why do people bottle feed?

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first of all, i dont want this to become a slanging match. i am honestly curious about the reasons.
im asking about those women who do not even try breastfeeding. the ones who think that it is an equal choice between breast and formula. i dont want to judge anyone, i just want to know how these women can justify denying their babies species specific milk.
my eldest was mainly bottlefed, my younger two were exclusively breastfed till they were weaned. and moved to formula around the eight month mark.

LOL!!
I'm worried now that I have incurred the eternal wrath of tiktok and mears....

LOL!!
I'm worried now that I have incurred the eternal wrath of tiktok and mears....

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Prunegirl, soooooo agree with the bit about finding help when you are so low and vulnerable.
I remember blindly reading,phoning,driving around looking for groups while sobbing my heart out, and i come from a place where provision is GOOD!!

You need to stand still while we pelt you with cartons of readymade milk!!!

'blindly reading'??? Errr perhaps not but you get my drift.
FS, haven't I suffered enough??? (whiney moany emoticon)

I'm completely with you on more support. As much as I want the balanced leaflets, I would quite happily say sod all the leaflets and just give real human support to mothers when they actually have the bundles they are trying to feed.

Maybe it was the blind reading that stopped you getting help

God I'm thick...(today, she add hastily!)

maybe we should start a system where by real mums actually go into to hospital and help properly with the new mums and babes.

Oh...we do...that would be the NCT. Sadly tho, I have never actually met a breastfeeding counciller (SP?), because no one told me about them .

Someone somewhere needs to address this, before more mums get let down. Mind you, the huge lack of midwives needs addressing too, but that is a whole new arguement again!!

Just noticed beansmum's (rhetorical?) question about people researching stuff for themselves. Trouble is, bm, some people have NO IDEA about accessing information (a poss. definition of being educated??) so it needs to be made available to them.

I am the sort of middle class nerd who researches decisions like this very carefully.(God you shouls see my collection of pregnancy&birth books-you'd die of boredom I swear!!) Info of this sort for me personally merely confirms what I already know (am glad to have it confirmed though!)

When I started work the thing that amazed me most was the fact that hardly any of the people I gave information to actually read it. Was a very sobering lesson in fact.

Why don't people read the information??? I know I tend to read it and then do what I want anyway - but I still read everything in sight.

sorry sponge if u were offended by term silly wasnt meant to. i meant it is silly that the system allows women who want to BF give up, not because of what they want but because they have no support in exploring if it can infact work for them. Fair do's if they have the support and still want to change their minds

psychomum, the NCT and other volunteers do good jobs, but they can never be expected to meet the needs of all mothers in hospital. You need to train people to do this - goodwill is not enough, as they will be seeing people at a vulnerable time, many of whom may have big problems and 'issues'.

In total, there are maybe 600 trained breastfeeding counsellors in the UK (several hundred more peer supporters who train at a very basic level to offer friendly support, rather than 'how to breastfeed' skills - they can and do go into some hospitals to say hello and publicise their groups, but it's not fair to expect them to do more than this).

Many of these 600 trained people are workers; all are mothers. How much time can we ask them to give up - freely, unpaid - to visit mothers in hospital? One hour a week? Two hours a week? OK, let's say 90 minutes a week.....that is 900 hours a week. In total. Over the whole of the UK. But there are 8,000 mothers who begin bf in the UK every week. See how that just isn't realistic.

I'm being logical again

That's not even to begin to address the issue that there are swathes of the country where there are very few counsellors to begin with.

Relying on volunteer mothers is never going to work. But train the existing midwives properly, and we might get somewhere.

See...midwives thread needed!!!

I do see your point ticktock on the NCT, and from what I have heard they do a fantastic job, I'm just sad that I never got offered support from them myself, cos I could have done with it. I did cope, but that was more by sheer bloody mindedness than anything else.

You really got to stop being so nice and logical....(psyhcomum hangs head in shame, as she normally goes off on a tangent, then regrets things later!!)

I don't think we can expect unpaid volunteers to take this on.
But we all get visited by a community midwife - the easiest first step would seem to be to get them to support and encourage women better rather than pushing them towards a tin of formula as fast as possible.
Could it be eagerness to discharge new mothers to HV care? After all if you take on the challenge of getting someone who's having problems to breastfeed successfully then you're probably signing up for a longer haul than teaching her to mix powder with water accordig to the instructions on the packet.

so agree that all midwives should know their stuff after all they have contact with women for 10-14 days im sure many problems arise in this period so early support could make all the difference.

altho when i had baby in October i only saw the midwife once after ds was born as they were short staffed and she only could spare about 5 mins as she had about another 30 mums to see!

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Here's a question.......and I am not meaning it to start an arguement, but it does come from a genuine query from lots of friends:-

Should midwives be only women who have given birth??

Not sure on this myself. I have had, with 2 of my kiddies, a wonderful midwife who was in her 50's, single, and childless.
But then again, I felt much more empathy from the midwives delivering my other 3 as they had given birth themselves.
I have a friend who refused care from a midwife because she was childless!!!

So what does anyone else think????

If I needed a heart operation I wouldnt care whether the docter had had one himself.

maybe i should have started a new thread for that one....not sure how to tho, can anyone help me...still quite new here, and have only jumped in on threads started.

good answer hercules

I was the same prunegirl. I thought I was quite well informed too. It was all very well larking about practicing breast feeding in ante-natal classes with a purple-haired raggy doll - but they really didn't prepare us for how hard it was going to be. I still don't really know if bf didn't happen for me, if my milk was late, if I wasn't doing it right or if everything was how it should be and I just couldn't cope with it.