theres so much pressure to breast feed exclusively!!its making me feel really crap!!

[wannabump2006]

Hi there,have a 4 week old dd who i initally started breastfeeding from day one.Its taken us 3 years to get the baby we want as i had a stillborn in may 2005 and a miscarriage in the september of the same year.
Shes an incredibly laid back little girl,wakes twice in the night for feeds,once around 3/4 and then again at about 6/7am,we give her a good feed at 10/11pm then she just goes down,so feel really lucky about that.
The issue now though is that because she is such a hungry baby,i introduced topping up with formula after a bf if she wanted it(suggested by midwife)which i felt really relieved about as i was feeling like she wasn't geeting enough from me,and the formula would really settle her down.ergo it would make me feel better because she was satisfied.Now though at 4 weeks i'm alternating between bf and bottle feeding,eg bf one feed then bottle next,which is suiting us really well,but i just feel theres so much pressure to just bf that it really gets to me!!
Its such a blessing to have this little girl and shes so good to take to both breast and bottle so well but just feel like health visitor and others are thinking i should have just bf and not introduced the bottle!!
I really need some support from others who have had a similar experience and just to be reasured really that the bottle isn't the enemy!!Which is how i'm feeling at the mo!!,please any one else had a similar experience?many thanks.x

WHY are these thread always turned into a discussion between the same smug 'lecturers'

the woman lost a child and is so so so so happy to have a beautiful child now. Give her a break. and some support. surely thats why she came here

God im having a shit day today

my advice is (as if anyone cares) FEED your child, whatever way you choose (it is a choice after all) ENJOY your baby and soak up all the nice bits about having a teeny baby. And God knows they are not teeny for long.

now. are you all assuming i am a bottle feeding mother? thought so...

WANNA - enjoy your baby. Congratulations.

As a new mum we alwasy assume that we will automatically give our children "the best". As time goes on you tend to have to choose between "the best" or "good enough" on a whole raft of issues - not just on milk, but on every meal that you feed, childcare, schools, activities, housing etc. And actually determining "best" vs "good enough" can be time-consuming and exhausting in itself.

Ultimately as a parent you look across the whole range of input. Personally I think that if you breastfeed exclusively but send your kids to a crap school then your kids are probably worse off that if you formula feed and send them to a great school. But another mum will take a different view. And school is still out as to the relative benefit of nature/nurture anyway.

If it is any consolation most mums are far more relaxed about the whole feeding thing second and thrid time round - once you've seen you PFB eat from the dog bowl it is hard to get quite so excited . Yes breast may be best but formula will be good enough for most children.

nailpolish - no one is criticising the OP in any way. It's all been supportive. All of it.

But people are criticising the posters who are sharing information, and asking them not to do it.

Fio, I expect you will want to withdraw your quip about lecturing, now that you have told us you don't know who was giving the lectures, and you missed all the supportive posts.

Ladymuck, my kids are breastfed and educated at crap schools (this is actually true). Are you saying I am a terrible mother?

[joke]

Fio, are you detecting a "the OP should breastfeed" message here? I'm not.

There was a "if the OP wants to breastfeed she needs to know that mixed feeding this early might mean she can't for much longer" message.

And there's a "hold on a minute, whatever people are saying about formula being pretty much as good as breastmilk, that's not actually true" message - directed not particularly at the OP.

And there's been a bit of a discussion about whether support and information are pressure - actually I'd agree that some information can of course put pressure on us to move in one direction rather than another. That doesn't mean that the people providing that information have an agenda to get us to move in that direction - the chances are they really don't care what we as individuals do, they're just interested in accurate information (which I think is quite helpful personally, even if it can be annoying occasionally to have to go back and rethink a decision I thought was done and dusted until the new information came along, and even if I don't end up changing my decision).

Please don't feel bad about mix feeding. I think 99.9% of mums would love to exclusivly bf because it is the best way to ensure your babies health is on top form. However this doesn't always work out that way as i really wanted to bf mine and was very disapointed when i couldn't and had to go to formula.

Even though breast milk IS best for baby, formula is very good nowadays and is the next best thing to breast milk if you have no option. My friend had a similer situation to yours, she was told to bf and ff because her dd was underweight and wasn't getting enough from bf alone. Don't let the hv make you feel bad, alot of hv don't even have kids which really annoys me so just do what you feel is right for you and your baby.

Right - self-fulfilling prophecy or what!

It might help if you read what people have actually written, rather than just assuming you know what their agenda is and criticising them for that without reading or thinking about what they've actually said. Talk about unfair!

Wow, fio, you really did skim read the thread, didn't you!

There are plenty of 'there, there' comments and hardly anything about the benefits of bf.

Defensive? Yes, because you are making criticisms that are neither true nor based on a careful reading of the thread.

Everyone is being supportive of OP.

The problem is that the opening post was looking for reassurances that the 'bottle isn't the enemy'.

You cannot just give that reassurance without giving the information that it may well be the end of breastfeeding.

OP is not concerned whether it is or not therefore she is happy.

Others lurking looking for information may well not want to risk the breastfeeding that they have. They may well change what they are doing.

This is an open forum and therefore lots of responses will be received. Some will be what the OP was looking for - some will be what others unknown will be looking for.

That is what is good about Mumsnet.

Tiktok - no, I don't think that you are a terrible mother. But I do think that it is most likely that the difference between a good school and a terrible school have more of an influence on how they turn out as adults than whether you breastfed or gave formula. And in one sense they are similar decisions - you will never get to see how your child turned out had you made a different decision. Equally you can look at a range of 11 year olds and I doubt that you could tell which had been formula fed and which had been to a crap school.

Ladymuck: you say 'Equally you can look at a range of 11 year olds and I doubt that you could tell which had been formula fed and which had been to a crap school"

You can't tell by looking, no.

But you certainly can tell the difference on both counts (schooling and infant feeding) if you run certain tests on them.

ROFL

you cant compare schools to feeding your child

I personally hate it when people try and make me feel bad about ff.Yes i know its best for babies health but i didn't have any option BUT to ff.People can just assume you choose to ff all the time and sometimes thats NOT the case. I would love to have bf but as i didn't get that option i have to go with the next best thing which is formula. Then i get people saying my baby will be unhealthy and have all sorts of problems with my dd health later on.

that should have been yes i know its best to bf by the way

Icing

Icing - that is not the case at all.

It is such an emotive subject that people to do view what is said objectively.

Where a baby cannot be breastfed, ofcourse formula is the best option. Babies need milk to survive.

NP: I don't think anyone's comparing....just discussing LadyMuck's interesting thought that a good school somehow makes up for formula feeding.

I have absolutely no idea if she is right, and neither has she

Icing - no one should try to make any mother feel bad about using formula.

That's not what people are trying to do here.

Who is telling you your baby 'will be unhealthy'?

Formula feeding does have a negative impact on health - no one can argue with the research that shows that. But that is not the same as saying 'your baby will be unhealthy', though I know it can feel as if that's what it's saying

What constitutes "trying to make you feel bad about ff" though...

There might be some things that make you feel bad about ff temporarily until one second later you recall why you had to do it (just as I sometimes read things that make me feel momentarily bad about some things in my child's life before reminding myself why they were best for us), but that doesn't mean that the people saying those things are trying to make you feel bad. That's an agenda that's just not there in the way you seem to think it is.

There are many many good reasons for talking honestly about different feeding options, without rose-tinted specs and so on. "Making people who ff feel bad" is just not one of them. It's an unfortunate side-effect, which happens more often in this context because this is a big public board read both by people who are already ff, those who haven't got to that particular set of branches in the road, and those who are at a branch right now. Sometimes information shared with one type of person is also read by people for whom that bit of the road is in the past...

I totally understand why it can be annoying to have 'choice' referred to a lot when you had no choice though. It is difficult, because people come to a particular way of feeding by many different routes - some really are choosing, some have no choice at all, many are in the middle somewhere with a degree of choice restricted by individual circumstances.

I wasn't suggesting that it made up for feeding! I was just pointing out that decisions about ff v bf are simply one of a long line of decisions that you will be making that will impact your child, and it is not necessarily the most important of those decisions. And for most decisions there will be a trade between good enough and best. It is unlikely that every mother will make the same trade for every decision.

However for a new mum the decision about feeding may be her first such decision. I though it was worth remding her that it won't be her last. In some respects you have to make a "best" v "good enough" decision with every meal that you feed your kids.

icing, that is truly not what is being said at all. i mix-fed, then exclusively formula fed because my supply dropped and it was importnant that the OP knew that might be the case for her. she does now, and she's fine with that, so that conversation is over. (or should be)

as for making people feel bad, you are reading more than is actually being said. no one is quicker than i am to jump all over anyone on here who talks about ff as a 'choice' without acknowledging that it's not the case for all ffers and it simply hasn't happened on this thread. course if it is a choice then that's equally valid, but better to be an informed choice than not.

it would have been awful for the OP to find herself writing a post in a month's time saying 'you all said that mixed feeding was fine but now i don't have any breastmilk left' wouldn't it? but it's been established that she's not going to, she's happy with her choice (because in her case it it one) and that make people like me and you a bit but she's totally happy with her decision which has got to be the main thing.

Sorry, LadyMuck - when you said 'Personally I think that if you breastfeed exclusively but send your kids to a crap school then your kids are probably worse off that if you formula feed and send them to a great school' I understood you to mean that a great school for a formula fed kid is a better outcome than a crap school for a breastfed kid...that is, a great school compensates for formula feeding.

I can't think of any other way of interpreting it.

I agree that there are a squillion decisions ahead, though

i'm afraid it has not all been supportive and i'm currently in tears due to the fact that this has turned into something i really didn't want it to!!
i'm an intelligent woman!i do know that formula is ofcourse not as nutrionally benifitial as breastmilk!!christ!!
and i really didn't ask for 'lecturers' as nailpolish put it,that are then going into the social/emotional benfits of bf!!i work with babies for a living for goodness sake!!and i see so many different ways that children are fed and i adhere to/carry out/respect as its theirchoice!!
i merely started this thread to hear from other mothers who have experienced a similar situation to myself and to hear how it went for them,something along the lines of;'yeah i did the same,don't worry,worked for me etc etc', or alternatively;'no i found it didn't go well,this is why,etc etc'.....not a huge thing about the psychology of breastfeeding and its implications!!although i am an extremely experienced and qualified nursery nurse,when you have your own child everything you've ever learnt or applied to others children,goes out the window!and you doubt yourself so much with everything!
that is why i asked for advice purely on the basis of how other mothers found they got on with bf/ff,not all this!!
i've been on mumsnet for 3 years now and found the support when i lost my little boy and subsiquently had a miscarriage really invaluable!!..i couldn't have got through it without them!dispite my partener thinking that talking to a bunch of strangers wouldn't do me any good,i proved him wrong,but now its been proved right!
and whats all this 'op' stuff!!?..my chat name is wannabump or wanna!..more precisely i'm a person with feelings called michelle!not a statistic or 'patient' in a doctors surgery!!
i'm going to leave this thread now because if this is reassurance,i'm really better off without it!!
you may mean well thinking that i need to know the ins and outs of the great 'bf Vs ff' debate,but i am fully aware,as i mentioned before,if anything my daughter is thriving and achieving milestones beyond her 4 week age(which professionally i am fully aware of!|)so the social/emotional/health side of things are totally unnecessary on this thread,just good old support from mixed feeders/breastfeeders/formula feeders..whatever!!as long as they had felt in anyway similar to me in the early days and could support me to some extent...i never asked to be given all the facts ,simply because i am aware of them,and they have never been an issue,
the issue being,'i'm a new mum,and feeling alittle insecure about this little being that i'm now responsible for,and hoping that its normal to not be 'textbook' perfect!'
i'll leave it there.

It wasn't a suggestion that one would compensate for the other. It is more about putting this one decision, often the first of its kind in the life of a child, into a context that a mother will be making similar decisions for many years to come. The fact that mothers choose to settle for secoond best can come as a shock to new mums who will assume that they will always be able to a) identify and b) afford in terms of time, money and energy to opt for "the best".