NON personal discussion about breastfeeding rates <no mud slinging allowed>

[JingleyJen]

Instead of personal stories and family circumstances I am really interested in the potential reasons why in this country are breastfeeding rates so much lower than in other countries?

Surely in other countries boobs are sexual things as well so it can't just be that.

Is it that ever downward spiral that as fewer women breastfeed that it is hidden and therefore fewer women feel comfortable with the whole thing?

I don't think it is the availability of formula

Have there been studies done on this? (sure there have but don't know where to find them)

Is the success rate of mothers who have chosen to breastfeed truly dependent on the support network around them - or are there really an increasing number of women whose milk doesn't come in - and why could that be the case?

This is NOT a thread for the wrongs and rights of breastfeeding vs formula it is more a question of how things have got to this stage.

Anyone?

an entire generation of women or more in some families have grown up without ever breastfeeding past maybe the initial few weeks.

the community knowledge and acceptance of it has died out.

It is possibly akin to reviving a dead language into an entire country?

I do think you are right Kiskidee,

english stiff-upper-lippedness to the extreme i think

I agree that I think that the ground that was lost since the introduction of formula, particularly when in the first couple of decades it was hailed as the best way to feed, meant that many mothers today have mothers and grandmothers who didn't breast feed.
There used to be a likelihood, with larger families and families not being geographically dispersed, that new mothers would have seen their mothers, aunts and neighbours breastfeeding and it was normalised. Whereas today that is not necessarily the case.
My mother was breastfed, it was the norm in her family. I breastfed.
My mother in law was breastfed but formula fed because she could afford to, because obviously formula cost more. She found my breastfeeding difficult to understand.
My father's mother formula fed (again with more money and not living within a close-knit family group), and her daughter used formula too.
I don't know whether these are the kind of personal observations you don't want? Or do you mean judgemental personal instead?

so was it ever thus then? with our grandparents generation was BF taboo and did ladies not do it?

Huge subject......although virtually every story I read in the press goes on about how low UK bf rates are, actually there is a bit more to it than that. Rates in Ireland are even lower, as is the case in the US and Canada, rates in Sweden and Norway in the 70's were very low but the government there invested in changing that.

It definitely isn't a downward spiral as in fact rates in the UK have been on an upward curve since the 1970's.

As for formula...well the steep decline in breastfeeding that began in the 1920s in Britain and gathered pace after WW2 has got EVERYTHING to do with developing ways of artifically feeding babies that didn't kill them and which were "modern" and "scientific" to boot.

Added to this the fact that as more women had their babies in hospital (from the 1950s on) they were more likely to be separated from their babies, more likely to be told to feed to a schedule and their babies were more likely to be given unnecessary supplemental feeds. (See the WHO website, Evidence for the ten steps for successful breastfeeding)

As for more women's milk "not coming in" that is b*: if evolution takes thousands of years, how is it possible for a species that doesn't feed its babies the way nature intended to lose the ability to feed in a few decades?

If you want to read more, try "The Problem with Breastfeeding" by James Akre, "The Politics of Breastfeeding" by Gabrielle Palmer, old (pre 1990) editions of "The Experience of Breastfeeding" by Sheila Kitzinger or have a nosy around the Baby Milk Action and WHO websites.

rich people had wet nurses didn;t they?

I don't think so. Partly because formula wasn't mass-produced and advertised in the way it was after the war.
The very very rich might have had wet nurses, but not all did.
My grandmother for example, had night nurses who took charge of the children overnight, she didn't breastfeed at all at night, and being post-war, had access to formula milk which she could afford.
I think the vast majoirty of mothers breastfed. I did borrow an interesting book from my mother that was a series of interviews and then analysis of childcare and parenting from the 1950's in somewhere like barrow. If I recall correctly, babies that were fed with formula tended to be those of the middle-classes rather than working classes, purely I assume because they had the finances to pay for expensive formula milk and were also the first generation of mothers to buy into hospital labours and the medicalisation of birth and beyond.

its an early form of chavism then!

hope that hasn't offended - just meaning middle classes all took to it so readily...

like a fashion-type thing

I agree with pooka,

Jingley you would probably find the majority of our grandparents breastfed, it is our parents generation when bottle feeding became popular (the 60's).

I think you need a role model who advocates BF. My mother was my role model, although she did not BF my elder brother and I, she did BF my youngest brother for 11 months, the reason for not BF us that was lack of confidence and her mother told her BF was a waste of time. Had her mother given her the confidence to BF, she would have felt more inclined to do so.

I try my hardest to convince my friends to BF but sadly, the ones who aren't prepared to give it a go, are the ones whose mothers do not think BF is worth the hassle.

Really interesting reading - thanks.

Pooka I guess I didn't want peoples justifications for what they did or didn't do with their children IYKWIM.

Modern inventions have always been seen as the best and most wonderful things haven't they - parenting has followed various trends - am just not sure how you can reverse trends.

I am pleased to read that BF rates are up since the 70's but is that because they were at an all time low in the 70's? Stats seem to vary depending on how the research was funded.

I agree pooka, the books I've read say that wet nursing in the UK had pretty much died out by 1900 and was only ever really used by the very well off.

My theory is that a lot of it was intended to be scientific- after all scientific advances meant the development of vaccines, sanitation, and a reduction in infant and child mortality, which was terrible. Knowledge of breastfeeding was something women, not men of science, had, so it wasn't perceived as worth preserving once there appeared to be alternatives.

Wow - Lizzy had never thought of it as a thing that men had invented to save women from the trial of breastfeeding!

In a sentence, it is the "normalisation" of formula milk and everything that goes with that.

I bf my children, as you all say, I had a positive role model - my mum and then my sister. I must admit though I was tempted by formula to fatten my babies up! I resisted though

I think the mid 70's were the low point when something like 50% of women initiated breastfeeding. The government has done infant feeding surveys every five years since then: there's been some differences n figures because around 1990 they revised their statistical methods.

What I find incredible is that some people argue that formula "is virtually identical these days to breast milk". How uneducated can you be to seriously think that modified cows milk is virtually identical to breast milk?

JingleyJen - you could put it that way, although I tend to be more cynical and point out that no one can sell me my own tits, or that in a perverse way we only value what we have to pay for....

Maybe so.

None of the women from either side of my family bf their children in the 70s & I'm not sure my grandmother did either. Would describe them as broadly middle class.

Nearly all the women in dh's family bf (except MIL), who originally from poor mining families & would have had no option but to bf.

anything to do with the fact that a lot of the people having babies in the UK are single/young/teen mums and don't want to be tied down with bfing? or don't want to have to worry about the substances they're consuming? Just a couple of ideas from the top of my head! lol

Some mums genuinely think it's difficult, or plain awful. When I had my first baby, I overheard a teen mum at the hopital talking to her mother about bfing and saying her friend had tried it with her baby and it was just awful (I think she implied something about having to be more tied to the baby), so she was determined it was a bad idea and bottles it would be. Though I think her mum (prob in 40s) seemed to be talking positively about it.

lizzy makes a very good point about formula being presented as 'scientific' - giving the impression it was the best thing for baby. When my mother had me, in 1969, the midwives came round and gave all new mothers an injection to dry up their milk because only a very few people b/f - it just wasn't seen as normal. And babies were stuck in the nursery and brought out at regular intervals so even if you wanted to b/f it wasn't going to go very well. All that talk about milk drying up - hardly surprising when the women were only allowed to see their babies occasionally!