Can't seem to change the way I think about BF

[twiglett]

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I wonder if a distaste for long-term bfing is connected with the way our society seems keen to separate mother and baby. We are encouraged to give babies bottles so someone else can feed them, to give them into the care of relative strangers, to sleep in a separate bed or room etc. This contrasts very much with a country like Indonesia where babies co-sleep, are carried all the time and not even put down on the ground for the first seven months (in case evil spirits take away the baby's soul via the feet). They are in a sling for about 18mths/two yrs and it isn't uncommon to see much bigger toddlers sleeping in a sling. For them, it's a given that babies need physical closeness for a long time and it's easy to do with the extended family life that is still the norm in that country.

But that early closeness doesn't lead to infantilising - you only have to see four and five yr-olds working to realise that. It's rarely possible for us in the West to follow that closeness of lifestyle but I do wonder if that's why some people dislike the idea of extended bfing. I think the infantilising idea is a bit of a non-starter, tbh. No one says that having a 3yo in nappies is infantilising, yet when I had my boys in the 70's the idea of an un-potty-trained 3yo would have been pretty shocking. I know when my dd's were is disposable nappies I left it longer to potty train them but I didn't think of it as infantilising them, the same as I didn't think I was infantilising them with LT bfing, let alone abusing them.

Oh dear, what a long incoherent ramble - I'm high as a kite on my Saturday caffeine!!

Suedonim, I gave dd1 bottles at 4 months 'cos I had to.

I have found that as a parent there are many things I assumed I would or wouldn't do when rearing children, until I actually started having them . I think as a parent you do not truly know what you will do until you are responding to your own child's needs. I remember being turned off by watch a friend breastfeeding her toddler who was 13 months old and just walked up and lifted up her jumper. However, I actually fed 2 of mine until 14 months and 15 months. I never did have them walk up to me in a room and lift my jumper so I never had to deal with that situation. Both of them self weaned so I was never in the situation. I was happy for them to lead the pace though, so perhaps if they had not weaned themselves off the breast I would have fed for far longer.
The point I am trying to make is we all have our own ideals as far as parenting goes. I had lots - no sweets, bed by 7pm, no extended watching of TV, no biscuits, no bad behaviour, the list is endless. I had to rethink lots of preconceived ideas when I was actually personally dealing with an issue. A friend of mine was not going to breastfeed when she was pregnant with her first baby. She is still feeding him and he will be 4 years old in October!

What I mean, Carla, is that sometimes there's an expectation from others that a baby be bottlefed. A friend with a 1mth old baby has come under pressure from her MIL to put her baby on a bottle just so MIL can take the baby away and feed her. There's no reason why this baby needs a bottle, friend is very happy bfeeding, it's all going well etc so what on earth gives her MIL the cheek to demand that the baby be bottle-fed? That's a completely different scenario to you as the parent deciding whether/when to b-feed/f-feed, which is entirely your prerogative.

I had to give up b/f early on and was dismayed when my dh told MIL and her reaction was 'oh good now we can all have a little feed'. Even now, and he's 14 wks I don't really like other people feeding him apart from me and dh but I feel mean if I say no

The thing I have realised about parenting is that my choices in bringing up my baby are sometimes interpreted as an afront to other peoples choices. I don't care if another mother bottle feeds her baby or bfs her until they are 10! Why do others care so much about what I do. People defending extended bfing are not attacking others who don't. Personally I like the idea of extended bfing but am not sure I can cope with the big boobies that long!

Has anyone read the book Eve, about pregnancy and motherhood through the centuries?

Apparently there have been times in the past (even before formula existed) when a lot mothers disliked breastfeeding andw nould rather pay a wet nurse than do it themselves.

It doesn't mean anything of course, but I always thought that being a 'natural' thing it was always done in the past without giving it a second thought.....

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suedonim - interesting. Apparently it is only fairly recently (speaking for the whole history of man) that we have put our babies in separate beds and rooms. I think to go back a hundred years people would have laughed at the "is he sleeping through the night yet?" kind of conversations and the myth that we are 'damaging' our babies by 'not letting them sleep'. As far as I am concerned sleep is an issue that makes it convenient for the parents and no-one else, not that that isn't a valid case of course! Oh dear going off topic again...

webmum - twiglett is right - wet nurses were used to prevent lactational ammenorhea (ie no periods through b/feeding) so that a woman could get pregnant again quickly. Usually the rich who could afford them. A large family was seen to be desirable and produce lots of heirs. I am sure lots of informal wet nursing went on too in families if a mother was ill.

tamum - that is OK. I missed out the end bit (sorry about that)which was .... "In several instances the protection seems to improve with the duration of breastfeeding."

That is a bit woolly so I did a bit more digging and found the following (just put in excerpts here)

Breastfeed a Toddler?Why on Earth?
Handout #21. Toddler nursing. January 2003
Written by Jack Newman, MD, FRCPC. © 2003

Breastmilk still contains immunologic factors that help protect the baby. In fact, some immune factors in breastmilk that protect the baby against infection are present in greater amounts in the second year of life than in the first. This is, of course as it should be, since children older than a year are generally exposed to more infection. Breastmilk still contains factors that help the immune system to mature, and which help the brain, gut, and other organs to develop and mature.

Immunological Protection
This article was originally written in 1999 by Kathryn Orlinsky.

Skeptics have said, "yes, human milk benefits infants, but older children cannot continue to receive immunity by breastfeeding, can they?" The answer to this question is a resounding yes. Children enjoy health benefits for as long as they breastfeed. Studies have compared weaned children with breastfeeding children at 30 months16 and at 36 months,20,23 and found them to be sicker.

There are at least two reasons why breastfeeding continues to benefit older children. First, human milk contains immune factors regardless of the duration of lactation. Both lysozyme and SIgA levels have been found in human milk for the entire period of lactation studied, including the second year.10,12,13 Many of these immune factors would be otherwise unavailable.13 Second, human milk is more easily tolerated by a sick child than weaning foods. Thus, breastfeeding ensures that sick children remain hydrated and do not lose excessive weight

References:
Gulick EE. 1986. Pediatr. Nurs. Jan-Feb;12(1):51-4. The effects of breast-feeding on toddler health.
Molbak K, Gottschau A, Aaby P, Hojlyng N, Ingholt L and AP da Silva. 1994. BMJ. May 28;308(6941):1403-6.
van den Bogaard C, van den Hoogen HJ, Huygen FJ and C van Weel. 1991. Fam. Med. Sep-Oct;23(7):510-5.

And as someone mentioned earlier the benefits to the mother ...

BBC Online 19.07.02
Thousands of women might be spared the agony of breast cancer if they extended the period for which they suckle their babies.
Research published on Friday suggests that for every year of her life spent breastfeeding, a woman's risk of the disease drops by 4.3%
This is on top of the 7% reduction she enjoys for every baby to which she gives birth.

This last point is important as women used to both have a lot more children and feed them for longer thus preventing cancers. So rather than having more kids which is impractical, we could feed the ones we do have for longer.

Just a further point about wet nursing: it's a good example of how women's feeding choices have been made in a social context, in the last few hundred years anyway, and we are no different now than then.

In many parts of Europe, until probably about 100-150 years ago, even the middle classes sometimes sent their babies away to be nursed - it wasn't just the aristocracy who employed wet nurses, but people who had the money, even a little, to do it. I have a feeling this is mentioned in one of Jane Austen's books (there were scandalous baby farms where babies were neglected and even starved - I have a memory there is one mentioned in Dickens). Then when the child was weaned (at toddling stage, usually) they would be returned to the household. The artistocrats of the Ancient Romans did not nurse their own children, and there are prob other examples.

Yet the majority of people, in all societies and at all times of history, have breastfed and breastfed a long time.

Ok Eulalia, you've convinced me (too late of course, but still!)

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But babies are individuals too, my ds was a terrible sleeper as an infant, the first 7 weeks of hios life he slept 20 minutes out of every hour and fed off me the rest of the time, we never left the bed except to wash the nappies!
He was the sweetest happiest child, throughout that, the only reason it wasn;t working was because I was nearly suicidal.
So I did something about it for me entirely...
He never slept well until age 4 really, so he slept with me, then we got all the sleep we needed.
You adapt.
however my young dd now is the best sleeper in the world!

Re the wet-nursing. I read something recently about an aristocrat (maybe Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire??) who fed her own babies, much to the disgust of others, who felt she should be producing more children.

Something else I noticed when looking at family trees during research of my family history was the spacing of children. It seemed that children were often more widely spaced than today, with 3+ yrs being more common than 18mths/2yrs. A small gap often occured if a baby sadly died within months of birth while larger gaps seemed to be associated with children who survived infanthood. I wonder if the smaller gaps are connected with the loss of lactational ammenorhea when b-fing stops upon death of a baby?

It wasn't unusual for Royal/aristocratic mothers to become distraught when their babies were taken away either, but it was because they were considered by society to be baby machines, just there to produce heirs. The children actually went elsewhere to be raised through their childhood. Horrible thought.

BTW, I have heard that in Medieval and Tudor times there are lots of reports that sleep wasn't taken in one unbroken block, but that people went to bed at sunset, woke in the night, made love, did stuff, then slept until morning. Not for me - but interesting, I thought.

bloss - not sure what recent is myself either but was a bit rushed with the post. I did mean 100 years ago there wasn't so much of a race with sleeping through rather than talking about separate beds, it wasn't put very well. It was only at the turn of the century with industralisation that we became more interested in timed feeds and sleeps. I agree cots have been used for a long time but many people were poor and would have slept together. Also central heating hasn't been around for long and that is one way of keeping warm. I know as we don't have CH and dd was born in an April. I tried to put her in her own bed wrapped up with hat and gloves but she was still freezing so she came into bed with me.

Young babies are different. They are programmed to wake frequently and have different sleep patterns to adults. They wake more often because they need to feed. Obviously this trait disappears over time and they sleep for longer periods of time. I think it is unnatural for a 8 week baby for example to sleep through the night. Even the HV said that around 6 months is the 'benchmark for a baby sleeping through. As for development, well I think this is an issue for older children who aren't having daytime naps. So I did mean very young babies, didn't make that clear either...

Every baby is different and I think some are just bad sleepers wherever you have them but they all get to their own beds eventually whichever route they have taken.

For me co-sleeping after the first 6 months or so (when I felt that it was much easier regarding b/feeding) did eventually become a form of lazyness on my part. I am just not good at sitting up freezing in the middle of the night next to a cot. With co-sleeping you are woken a lot but its not being fully awake. Anyway sorry going off topic here again.

Bigger spaces betw. siblings is connected with lactational amenorrhea, but poorer nutrition, too. And women didn't even start menstruating until (average) age 16-17yo ... not sure when that changed, but probably with industrial revolution.

Radio 4 did a series about Georgina/Duchess of Devonshire(?) -- and yes, she did feed her own babes and was thought highly eccentric for it (and many other things). I think a lot of her offspring died from "childhood diseases" though.

suedonim - yes it would have been unheard of for the very small age gaps before formula. For me lactational ammenorhea worked very well - 13 months post partum with dd and 18 months pp for dd so I've had very few periods in the last 5 years. This does vary a lot though from person to person but it has been thought it is related to body fat. We are more fertile now and girls start their periods younger because of a good diet and higher % body fat.

Don't we as a society tend to dis-associate (is that a word?) ourselves from things we perceive as unsanitary? When was the last time you saw a carcass hanging from a hook? Certainly not in Tesco, where meat is neatly packaged in clingfilm and looks nothing like the animal it came from! Have you ever seen the landfill where those disposable nappies end up?

'Other people' deal with the things in life that we don't see and don't think about. Now I'm not say that ltbf is dirty (I'm a ltbf-er myself), but what I mean is that bfing is one of the things we don't tend to see in our society. Maybe that's why our society seems to think that bf needs to be finished and tidied away as quickly as possible - seeing the unseen is offensive.

prettycandles - I don't think people see it as unsanitary - just somehow invasive of their own bodies and that it is a bit rude somehow displaying this feeding in public when we on the whole don't show our bodies. However total double standards of course as we display just about everything on the beach - but feed a baby over 12 months - horror!

Also was thinking about other things that babies do from birth right onwards till about age 3.

Use a dummy/bottle (sucking is a strong urge for many years, hence the over 36 months mark on many toys)

Use a pram well past the age they can walk

Use Nappies

Use bibs and highchairs (not from birth obviously!)

All of these are seen as socially acceptable. Toilet training in particular is now done much later than it was 50 years ago. My mum says that people would have been horrified at a 3 year old in nappies in her time. Now it is perfectly normal and not at all 'babyish'. So why should breastfeeding be 'babyish'?

Expect everyone has got bored with this topic though!

I've found this a really interesting thread. I stopped bf at 13 months - my daughter was refusing it because she had a cold and I was ready to stop. I also felt the same as Twiglett when I began bf, but after a year it was easier to imagine carrying on (even though I didn't). At the same time I found all the bottle feeding paraphernalia a physical turn-off, which I didn't expect.