Reasons why women don't breastfeed

[ohthegoats]

Today's breastfeeding 'news' from Brazil. I finally heard a sensible comment on the story at about lunchtime today - a woman saying that there shouldn't be surveys on whether or not it's a good thing to breastfeed, because everyone knows it is. The research should be into why so many women don't do it, or don't stick with it.

Here are my reasons why I don't like breastfeeding - has anyone got any to add? Or ideas to mitigate the issues?

After being so out of control of your body during pregnancy, being poked and prodded and 'nanny stated' out of your mind, you want control back.

Little help available when you have problems - I know this isn't true for all people.

Having to wear such unflattering underwear in order to be able to get your boobs out easily. Why hasn't this been sorted out? Why so few underwired options that actually work without causing duct blockages? Why so expensive to get even a crappy underwired one?

Having to wear clothes that are mostly unflattering too. I have one reasonable breastfeeding top out of the 10 I have bought - H&M for a tenner in the sale, not been able to find it again. They are all either too plain coloured, too low necked, horrible material, too tight in other places etc etc.

Getting stared at in public for doing it.

Being confined to the sofa for days on end.

Waking up covered in yoghurt for reasons you don't understand.

Boobs squirting milk during sex.

Think that's my starter list.

I'm 5 and a half months into ebf with my baby... plan to start moving away from it at 6 months. I've done it because it's the 'right' thing, but I've mostly hated it.

Culture, I don't think the stats back up the assertion that most find it easy. Just looking at the BMJ article Tiktok linked to earlier - 90% of women stop breastfeeding before they want to. 81% start out breastfeeding but by 6 weeks only 55% are breastfeeding at all, 23% exclusively. And it falls off a cliff by 4 months. That suggests that the majority of women don't find it straightforward or encounter only minor problems.

Further, it suggests that there are issues specific to the UK, given vastly higher rates in countrues such as Norway, Sweden and Australia.

Well, so many do stop after starting so I suppose you're right. Is it because they had insurmountable problems though, or just a complete lack of decent support? Are modern UK women generally unable to breastfeed, as a group?

I guess what I was trying to say, probably completely clumsily, that pain, problems, depression, embarrassment etc are not inevitable, and not what many women experience.

Wow that is interesting Jassy.

I'm not sure it's possible to separate 'insurmountable problems' from 'poor support' - given the extremely poor support available, how can women know whether their problems were surmountable?

Women who weren't breastfeeding at 6 weeks cited 'problems' as their reason for stopping. I think those who find it problem-free are probably the lucky (significant) minority.

All this scaremongering about breastfeeding pisses me off. Yes some women have difficulties, some don't have any issues at all. Yes sometimes you are pinned to the sofa cluster feeding, presumably the same happens if formula feeding. Yes you have to think about what you wear so boobs are accessible, but it's not that limiting and you don't need specific breastfeeding clothes. Yes you can't have much alcohol, but presumably even if formula feeding you aren't going to be getting smashed what with having a tiny baby to be responsible for and if breastfeeding if you do want a few drinks then you can give baby a bottle of expressed milk or formula, and as they get older and feeds are more spaced out and more predictable you can drink and feed if you time it right. Yes you are solely responsible for feeding the baby, but again you can express or mix feed if you need that break.

I've breast fed two babies until they were a year old. No issues, no drama, and as I'm inherently lazy it was a whole lot easier than formula feeding would have been. I really do think that some women are put off breastfeeding before even trying.

Cherry pi

Can I tell you what isn't working 'out there', and why there are loads of 'hurt' women..

It is called pressure and bullying.

The minute a mother feels MADE to do something, her control and choices are taken away, and she is then being intimidated into something very personal and very private. It should never be the job of any midwife or consultant to start forcing women into bf. They should remain neutral and supportive. If the mother wishes to bf she should be given full support and guidance to do so. If she choose to ff she should also be given full support and guidance to do so. There should be no difference.

What is there not to understand?

It is Bullying plain and simple. And you are one of the leading culprits on here by dismissing meaningful posts as representatives of ff companies, and yet you sound surprised that you people find you unkind.

Force feeding Bf, no pun intended, is having the opposite effect on mothers. It is terrifying having some brute of a midwife manhandling your body, which has already been battered and damaged throughout labour. Most women are fragile at this stage, they need gentle and thoughtful care to help them make the right choices for them. It is called common decency. It is simply not acceptable to bully anybody in this way just to hit the NHS targets.

I think discussions like this are important - vital, even. If we know what things are influencing people to make a particular choice, and what problems, worries and struggles they have, we have a much better chance of creating a situation where everyone has the best chance possible of making the best decision for them, and then making that decision work for them.

I really wanted to breastfeed - I was desperately unhappy about not being able to nourish my children - watching ds2 turn into a skinny, pale shadow of a baby, all because I could not make nourishing milk for him, was awful.

It was made worse by the pressure from the HV - when someone tells you they are coming back tomorrow and want to see that the baby has gained an ounce by then, you feel tremendous pressure and stress - and I am sure that did not help at all. At one point, I was trying to explain how much I wanted breastfeeding to work this time, and the HV said, and I quote, "Well, I have to think of the best interests of the baby!!" I asked her how she dared suggest I was not thinking of the best interests of my baby, and threw her out of the house. To her credit, the next time I saw her (over a week later, because she had been on holiday) she apologised profusely for upsetting me, and told me she had really worried about the effect her words had had on me.

I am one of the people Jassy talks about - I used the term 'failure' about myself for years - and it really does feel as if my body failed me, and I failed my children. Why could I not do something that so many of my friends seemed to find so easy? Why was my baby 'failing to thrive' when others were growing and flourishing?

Over the years, I did manage to make myself feel a bit better, by focusing on the things I could do - I couldn't nourish a child with my own milk, but I could make lots of home made food, when they were weaning. I watched them grow up strong and healthy, happy and bright, and told myself that I had to have something to do with that.

But the rhetoric of failure was still in my mind - I was so hard on myself - it damaged my already fragile mental health - damage that is permanent, I fear. It is a bit better now, but not gone.

Made, the stats suggest that many women do struggle and many give up as a result of their problems. Great that you found it straightforward - but acknowledging that others experience problems isn't scaremongering. It's a really important first step in dealing with those problems, working on the assumption that British women aren't physiologically different from our counterparts in other countries.

I really liked the idea I saw on one of these threads the other day about decommercialising formula. Getting the government to produce it and the profit being plowed back into breastfeeding support/formula research.

It's not scaremongering

We've all put across why WE didn't/didn't like BF. That's it we've then been accused we're all working for Formula companies.

FF isn't hard work, you stick your bottles in the dishwasher/sink. Sterilise if you have a PP machine you push a button. That's it, not hard work at all and I've done both expressing was FAR harder and more work

I don't. I would like the government to stay well away from what I'm feeding my baby. Leave it to the people who have done it for years and years.

Not quite sure why people strive to de-commercialise it anyway. If you don't like FF fine but can we stop trying to demonise it.

I really really wish that lots of money could be spent on really helpful and effective infant feeding support, that is very easily accessed. I had significant issues with establishing breastfeeding, and was essentially left to it despite frequent midwife and HV visits to check up on the health of me and my baby. My HV didn't appear to have much specialist knowledge or understanding of breastfeeding, and just offered very generalised positive comments without any specific advice. I was fortunate to be able to sort my problems out myself, but not everyone will be able to.

I did acknowledge that not all women find it straightforward. What annoys me is there is usually no acknowledgement that it will be straightforward, as per my own experience. A lot of my friends and acquaintances are having babies now and each time breast feeding is discussed all I hear is, it's so hard, I couldn't produce enough milk, etc. I think people are set up to fail before even trying because all they hear is negativity.

But maybe they couldn't produce enough milk and they found it hard they can't lie and said oh yeah it was piss easy just because you don't like their experience.

It's like when people ask me how my birth was, I tell them the truth it was a cat-1 section, high bp, cardiac problems after, infection, resus. I can't sit there and go it was a wonderful thing because it wasn't

Wow there seems to be terrible, conflicting advice out there for breastfeeding, no wonder a lot of women in the UK are unable to. I would like to add that there are some attractive breastfeeding bras out there though -
www.mammae.be/en/collection/breastfeeding-bra-s/mammae-classic

www.esprit.nl/dameskleding/positiekleding/lingerie-belly-belts/voedingsbh-met-kant-M8450_003?camp=NL_IC_PP_PS_40_00002

Madge, there's a bit of a gap between 'not all' and 'most'. For most, it's clear that it won't be straightforward, whether physically or psychologically.

If you set up a narrative that sets out that breastfeeding is/should be straightforward and easy, in the face of evidence that the majority of women do not find it so, you're setting women who do find it difficult up to fail and to feel like failures because their bodies didn't do it right. You shut down avenues of advice and support because women experiencing problems feel marginalised and the exception, rather than the rule.

After all, if most people are supposed to find it easy, and you're finding it really bloody hard, the logical view is that the problem must be you. So why keep trying?

Jassy, £5million on breastfeeding support in the UK would be actually a large amount of money! It's a drop in the bucket in terms of overall NHS spending, of course, but many bf support programmes close down, completely, because of a lack of a few £K or even a few £Hundred.

Anyway, here are my links, which address the issue raised by Toffee last night, who said that more breastfed babies were hospitalised than formula fed babies, because of issues linked to feeding method. In all situations, hospital admission for babies is unusual in the UK - which is why we need BIG studies (not personal experience, not friends' experiences, even if we have a lot of friends :) )

In the very early days - the first two weeks - the incidence of admission for hypernatraemic dehydration (or 'HD' - basically, the baby not being hydrated/fed sufficiently well) is much more likely to happen if the baby is breastfed.....but it is still very rare, with Oddie et al finding www.careperinatologia.it/lavori/L235.pdf an incidence of just 7 babies in 100,000 births. Oddie's study was HUGE, covering all the UK and RoI, and all neonatal readmissions over a period of several years. They found a total of 62 readmissions for HD over the whole period, of whom 61 had started off exclusively breastfed.

Now, the study is sort of reassuring, in that it affirmed the rarity of HD, and the fact that all these babies recovered well (see newspaper stories with his quotes in here www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/mar/20/breastfeeding-myths-dispelled and here
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9942020/Dehydration-risks-from-breastfeeding-are-negligible-study-finds.html. From a medical point of view, hurrah and all that, but of course for each one of those 62 babies and their families, the stay in hospital will have been unpleasant and distressing. So we should not minimise it. Oddie's team are pretty sure that most of these admissions could have been wholly prevented with better breastfeeding care earlier on.

(Just to add, of course babies are readmitted in the newborn period for other reasons; this study picked out the HD ones only).

When we get beyond the newborn period, and we look beyond HD, the story is a bit different. Hospital admission is still unusual - 12 per cent in the first 8 mths of life - but it is pretty clearly more likely to happen with ff babies. Quigley et al, in their Millennium Cohort study in the UK, find that gastro infection and respiratory tract infection leading to hospitalisation are more common in ff babies www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17403827 - full study elsewhere on the web. We know from many other studies that gastro and respiratory infection are more common in ff babies anyway, including in the UK (Dundee cohort; ALSPAC cohort).

What we don't have, and which we will never have, is a study telling some parents to deliberately make up/store formula in an unsafe way, to see how frequently their babies fall ill...so it's hard to say with any certainty that x per cent of the hospitalised babies would not have been poorly if their formula was safely made. It prob does make a difference though. One of the reasons why ff are at greater risk of gastro and other infections is the lack of antibodies in formula, which actively protect the baby.

I hope that helps clarify a bit.

Hmm it's tricky isn't it because I think formula feeding is easier than breastfeeding initially for lots of people and then breastfeeding becomes easier (with the right support) than formula feeding but most people don't get to that stage.

Claira, not my research - what an odd turn of phrase. But it references studies suggesting that 90% of women who stop do so before they wanted to, many citing 'problems'. Which suggests that a decent public health response would be to provide support to those women.

I agree that support for those who want it is woeful, poorly targeted and ill-informed. And I agree with the PP who pointed out that there is a bullying and coercive approach that is fundamentally unhelpful and anti-women.

But then, I don't want anyone to breastfeed if they don't want to. I just want to see better help for those who do.

formula feeding is easier all the way through in my experience.

Tiktok, I'm not saying that £5 million wouldn't be extremely welcome - and it's a sad indictment of current support that this is the case. But I still don't think it would get you the results the paper envisages, given the piss poor state of current support. And with such marginal savings, the NHS will not see an economic case for funding even a fraction of that level of support.

Jassy

Mothers choosing to ff should also be offered unfettered, unbiased advice. Often they too are under supported.

The bottom line is until we start supporting each other whatever our feeding choices are, we are never going to get the support we need, we are wasting far too much energy on bickering about 'what is best' in such a childish fashion, if we collectively demanded more (gentle) support across the board for ff and bf mothers, motherhood would be a whole lot easier for everyone. And who knows, without the bullying and pressure MORE women might choose bf and stick with it. At the moment it is simply putting thousands of women ~ no one likes a nanny state when they are 36 years old

I don't know how we do it, but what we need is a culture that is supportive of mothers and their choices, where accurate and balanced information is available, and where good quality support is available too.

I do think it is vital that we are honest about our experiences of infant feeding, both good and bad - I don't think it would be right for pregnant women to be told it is all rosy, you will naturally know how to breastfeed and so will your child, and it will be a magical experience - when the fact is that it is not always thus.

Far better, surely, to say that, like many things, breastfeeding can and does have its challenges, but there is plenty of advice and support available to help you meet those challenges - and if you decide that the challenges are too great and you cannot overcome them, then formula feeding is not the Axis of Evil - it is a safe and healthy way to feed your baby.

I still wonder whether there is anything I could have done to make breastfeeding work for me and my children - the right supplement at the right time, expert advice on my latch, more or less of something in my diet - I don't know.

I can't beat myself up about it any more (I have done that far too well for far too long), but I would love to see other women not have to go through what I did.