Were you formula fed as a baby?

[Janni]

Do you believe you would be healthier or more intelligent had you been breastfed?

Do you believe you were disadvantaged in any other way by being formula fed?

I was not breastfed.

I breastfed my own children for 20 months.

I realise though that I do not feel in any way disadvantaged for not having been breastfed myself.

I just wondered how others felt.

Believe me Sabire, when you bring a 5 days old baby to A&E with a high temperature, you do wish to have been tested for GBS.

angel - who makes you feel 'bad' and 'guilty'? You don't feel bad, or at least it doesn't sound as if you do, and you don't feel guilty, either, from what I can tell You sound confident and relieved and happy with your feeding....so why resent something that as far as I can tell, is not happening??

Sabire - clarification: what I mean is, how do you know 'the vast majority' of ff babies are healthy? How do you define health? And where in the world are you talking about? That's what I mean about 'too sweeping'. I think common sense tells us that the 'vast majority' of people are affected by how they were fed as infants ....

I suppose so franca. But that only means that we think it is the ideal feeding and it is worth trying. Parenting is more than feeding during the first 6 months. If I really cared (which I don't) I would be more "worried" about a mum who moves from breast to baby food pots, than a mum who moves from ff to balanced home-cooked food.
If we acted in consequence after all the studies on children and health we would all be living in a rural environment, with no mobile phones, no wifis and eating what we grow in allotments. The reality is that not everybody can sell their house and move to the montes of Toledo and live off the land. And yet we are not giving our children the best because we live in a polluted environment, we drive them to school, we use mobile phones, wifis, etc. Maybe is it because one thing is the ideal and another thing is what realistically people can do in their own circumstances?

Angel1976, no one is trying to make anyone feel guilty. I'll quote my previous post again:

"I hate this guilt thing that's brought up, and it's often brought up as a reason to hide the truth about the risks of formula.

"Why feel guilty when you didn't have the right support to breastfeed, or you didn't know the truth about the risks of formula at the time, or you were in a culture that did not value breastfeeding, or made public breastfeeding unfeasable for you, or you were unable to breastfeed full stop, or you were in a society that does not value human milk for human babies and therefore does not set up a milk bank service for mothers / babies who can't breastfeed, like it has a blood bank service?

"I wouldn't feel guilty (and don't, about the first two days when I couldn't get support to bf / express and ds had formula) but I would (and do) feel angry. I'd like to think though, that I'd direct this anger at the formula industry rather than those who were simply giving out the facts."

I repeat, no one is trying to make anyone feel guilty. But if the facts - which can be hard to hear - aren't known, then nothing is ever going to change.

Formula companies will still advertise to HCPs who will therefore still see a bottle (rather than good bf support) as the first solution for any bf problem.

Mums will turn to a bottle not knowing the risks and seeing the nice fluffy polar bear pictures on the front of the tin and gradually their supply will run out the more "top ups" they give.

Then they will eventually learn from a site like this that they did not need to give formula, and in fact formula has health risks.

And they won't want to believe it because their baby is fine and it makes them feel guilty even though they have no need to feel guilty, it wasn't their fault.

And the cycle starts again. No guilt intended here - but by not telling the truth things won't change.

OK I will rephrase the 'not completely clear'. To there is no single factor. I didn't mean that it wasn't clear that breastfeeding had an effect, I meant the outcome to a child isn't clear because there are so many factors.

Sorry if that was too obvious to state.

"No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." --Eleanor Roosevelt

Love that quote.

I was ff (bf for first couple of weeks only). Reasonably intelligent (school scholarships, top A levels, good degree from a good university, 2 postgrad degrees etc). No childhood diseases. Mild contact eczema developed in late '20s.

Brother was bf. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, with next to no academic qualifications. Has had bad eczema and asthma all his life.

Tried and failed to bf both my dcs (12 weeks with ds1, 3 days with ds2).

Well there aren't an infinite number of factors. It's the job of science to find patterns in apparent chaos. Just cos it confounds us here at MN doesn't mean it's unknowable to science.

This is an interesting thread - it's not something I've seen discussed before, particularly comparing stories of what maternity wards were like in the 60s and 70s.

I was bf for a few months, mum gave up due to soreness, me biting apparently (sorry, mum). However, I firmly believe I would have better teeth and less of an overbite had I not been obsessed with the bottle well into early childhood - I stopped having a bottle at 5 years old I have mild IBS symptoms, but am otherwise slim and healthy. I use MN, so I'm obviously intelligent.

My oldest brother was bf for 8months and my mother stopped when she discovered she was pg with my middle brother. bf whilst pg was unheard of. 1st brother was on a timed, 4 hourly feeding schedule, whilst my mother was in hosp. for 10 days, so well done my mum for actually managing to establish bf despite. She says the staff would bring babies to the mums at the appointed time, and my brother would always be asleep for most of feeding time. I also remember her commments about a lot of the mums asking for injections to dry up their milk so they could ff and have a fag, as the hospital did not allow bf mothers to smoke.

My middle brother was bf for only a couple of weeks and then ff - my mum said her milk dried up. She recently told me that when she was on the maternity ward with my 2nd brother, the babies were given to their mums all day and taken away all night, which goes some way to explain the low milk supply. This brother has the most weight/appetite issues out of all of us, and not academically minded at all. That's my anecdotal evidence.

There's plenty of evidence to show that bf benefits mums too, for instance, one very extensive study shows that bf for a total of 2 years or more may reduce the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis by up to 50%. So, in a similar non-scientific, anecdotal vein, how are our mums? Did not bf impact on their health?

Although it gets confusing when those factors interact.

Anyway sometimes you have no choice. Eg antibiotics- I would really rather not have had iv antibs for the 3 days post ds3's birth, but I didn't really have any choice. I would rather have breastfed him for longer than a few weeks, but didn't have any choice. I was aware that both factors increased his risk of gut problems and therefore quite probably autism (and the other autoimmune things the family has going on) but couldn't actually do much about it.

I was formula fed after the first ten days. Apparently my great grandparents, whom my parents lived with (young and poor!) were very strict, and insisted my elder sister needed mum more than I did, so she wasn't really allowed any time alone with me at all or to hold me/feed me.

Yes, I believe this strongly affected my ability to form a secure attachment - it has affected my whole life in quite a bad way.

It wasn't the formula though, rather the lack of bonding full stop. If she had breastfed it would have changed that I guess, but she didn't feel able to stand up to them.

I have a good IQ and was told I was one of the most intelligent people some of my school teachers ever taught, but gawd the emotional problems!

I do like that quote VLC.

Mind you my sister was Breastfed for 10 months and she had bad eczema - I don't - lucky I guess!

"If I really cared (which I don't) I would be more "worried" about a mum who moves from breast to baby food pots, than a mum who moves from ff to balanced home-cooked food."

Well - so would I if I'd seen recent good quality evidence that linked this with a tripling of hospital admissions for bf children moved weaned on jarred foods.

There is no good quality evidence that children (as a group) weaned on jars have significantly more ill health than babies weaned on home-cooked food. But if there was I'd want to know about it.

"If we acted in consequence after all the studies on children and health we would all be living in a rural environment, with no mobile phones, no wifis and eating what we grow in allotments. The reality is that not everybody can sell their house and move to the montes of Toledo and live off the land."

No true - but the vast majority (well over 90%) of women are able to breastfeed if they're well supported and have recourse to expert help to tackle early breastfeeding problems.

"Maybe is it because one thing is the ideal and another thing is what realistically people can do in their own circumstances?"

Breastfeeding is NOT some ideal, like raising your children on homegrown organic carrots in the Welsh mountains while communicating by smoke signals and fermenting your poo into organic compost for said carrots.

Breastfeeding is the biologically normal way to feed a baby and it's the way the majority of babies around the world are fed, even today, including the vast majority of babies born to women living in the most socially challenging circumstances.

i was ff as a baby, fairly healthy had tonsilitits constanly as a child and hayfever but no major problems.

average intelligence.

never got on that well with my mum.

I was formula fed and my mother smoked and drank and look at me!

Sabire - a pair of breasts is not all that you need to realistically be able to breastfeed. As you say, support is needed. Many BF advocates say that support is very low in general. At the same time, mothers who move to FF are frowned upon because they don't try hard enough. So what is it then? Are mums not trying enough or is there a lack of support? I don't get it.
BF is the ideal type of feeding, when it works for the mother. If it doesn't work for her, it is not. Full stop.

Just to clarify! NO ONE on MN has made me feel guilty! In fact, you have all been so supportive in my decisions to try and try and then later the heart-wrenching decision to stop.

What I meant were the midwives etc. It was very indoctrinated (I felt!) from when I was pregnant during antenatal classes that EVERYONE can bf and EVERYONE should bf. God forbid if you mention FF in those classes!

And when I was in the hospital having had the baby, all the mws weren't particularly helpful. One mw came in in the middle of the night, barked at me to latch and roughly shoved my poor barely day old son onto my nipple!

I was always concerned that having a pituitary tumour would have affected my milk supply/quality but when I tried to talk to any hospital staff about it, they were really dismissive and no one took my concerns seriously. It was only at a baby clinic that I took DS to because I was concerned with his feeding that his TT was diagnosed and later, the bf counsellor was the only person who took my concerns about my health condition into consideration.

Trust me, my decision to use FF wasn't easy. I changed my mind so many times because I didn't want to give up BF and I felt IMMENSE GUILT. But it was making everyone so miserable and it took the cranial osteopath whom I took DS to as a last resort to make me see the lightbulb... He said I had been through a tough 18 months (problems conceiving DS and then complications through the pregnancy...) and I thought 'he is right and I really shouldn't carry on making myself and DS miserable...' Once I made the switch, I haven't looked back but making that decision was tough and I wade through an olympic size pool of guilt before making it!

Has there been any research on babies fed on baby food jars btw? Because maybe the lack of stats about hospital admissions is because nobody has bothered researching this. There was an interesting article the other day in the papers about the levels of arsenic in baby rice btw, which were considered so high they would be illegal in some countries.

And I did not use ideal as "utopian ideal" but as in "best". Things are rarely "ideal" when considered in combination with other factors. And most things in life exist in combination with other factors.

Sweeney, I think you will find that people who say mothers don't try hard enough are not the same as the people saying there is not enough support.

No one should have to 'try hard' to breastfeed.

Breastfeeding is for the lazy, the feckless, the sluttish and the slobbish...and the determined, the organised, the energised.

It's for the laissez-fair, couldn't-give-a-toss, relaxed people, and the control freaks who iron vests and knickers.

It's for people who have literacy problems (and can't read the research). It's for people with PhDs coming out their a*holes (and who may refuse to read it).

It's for people who wear 6 inch heels and for hairy-legged Birkie wearers.

It's not an 'ideal', or it shouldn't be. It's the normal way to feed all babies, whether they are the kids of slobs or super-models. All those kids need breastfeeding as much as each other.

It should be easy, and when it isn't, support and help should be easily available immediately.

Presenting it as on a par with moving to a mobile-phone-free, petrol-free, rural paradise is to perpetuate the notion that it's an impossible dream.

It isn't. At the moment, many women do have to try hard to do it - but very small, low cost changes could alter that forever.

I was formula-fed. My mother smoked during her pregnancies. I have inherited asthma from my father but also had eczema and a lot of chest infections as an infant, no doubt not helped by my mum's smoking. I was given Tetracycline (sp?) antibiotic for the chest infections and this stained my adult teeth. I have veneers. I blame the smoking rather than the formula. I don't blame her as she didn't know it would harm at that time, and was addicted, but I do think that her smoking affected my health.

sulk

We're too polite, Monkey, in case you are really like the back of a bus

well, apart from a dubious taste in trousers, I don't think you turned out so bad MT