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??

TheEagle it is not about Lancet publishing the article, it is about statistics from scientific journals being cherry picked to advance any particular agenda and potentially undermine women making their own choices.

fusion, whilst I agree that breastfeeding in Ireland is a contentious topic, I have fed in plenty of public places and never had a negative comment/negative glance. Perhaps people were talking about me unbeknownst to me, I can't attest to that.

Ireland's low level of breastfeeding is certainly linked to ideas from the past, particularly ideas in relation to the Catholic Church and women's suppression thereunder. However we are also one of the world's largest producers of formula and that is linked in to the way we feed our babies here too.

I realised that the 20000 shouldn't be about the whole population of women but rather about how many who currently die each year from breast cancer.

So WHO says in 2011 508 000 women dies from breast cancer so reducing that by 20000 seams pretty significant. or isn;t it?

I never had any hassle in public in Ireland either. Talk about a generalisation.

That 0.0006% figure is wrong. You don't work out lives saved as a fraction of global population.

The worldwide incidence of deaths from breast cancer is about 500,000 per year. The Lancet article (which is a meta-analysis of 47 studies of bf and breast cancer) calculates that if bfing were universal, 20,000 of these deaths per year from breast cancer wouldn't happen.

Their calculation is based on the final odds ratio of the bf effect, and on a quick back-of-envelope check it looks legit.

So that's 20,000 out of 500,000, which is about 4% of all breast cancer deaths per year that could be prevented by near-universal bfing.

Bear in mind also that the breast cancer figures are for deaths alone, and doesn't include the number of women who survive it. In that sense, near-universal bfing would prevent an even larger proportion of women from contracting breast cancer in the first place.

You can't dismiss 20,000 as statistically insignificant, or not worth basing public health policy on, unless you're also prepared to dismiss the current death toll of 500,000 as being too tiny a proportion of global population to care about. Of course, no one is really dismissing these figures because it would be irresponsible of public health policymakers to do so. A 4% reduction in deaths from a single cause is better than many drug treatments manage.

I totally agree with Hubble

Eagle It does matter what the prevailing attitudes online are. Many mothers don't have support IRL and go online for advice. The attitudes on Facebook boards, MN, blogs and support groups are important to them.

erin I'm totally serious about that book. Maybe it should be more than one page. It should be unbiased information about different parenting approaches with appropriate facts and no anecdotes. Just ways you could do things if you wanted to.

I'm not sure we have the woman power to provde only indervidual support to women who choose to breastfeed. I'm thinking say the 96% of women in Australia that start out breastfeeding and only about 15% get to exclusive feeding at 6 months. To inderviudally support those women is a pretty huge and expensive task if we have no goals in mind because the supoort is only occuring after a need is created rather than trying to remove the need for support.

geekaMaximia thank you for putting that so clearly.

cosmic, sorry I didn't mean to come across as dismissive of online attitudes - those have a huge part to play in affecting women's confidence.

I was just talking about my own personal real life experience of breastfeeding in public. In fact, I've seen 100s of women attest to the fact that they've never had a negative comment as regards BFing in public in Ireland. But because of online attitudes/articles/videos some new mothers feel nervous about it.

If I was going to have a pop at a parenting "style" that was likely to lead to isolation and depression, I woildn't choose a pretty niche one like AP. I'd choose a mainstream rigid timetabled one like Gina Ford........

Bertrand The point I would make it that all parenting 'styles' are anti-feminist and damaging because they set women up with a set of rules to either pass or fail at implementing. Codifying anything makes it easy for people to fall into hostile groups.

I reminds me of that scene in 'Dogma' about the difference between having a good idea and a belief. Lots of parenting advice falls in the good idea catagory but often turned into belief- this is the only way.

cosmic expresses it well. I don't think anyone is 'having a pop', I think it had been an intellegant and nuanced discussion about the intersect between supporting women and potentially undermining women in making choices about how to parent, which particularly comes to the fore in relation to feeding choices. I think the tone of the debate has been quite respectful even while disagreeing with approach.

Cosmiccreepers203 I had a different book in mind. I'll try to bump my thread later.

There is a book that is along the lines that you suggest. I'll look for the name later.

Breast fees g and attachment parenting are just feeding and parenting. Men cannot breast feed, granted, but attachment parenting is not antinfeminist. What is anti feminist is the assumption that women will be doing the attachment parenting and nit men.

"Talk about a generalisation."

Erm... I said I had had comments in public places. That's been my experience. I know many who have had similar experiences. It's not a generalisation, it's a statement of experience.

It annoys me when the general point of a statement gets lost in the specific way it is phrased. Any feminist who thinks there isn't a substantial number of people in Ireland with deeply problematic stances towards women's bodies probably hasn't lived here very long or doesn't interact much with people outside of a very narrow South Dublin/North Wicklow demographic. I don't think that's a particularly controversial position, to be honest.

That's awful that you've had personal comments like that, fusion

As I said above, I've read a thread on an Irish BF support group on FB where 100s of women stated that they never had any negative comments when breastfeeding in public in Ireland. That was everywhere in Ireland.

I'm almost 36 and have lived all my life in Ireland (in urban and rural settings), I'm well aware of women's struggles here.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a long way to go towards normalising BF here.

Out of interest is AP niche? Round here it's the norm, I don't know anyone who is routine based. I'm desperately trying to get DS into some semblance of routine to help my PND and I get met with this whenever I ask about it

Maybe, I think the popularity of AP depends where you live and (this sounds bad), who you mix with. I noticed there were more mothers BF at the NCT baby group in the city centre than at the children's centre near me, for example (though BF does not equal AP, of course). I only know one person who set out to create and routine eg: she fed four-hourly but topped up between feeds if needed.

In general, the advice I received from health professions when I had my first baby last year was very much baby-led: feed on demand whether BF or FF, follow baby's cues for sleep and create a routine from them, that kind of thing. This was all for young babies, and might be different for older ones.

and only about 15% get to exclusive feeding at 6 months

I see this quite a lot and i wonder how relevant it actually is. Most people start to introduce a few solids around 5-6 months; a little dip of a finger into gravy, a tiny bit of mushed up something to taste. So even if you were mainly giving them breast milk and no formula, and haven't even given them proper solids, technically you're not exclusively breastfeeding.

I wonder if a better goal might be something like 'predominant form of nutrition is breast milk at six months' rather than exclusively breastfed? Some babies do need solids earlier than six months - mine did, but I wasn't breastfeeding any less.

geeka I accept your point.

I think non routine based parenting is the norm where I am maybe but with the caveat that Swedish parenting seems rather less dogmatic than full on AP.
Critically, men do take parental leave, parental leave is encouraged to be split equally and there is a much better level of gender equality than the uk. Still not perfect, but not bad. Childcare is cheap (100 quid a month ish for full time per child) and good quality,

I've read this thread with interest, as I know a fair bit about attachment theory and am both interested and often horrified at the ways in which it's traduced in popular understanding, particularly in the context of 'attachment' parenting which - while I'm sure it works well for some families - has no meaningful basis in science.

The lack of real evidence for AP as a method is not necessarily a problem - parents can and should raise their children how they choose. The only time it is a problem is where the proponents of a particular method, such as AP, try to imply that their chosen approach to parenting has some kind of evidential basis. This is noticeably the case in popular discourse around APapproaches to infant care where studies from attachment science are frequently misquoted or selectively quoted, in order to imply alarmist conclusions in support of that approach. As a PP said, where an ideology claims a scientific rationale but does not in fact have one, it invites curiosity about whose agenda that ideology might benefit.

I think the way attachment studies have been appropriated - without real justification - for a highly moralised discourse around childrearing, which is largely deployed by and aimed at mothers, absolutely is relevant to feminism.

The sociology nerds on this thread might be interested in fairly recent book on Parenting Culture Studies, which looks at attachment parenting as part of a larger enquiry into our modern, anxious and expert-driven parenting culture. While it's not an explicitly feminist book it raises a number of very interesting points about the discourse of competing 'parenting styles', the 'experts' that promote them and the ways in which these de-skill parents (mothers in particular) and actively work to undermine parents' ability to support one another, as relatively trivial differences in approach become a social and interpersonal minefield.

In summary then I think whether you consider AP to be exceptionally antifeminist depends a bit on your stance and understanding of what it means to be feminist. But it is part of a wider phenomenon - expert-driven parenting culture - that I would argue really is antifeminist, or anti-parent really, as it invades family life, deskills individual parents and undermines the ability of families to support one another by creating artificial 'parenting style' barriers between them.

But you're conflating your experiences in BFing in public with an underlying patriarchal attitude and saying if you don't agree you're probably from the Pale or a blow in?

Seriously??

I live in Connemara for gods sake! And have whipped my tit out all over. Never a single remark. So I'm sorry you've had bad experiences but please don't presume to talk about the rest of us as being somehow deaf dumb and blind just because our experiences have been more positive.

Expecting Better by Emily Oster.

It is my mistake as it is a book on pregnancy. I have no idea whether it covers parenting. All I know is that someone I know read it and found it helpful.

For help with the synthesis of evidence a useful book for someone who does not have formal training in science is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. I do not agree with everything that Goldacre says but this book might help to untangle the "Does this mean that the Lancet should not have published the study?" question. Goldacre is a clinician.

OTheHugeManatee Interesting. Thank you. There is a forthcoming book on the history and sociology of clinical trials which would make a nice pairing with the book you link to for readers of this thread.

Therapeutic revolutions: pharmaceuticals and social change in the twentieth century.: University of Chicago Press, 2016 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo24313074.html

I believe that the most equal society in the world also has the highest BF rates so it is possible for a shift towards more feminist BF.

This is a touch disingenuous steve. Very equal societies such as Norway have high rates of breastfeeding, yes, but so do very unequal societies.

Who stands to directly financially benefit from AP principles... No-one.

You can't possibly think this is true, though? Anyone who's selling slings, or breastfeeding support services, or nipple cream, or breastpumps, or anything people might need or think they need in order to practice AP principles. To say nothing of the people who make money writing books about it, giving classes, that type of thing. Dr Sears isn't doing too badly, is he? The same is also true of non-AP parenting of course, since people also buy formula, bottles, buggies etc. Indeed, most of us buy some from both lists. But it's very naive to think there aren't people with financial skin in the game when it comes to promoting AP, and of course their advice would need to be seen in that context.

And yes, we do need to interrogate some of the claims about the benefits of breastfeeding and particularly the we could save x number if this many breastfed in whatever developed country is being talked about. There's some terribly poor science, even from reputable organisations. Unicef's most recent offering was disappointing, to say the least. We can still defend every woman's right to breastfeed and demand appropriate support without unquestioningly accepting everything we're fed (no pun intended).

It isn't bollocks, really, before formula everyone breastfed. It's the biological design of the human race. If it was so bloody hard we'd have died out as a species.

Sorry to jump back again, but this is a claim that's often trotted out and it really needs some analysis. While it's clear that some women find breastfeeding very easy indeed, so I don't agree with the point you were arguing against from Lass here, the fact that we evolved it and we're here certainly doesn't mean it couldn't be generally difficult. Our continued existence and the lack of a safe substitute for breastmilk until very recently simply means that enough breastmilk got into enough babies for enough of them to survive long enough to reproduce. That's all. It doesn't tell us anything about how easy or hard the women found it, or what the primary or indeed secondary lactation failure rates were, or how many babies were fed by women not their mothers. You cannot use our current existence to deduce anything else at all. That's a misunderstanding of evolution. And personally I think we're better off not generalising about the experiences of women we've never met and who left no record of their feelings.