Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

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Talk about every stage of pregnancy, from early symptoms to preparing for birth.

Honest advice please

53 replies

CMAYF11 · 16/11/2020 17:06

Hello. I'm really struggling to get a non bias view of bottle feeding vs breast feeding.
This isn't about the rights and wrongs of either. What I'm interested in is speaking to a mum who has breastfed a child and maybe bottle fed another.

Was the experience/relationship different with the baby?
Now they are older are there any noticeable health differences?

Happy for ppl to message me privately if they don't what an open discussion.

I'm the sort of person that needs to see both sides of the perspective before making a decision and I'm struggling to find this anywhere.

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
kmammamalto · 17/11/2020 10:39

Eeek I should say my daughter is also very healthy and smart so no evidence of anything making any difference! X

Gumbo · 17/11/2020 10:49

I breastfed exclusively initially, but as my DC wanted feeding every 2 hours like clockwork, night and day, the exhaustion became overwhelming, and at 12 days old we introduced a 10pm bottle of formula that DH gave which allowed me a full 3 hours of unbroken sleep which was truly amazing and made a massive difference in my life.

At 6 weeks I introduced another bottle, then dropped at least one feed a week until he was on formula only (boring medical reason why - I knew I wasn't able to continue BF after 3 months). I have absolutely no regrets about not BF for longer; DC is now a healthy 15 year old Smile

My advice is do whatever is right for you - your baby will be fine either way!

BertieBotts · 17/11/2020 10:49

You won't be able to notice health differences on an individual level, as there is so much overlap. It only really makes a difference on a population level. Other factors also feed so much into health issues that they will usually obscure any individual effect from BF/FF.

I will say that an unexpected perk of BF is that any time DS2 gets a cold, I get exposed to it before I get ill and start making antibodies. So DH will come down with the cold fully and I'll get a bit of a sore throat and then feel better a couple of days later.

There is a school of thought that BF might have effect on future obesity because with bottle feeding there is a natural tendency to want to make the baby finish the bottle, either out of a sense of avoiding waste, impatience to finish a feed, anxiety about the baby having enough milk, or in the hope that they will go longer to the next feed, etc. This can override natural cues of hunger/satiety and feed into attitudes like "Finish your plate". Whereas with breastfeeding, first of all you have no idea how many ml they have had because you can't measure it, secondly they have to actively suck to get milk out, gravity and the swallow reflex isn't doing the work for them.

You can avoid this by doing paced feeding which is where you hold the baby almost upright in a sitting position so that you can hold the bottle as close to horizontal as possible. (Long/thin bottles work better for this than wide neck ones). Let them take breaks when they want to. Don't encourage them to take more if they aren't interested. Aim for there to be milk in the bottle at the end of the feed, so that you know they've finished because they want to finish, and not because you've gone oh there's only 20ml left, come on, you can finish that. This can be a bit impractical with bottle feeding, because once their saliva has touched the milk you have 1 hour to use it and then must discard due to bacteria growth concerns. Using this feeding method, feeds can easily take over an hour and unless you have a handy second person there to make up a new bottle when the first hour is up babies often don't want to be interrupted or wait while you make the second bottle.

OTOH you could just bottlefeed in the normal way, not worry overly about whether you're causing these kinds of habits and just concentrate on healthy food habits/thought patterns once you start solids.

TBH, I would not overthink it. Give it a go, add in a bottle of formula as and when you feel like it, if you decide to stop BF then fine. I wouldn't worry about it at all.

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