Are fathers jealous of their babies when breastfeeding?

[Duncan]

I have just received a letter from the head of the local maternity services with this paragraph in it. Does anyone have an experience of a jealous husband/partner opposing breastfeeding? I would really like to know what mothers feel about this.

“Many Fathers today misinterpret the absorption a mother must show in her new infant in order to meet its entire nutritional need as a desertion from the previous exclusive relationship they enjoyed. This may seem cliched but as a community midwife I often saw women withdraw from breastfeeding because of implicit jealousy of the father at this very special dependence. Then there is the other cliched image of the father and his ownership of the maternal feeding equipment, which is also still sadly a reality in some sections of the community.”

Suew - what a sad story but sounds like you have learned from it. Also you did breastfeed for 3 months which is longer than many so you should feel glad that you pursued your instincts.

To me it sounds like breastfeeding jealousy. Men like to provide nurishment because it is all tied in with the giving the child sustenance. Breastfeeding appears to exclude them from that aspect and it is such an important part of a baby's life in the first few months. It is a shame but is all to common for men and women to have not seen anyone breastfeeding. It just seems to have slipped out of our culture. There is also the more deep seated problem discussed in other boards about men's role with children. That's probably why he said he would wave you goodbye because he would have felt powerless to do anything about it. Women largely have control of custody.

Anyway I digress. The dislike of your own milk is upsetting but again natural. It is down to our society's views about substances secreted from the body. Generally things that come out are waste substances and some people (men or women) feel a bit odd about dealing with human milk. I wouldn't take it personally. It is all part of the lack of exposure most people have to breastfeeding.

All you can do is to try to educate others with your experiences and try again next time. You could point out the obvious of course that 100 years ago there was no formula therefore for thousands of years people didn't have any hang ups about it - it was just as natural as going to the toilet!

Try printing out some pages from the internet which give information about breastfeeding for him to read which points out that is more than just providing nutrition. 101 Reasons to breastfeed your child is a good one - promom.org/101/index.html

Sorry Duncan I am taking away your topic. My husband has been extremely supportive. He did show a little initial jealousy in the first few days but that wasn't specifically related to breastfeeding. He had 3 kids previous who were all bottle fed and he was keen for me to breastfeed our son.

Sorry I misinterpreted your message Suew. I too am still breastfeeding at nearly 20 months.

Duncan, my husband has always been very supportive and proud of me breastfeeding, even though it does inconvenience him- I work in the evenings and she is very attatched to me, he sometimes has to put up with her being grumpy - although he is free to give her a bottle (shes 9months old) he usually cuddles her till I get home. He thinks its funny when she starts making animal noises when she sees me come through the door! Having said that he would have been just as happy if i had bottlefed. His take on it is that there are many things he does for the kids that I can't or don't.He did get a little jealous generally with our first child but now realises that its only a short time that they are babies. He has never shown any jealously on the sexual side of things, even though this is seriously lacking while I am feeding! I should just go and give him a big snog for being so cool shouldn't I!!!!!!!!!!

Suew, Did your husband receive any information about breastfeeding before the birth? You say that he would be easier about it second time - might that be because he is more knowledgeable now?

I ask the questions in this way, because breastfeeding campaigns are beginning to target fathers more now, on the basis that the better men are informed, the more supportive they are. By implication I suppose, these campaigns are saying that the reason fathers might be unsupportive is that they have not been given the necessary knowledge by the professionals.

Emmy, I recognise the experience of your husband. I was pretty impatient to feed both our daughters, but second time round I was more relaxed about it, knowing that the time soon comes for solids and when it comes, life gets considerably more messy! (I fed our second daughter for the first time last week!)

As I have posted previously, I had a difficult start with breastfeeding. Without my husband's support and help with expressing and so on, I think I probably would have given up at about 3 weeks as I was so exhausted by the whole thing. In the end, I went on to breastfeed our son for 14 months.

Suew, that's excellent. I misinterpreted your message too. I had a difficult start as well and was not going to give in to pressure from my mother, who helpfully described her experience of feeding me as being gnawed like a little animal. My husband was very supportive in all sorts of ways (feeding me pasta over our son's head in the early days etc) but was also quite envious of the intimacy of the feeding relationship - and like Bron's, found it hard to accept that my breasts were not just his anymore (they're mine, actually, boys). We have an interesting hangover from those days - my husband happily feeds our son now etc but the onus is still on me to think what to give him when he is not eating what we have.
Now, Suew - how did you wean her? Mine popped his hand down my shirt in front of the MIL yesterday and said, Boozies eat now mummy. We're down to one feed a day, at bedtime, and have been for six months. I'd like him weaned by two I think!

At our NCT group they ran a breast-feeding class before we all gave birth. All the husbands from my group came and they all had to hold a wierd doll with a heavy lentil head to their chest as though they were breast-feeding. I have to say it was one of the funnier things I saw during my pregnancy.
I don't know whether it was the lentil doll experience or my own desperate struggles but my husband (a rugby playing non-right-on kind of bloke) was very supportive and never once displayed any kind of jealous behaviour. He used to crack some jokes about turning the shed into a dairy (I expressed for 3 months) but they were kind jokes not snidy ones. To be honest, I think he felt so sorry for me (crappy birth, hopeless breastfeeding, screaming colic for 4 hours every night for 10 weeks) that there was unlikely to be much jealousy anyway. Had I been the image of radiant motherhood with a calm, content, suckling baby, perhaps it would have been different.

Suew, Sounds like you had quite a rough time through pregnancy and birth, with disagreements about such fundamentals. You write remarkably calmly about it - sounds like you have coped with it incredibly well!

I think one of the problems about pregnancy and birth is that it is still very much framed as a woman's thing, even though it is actually about the whole family, parents and older children if there are any. The way ante-natal services are organised, the reading material (all very "feminine"), the way parenting is talked about in public, the expectations of our friends and family, etc. etc. - all suggest the same thing. There is also a lot of negative stuff about fathers 'out there' - like in today's papers about the 17% of fathers who never get up to stop a crying newborn baby at night (the story was not that 83% of fathers do get up or that in some families - like mine! - the father sleeps through by mutual agreement as long as the only solution to the crying is breastfeeding, so that at least one parent is awake during the day!) All these perceptions are also somehow in our minds and difficult to budge. It is all so pervasive that it becomes very difficult for many men to overcome the impression that to get involved almost means becoming a woman, which is not what most of us want at all! I remember very clearly thinking and thinking "what is my role in all of this?" If someone could have told me in a convincing way, I would have been more confident about everything. As it was, I remember distinctly withdrawing from the scene whenever a health professional appeared. I am embarrassed to think how shy I was at the time, but the self-doubt was really strong - it was "safer" just to walk out. Absolutely no-one had anything convincing to say to me about what a father should do and it took me ages to work it out for myself.

No, that doesn't sound awful Suew, it sounds like an emotion I can imagine myself feeling in a few months' time. I feel almost ready to give up and that is a recent thing. It's reassuring to hear that it can take just a couple of nights for the penny to drop.
I was browsing an American parenting site btw and a paediatrician who is very pro extended breastfeeding made a nice comment: that at her well child clinics, she could always tell the ones who had been breastfed beyond a year: they had a certain sparkle in their eyes and were often not there because of any ailment.
I find the whole issue of extended feeding a tricky one to deal with outside our own family circle - I know there are doughty supporters on this site such as you, Eulalia and others, and I am proud of how well our son is doing emotionally and physically, but I am very careful about letting anyone know about our bedtime feeds. Both families and almost all our friends think we gave up months ago and I haven't disabused them. Sad eh.

Duncan, you should have come to our NCT breastfeeding class & got stuck in with the lentil doll!!! In all seriousness, I thought our NCT group was very encouraging of the man's role in the whole thing, as was my local hospital ante-natal group. In every class I attended there was always an emphasis put on the things the partner could do pre, during and post birth. So maybe things are changing more than you think.

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