the 4 hour routine

First child is now 33. I was in a single room in a small NHS maternity hospital, baby stayed with me from birth and I fed on demand. I did stay in for five days even although there were no complications.

All hospital stays were much longer then.

My mum was in for 10 days after she had me in the 80s as my dad couldn't get time off work.
She tried for 4 hourly feeds and gave up breast feeding at 6 weeks as she 'didn't have enough'.
HV told her to leave me to cry at the bottom of the garden but thankfully she couldn't bring herself to do it!

"Baby led" is not a new phenomenon.

If you look at the Illingworth books (text books for medical students, plus manuals for parents) from mid-1950s onwards, you'll see lots of recommendations we would now call baby led. Big supporters of breastfeeding too - and recommended ensuring each breast was drained (not time per side) plus being somewhat flexibe rather than going rigidly by the clock.

The other downside - ask people who gave birth 1950s-1980s - was a real risk of mastitis for the mother. Women who produced a lot of milk despite the ridiculous routines suffered a lot. They would get very engorged, and with their babies feeding so very little, the milk would bank up and the resulting inflammation would become infected - painful abscesses were not uncommon with the mastitis. I am a breastfeeding counsellor and abscess is unusual (mastitis still happens, but not in the first week or so).

Mothers would usually be advised to stop if they had mastitis or an abscess.

Has anyone ever done a longitudinal study on the relationship between infant feeding/ mother-infant contact and adult depression and general emotional well-being?

meditrina, you are right that rigid ideas were not the only show in town. Things were indeed changing by the 1980s. Illingworth was a paed, his wife was a midwife, IIRC, and they wrote text books and parenting books (I have a few), and they were much less rigid, though I suspect they would still be talking about 3 hourly rather than 4 hourly....would need to check.

Well that would make sense, my dh was a 90's baby and my mil said her experience was nothing like that of my dm's, hers was not to dissimilar to now in fact.

Not 90's exaclyt sorry he was born '88

I'll check later too - I have two editions of their parents manuals one from 1950s and one from 1970s. My recollection is that they did have some sort of feeding schedule, but said if the baby cried for food before the clock said so, then feed it.

Illingworth ended up as president of the Royal College, didn't he? and I thought his wife was also a doctor

CityDweller - you would be interested in this:

www.amazon.co.uk/Parenting-Peaceful-World-Robin-Grille/dp/1903275547

This looks not so much at feeding or not solely, but at social differences in parenting responsiveness and kindness to their children, and the effect on society.

There is a branch of 'psycho-history' which studies the links between child rearing and family life, and the social mileu that creates the way parents and babies relate t one another.

Simple example: if your society is aggressive and war-like (Grille uses the mediaeval Mongolians, IIRC - think Gehngis Khan), it's really important you raise aggressive and war-like people. So you separate parents from children, you beat your children, you discourage any sort of kindness or empathy, and instead value things like family honour, egotism, violence. Grille says you can tell a lot about a society by the way they rear their children. He is an optimist. In many modern societies, children's feelings matter, and love matters,and we encourage stable, solid families based on mutual love....and this is augurs well for us.

Thanks tiktok that books looks really interesting. I have a very sketchy knowledge of social history and slight understanding of psychology, but I have pondered how (I think I'm right on this), the rise of emotional and psychological issues in (western) society seems to tally with when doctors (men) took over birthing babies from midwives and the subsequent medicalisation of birth that, in turn, negatively affected breastfeeding rates. I know that's overly simplistic and deterministic, but the op made me think of this wrt those who were born in the 60s and 70s...