Breastfeeding and attachment parenting - your thoughts

[awfulpersonme]

I've not posted on this board before but have lurked a lot.

I'm interested to see what you think about two things I have thought about a lot in recent weeks - breastfeeding and attachment parenting.

I breastfeed my 5 month old and as such was on a few Facebook groups for support. On these groups I have seen comments stating that women who ff should not have children, that formula should only be available on prescription for babies who need it medically, and asking for tips on how to persuade their female friends and relatives to breastfeed their babies. These groups are largely AP based.

So:

1. Is pressurising women to breastfeed essentially anti feminist? Isn't it just another way of telling us what we should and shouldn't do with our bodies, another way of making female bodies public property?

2. aren't a lot of the attachment parenting principles essentially quite anti-woman? Every AP group I've seen seems to place a mother's need for outside stimulation, sleep, and good mental health as far, far below the needs of her children (at all ages, not just newborns and young babies). The idea that you must be around your baby 24/7 just seems to me to be another way of keeping women firmly "in their place".

What do you all think??

The WHO provide instructions on making up formula for use in advance. You follow the regular way of making it up. Flash cool to under 5 degree and store at that temp then take out in a chilled bag. I can't link as it goes straight to a PDF but if you search WHO guidelines for bottle feeding it should come up

BFing is not Attachment Parenting.

If that was the case, half the country would be Sears acolytes.

Attachment Parenting is extended breastfeeding until the child chooses to stop. It's having the child with you night and day. It may mean emotional attachment but it could just as easily mean physical attachment.

According to the AP manuals, that's how you make an emotionally balanced and resilient child.

Where is the line that breastfeeding support is feminist and that breastfeeding is an act of feminism and when does it stop being that?

Sorry but is it really that complicated? If a woman says she doesn't want to breastfeed, or wants to mix feed, don't give her a long lecture about the dangers or formula, link her to the WHO reports on extended breastfeeding or point out the NHS guidelines.

If a woman is struggling with bfeeding because of shitty support, offer support.

Not hard at all.

erinaceus the evidence thing is problematic in breastfeeding research. It's something I struggle with in terms of feminism because lots of things don;t have an evidence base but that is because there isn't interest in researching them. We also value data rather than stories and lots of breastfeeding is stories. It's a discussion I've had on MN before and also having again regarding Tongue ties revision at the moment. Key for me as a counselor is trying to be reflective about my own bias.

For example i knew I should read the thread but I felt so upset that something I hold dear as an act of feminism might be thought anti feminist.

Nobody has ever pressurised me into breastfeeding or AP.

However breastfeeding and AP were/are right for my children and for me too.

AllMy

Based on:

• 4 separate Facebook groups
• 3 members of my NCT group
• my local postnatal groups AP fringe
• countless AP mums that I know in person.

Ffs no one has said breastfeeding itself is anti feminist that would be ridiculous

It is pressurising women into breastfeeding that is anti feminist

Interesting thread. I had 4 children (no twins) within 8 years and breastfed them all up to around 7 months. The whole "breast is best" ideology was definitely prevalent in all the ante and post natal care I received, though the main benefit propounded was more about the antibodies in breastmilk that are not replicated in formula. Not so much about attachment.

I was never one for following parenting guides so I breastfed on demand, hourly if necessary in the early months, and never really tried to impose a rigid sleep-routine or let any if our babies "cry it out." There are definitely pros and cons with this approach.

As a breastfeeding mum you are instsntky and necessarily cast into the role of "default carer." As soon as the baby cried, DH's reflex reaction would be to bring him / her to me. People used to always be telling me, "Tell him (DH) to get up and help you on the night", etc. but as I never really could manage to express milk, what would have been the point of him also existing on a broken sleep pattern? It also meant that I became accustomed to not being able to go out without the baby for more than a couple of hours at a time - it was a feeling of being perpetually rushed or like being on a piece of elastic pulling me back to the house. This feeling has never fully disappeared for me somehow. Even when I was out with the baby I was always anticipating the next feed and where I would be able to do this. Basically, as a breastfeeding mum, the health and survival of the baby is down to you and your milk alone and there is not a lot the DH or anyone else can do about this.

I do sometimes wonder if mine DH's parenting roles would have developed along more equal lines if I had bottle-fed. As it is, I've not returned to work since having DC (eldest is now 13). The mindset of default carer has stuck, for DH as well as for me.

I could never be bothered with parenting books, etc. I just did what came most naturally to me at the time. I think the most important feminist aspect of feeding babies is choice. If I recall rightly (it's been many years since I read about Bowlby and attachment theory), the central concept to this is the "good enough parent" - ie. one that is adequately responsive and consistent towards the infant. There is no reason whstsoever why a bottle-fed baby should be any less attached to the mother, as long as the caregiving is consistent. There really is no right and wrong here. I was bottle fed myself because that was the trend at that time.

it is hard because it's not one act is it? It's a whole society. It's medical conferences being spnosered by formula, and breasts being used to sell things, it's GPs being given virtually no training. I'm not sure about UK B Mids but in australia they do not do a unit on breastfeeding. They can get to practicing midwifery and not know when lactogenesis 3 is likely to occur. It's that formula and breastfeeding are talked about as an equal choice but it's much more complex than that.

It's women leaving hospital on day three having had a midwife hold thier boobs for every feed and not knowing how to do it themselves.

It's pumps and bottles being listed as essential kit for breastfeeding.

So not it's not simple it's complex

*ICJUMP I was told that you can only carry around premade milk for two hours. I tend to be out for longer than that. I ended yo carrying round a flask of boiling water to either add to powder and then cool frantically whilst my baby screamed or I had to use the boiling water to warm my overpriced bottle of ready milk - again whilst the baby screamed. Usually I managed to pour the boiling water over myself as well.

The instructions for making up feeds in advance were not as far as I can remember on the side of the box, I assume to encourage me to buy the little bottles of ready made forumula.

Ok. Of the countless AP mums I know, I don't know anyone who thinks that women should be forced to breastfeed, or that formula is evil and will harm babies even if made up correctly. Some of them only breastfed for a few weeks, others for over a year.

I'm only on one BF facebook group, and I don't see anything other than support there for both stopping and continuing but due to it's self selection, I don't think that's really relevant (sorry, that's hard to explain without giving out the name of the group).

I've seen people on MN say that CIO is cruel but I don't know if that's specifically an AP thing. Can self-selecting online communities ever be representative of a larger group? What about the AP parents who don't use facebook.

So by my anecdotes, it's even less than a small minority. But I realise that my own experiences don't give an overall picture. So between my not even a minority, and your most of them, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Which still comes down to, some people are just fucking rude.

When I found AP, I was just looking for an acknowledgement that my choice to BF for more than a few weeks was as worthy a choice as to FF from birth. Because anecdotally, I find people who have FF to be much more judgemental of BF than the other way round. But I don't think that all FFers think that women BF to get sexual kicks.

"The instructions for making up feeds in advance were not as far as I can remember on the side of the box, I assume to encourage me to buy the little bottles of ready made forumula."

It's all about the profit.

ICJump

Yes.

Who is the "we" in "we value data rather than stories"?

Fast moving thread. Apologies Lass for not reading your post properly. I was clouded by my own experience - I was told (unprompted) how to introduce formula at first HV visit, how to mix feed attending first bf support group, and knew numerous ff parents. The idea of not knowing how to introduce formula just by picking it up from exposure is totally alien to me. Sorry about that, it sounds like a very difficult time.

I think talk about pressurising women to breastfeed is a bit misleading. We live in a society where ff is the norm, there are regular 'debates' on radio, TV (loose women recently), in the tabloids about whether women should be allowed to breastfeed in public, the idea of breastfeeding in front of shock men is seen as being very hippy or some kind of statement.

In such an environment I felt pressured to formula feed. I found the nudging towards breastfeeding from the NHS to be fairly gentle, but then I live somewhere with lots of young families / babies being born so midwives don't have time to get hung up on individual choices. Once I was under HV care I felt pressured to formula feed again.

Obviously other women have different experiences. But what I find frustrating is that the focus is always on women being forced to breastfeed. How often do people say 'is a women being pressured to formula feed anti-feminist' ? And when the scope of the discussion is widened people say oh but I'm specifically looking at mothers who want to formula feed being pressured to breastfeed which seems like such a narrow pool of women? I'm not denying it happens but why are we talking about it like its a common danger but yet excluding discussion of why women who want to breastfeed and start breastfeeding switch to formula which I thought was the more common situation?

Don't get me wrong either are shit.

Philosphy the food hygiene issues with formula do make it's use outside the home difficult. Pre made is a good safe option but I know that this is expensive. The scalding water issue is tricky too. These are certainty things that should be discussed openly with parents considering using formula

I mean as a society we tend to value data. This can be useful but it's problematic in terms of understanding how we know things to be true. So if we only know them to be true because of data we see stories as less relevant. This I think has come about because science has alwasy been very male dominated and we haven't explored other types of knowledge as being important.

For example I guess we can measure attachment to breast in inches and position but actually what matter is how it feels.

So talking about positon and attachment in general we say things like tummy to tummy nose to nipple but if we could get to a point where women trusted thier bodies and they saw lots of breastfeeding all the time the advice would more likely be, how does that feel?, can you hold the baby comfortably like that, are you feelign comfortable.

Hmmm, I'm not sure speaking from a feminist pov, we do value data. For example, the incidence of false accusations is the same as or lower for other kinds of crime and yet false accusations dominate most discussions of rape ime. Or more than 90% of crimes of sexual violence are committed by men but you start talking about supporting female survivors and it's 'what about the men'. From a feminist pov, as a society, people appeal to data only when it suits them. When it doesn't, they ignore it. I'm not sure descriptions of breast feeding etc are evidence of 'we value data' rather than stories.

I'm making a bit of a hash of it I guess.

So for example one thing we don;t have much evidence of in terms of data and studies is food intolerance being pass through breast milk but anecdotally we hear this a lot. So the evidence suggest that food shouldn't impact on breastfeeding but mothers are saying it does. The feminist in me says well how are mothers who have these experiences going to prove it the validity of them? why are the they forced to prove their experiences are true?

Perhaps you see one or the other depending on where you live. Where I live in London nearly everyone I know breastfed for some period of time. Ff is not the norm here.

Regarding discussing the risks of mix feeding.

I feel that couching advice in terms of 'here are the risks of mix feeding' would have made me very annoyed indeed. A woman who is mix feeding needs advice on things like: pre prepping formula, how to catch possible engorgement before it progresses to plugged ducts and mastitis etc. They do not need to be talked to about risks that are tiny in the western world because that has the air of hectoring about it that is clearly annoying many on this thread.

BF support and indeed feeding support should be about supporting the woman in the choice they have made, NOT pressing them to BF or making them feel guilty for ff (please note I'm not saying you do this ICJump, I'm into the generic 'you' here.)

The problem we have is back to these 'shoulds.' Women have bodily autonomy, they can choose what feeding, sleeping, weaning methods suit them - we need to be prociding support for the decisions women make NOT trying to get them to change their minds.
Evidence based medicine is a huge leap forward. Public health guidelines must be based on that. Individually tailored support needs to take into account the individual mum and baby. What's best for the population level isn't always best at the individual level.

There is some evidence about proteins from diet passing into breast milk- I have to say I was surprised at this so read up on it a bit at the time. It does happen and you can see the evolutionary benefit - exposure to small amounts of potentially allergenic protein can help reduce allergic responses later.
It's generally accepted by the medical community that maternal good intake can affect a baby with intolerances.

There's no lab test for it though as the IgE response isn't fully developed in infants and even a positive skin test doesn't always correlate to clinical allergy. Thus the only method that really works is an elimination test,

Feminism for me is about a choice. If you choose to breastfeed for a prolonged period, co-sleep etc, it is ultimately your own choice. How is that being enslaved, as someone mentioned above? Nobody enslaved me.
Nobody pressured me to b/f, if anything, quite the opposite.
Both times when I had my babies, the hospital personnel didn't have time or desire to help me with the breastfeeding and forced me to use the formula.
When my younger one was born at JR Hospital in Oxford and I didn't have much milk to start with, the nurses offered me a choice of two types of formula. When I asked if there was any breast milk available from the breastmilk fund, one of them brought a block of frozen milk in a plastic bag to me and almost threw it on the side table with an empty jug. I asked her if they had facilities to defrost it, she just said I should do it using the hot water from the tap. So, clutching my belly (I just had a c-section) and pushing the baby cot on wheels, I had to go to the toilet to try to defrost the milk in the very "sanitary" conditions (there was a tap in the room, but the water was slightly tepid and not hot enough to defrost). And of course my baby was supposed to drink the icy cold milk. The pediatrician threatened not to sign my release papers until I started giving my son the formula top-ups. Nobody asked me even once if I need any help with the breastfeeding.
I wonder where is all the breastfeeding support when you need it?

Returning to your original question; you can be a feminist and share AP ideas.

Hubbles I would be unlikely to counsel a women by saying here are the risks.
Dpeneding on the conversation I might use terms like have you thought about managing your supply as you switch over? Have you talked to anyone about how to manage formula feeding?

I might even depending on how things are going in the conversation ask her if she has considered donor milk is an option for her.

My doctor tried to force me into formula feeding by telling my husband that by choosing to breastfeed I was putting my personal preferences above the health of my baby and that he needed to "act like a man" and intervene.

I wish that I had also been told about the risks of mixed feeding in terms of threatening long term breastfeeding.

My doctor tried to force me into formula feeding by telling my husband that by choosing to breastfeed I was putting my personal preferences above the health of my baby and that he needed to "act like a man" and intervene.

I wish that I had also been told about the risks of mixed feeding in terms of threatening long term breastfeeding.