It’s Breastfeeding Awareness Week, and I’ve been too busy and tired to make the most of it here (and apparently 34Sp have done something weird that has messed up the page anyway). I had my counselling tutorial today, and the tutor has renamed it Breastfeeding Bashing Week. I think she is feeling somewhat bitter that the media has objected so loudly to what they perceive as an attempt to make mothers feel guilty if they didn’t breastfeed for long. Sigh. As if anyone ever needs to go out of their way to make mothers feel guilty; and if it isn’t breastfeeding, then it will be something else. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there: here’s a little survey.
If you are pregnant, or you’re a parent of either the male or the female persuasion, or even if you don’t have kids but still have a pair of braincells to rub together, answer me this: prior to having a baby, what are/were/might be your expectations of breastfeeding? Just a glib sentence will do, but feel free to write me an essay if it helps you to exorcise some of that natural parental guilt.
I don’t have kids, but I intend to. I was breastfed as a bairn. My sister had a sproglet in January, and she is breast-feeding the babba, and just starting to wean her at the moment.
I know my missus would have something to say about this, but I would expect breast-feeding to be the way things will be done. I know women who have decided (for no medical or practical reason) that they weren’t going to breast-feed their child. I have even heard of one woman, an ex-co-worker of my sisters’, who didn’t breast-feed her baby as she thought is was ‘disgusting’. My sisters’ retort was that she thought that shoving a sterilized rubber teat filled with chemical-filled, synthetic muck into a precious, newborn babys’ mouth was more disgusting.
We have breast-fed our babys for a few hundred thousand years. Why are things changing now? Because of the media, I reckon.
Breast-feeding, imho, is right, unless for medical reasons, it is impossible.
Beautifully put, Matt. Thanks.
It really works for some people and doesn’t for others – I know someone who was ill during pregnancy (and still is, although the child is due to go to secondary school). She didn’t need to be guilt-tripped about not breastfeeding, because she was already feeling guilty about being ill, and hospitalised etc. OTOH, I remember a story of someone on the maternity ward feeding her baby and the stereotype chav teenage mother in the next bed asked her what she was doing with her tits…There again, there’s probably more benefit to child-of-chav being fed formula than being fed breastmilk-of-Kentucky-Fried-Rat.
I went to visit a friend and she was on her usual stupid dieting fad – cut out all the fat, to which I customarily respond, where do you get your fat soluble vitamins. You cannot believe my (concealed) anger when I later learnt she was still breastfeeding her son.
In other words, if mothers, chavs or graduate-friends-of-Gert, are themselves malnourished, the baby’s better off on formula.
I remember at my cousin’s wedding in 1975 my mother was breastfeeding my brother in the Ladies loos, which was the norm back then. Perhaps it’s no surprise that many of today’s Grandmas are not encouraging their daughters to breastfeed.
In the perfect world, of course, everyone would breastfeed for two years or until the child refuses, but I can see why that’s difficult for so many people for so many reasons
[In other words, if mothers, chavs or graduate-friends-of-Gert, are themselves malnourished, the baby’s better off on formula.]
I would have to disagree with that on the grounds that mothers in developing countries and during famines can still breastfeed their babies, and the babies will still be better-nourished than if they were fed on artificial breastmilk substitutes. And don’t forget that there are long-term health benefits for the mother as well.
There’s an article in my del.icio.us feed above that deals with maternal guilt, which you might find interesting.
If/when I ever have children, I intend to breastfeed. Apart from all the health benefits etc, I think the fact that when you go out you don’t have to carry around a bag full of bottles/powders/sterilising equipment which has got to make things a bit easier.
I get really really annoyed when I see people “taking offence” at someone breastfeeds in public…I really don’t see what’s so horrific about seeing a bit of breast. But then I’ve never understood peoples horror with the naked body in anyway….we’ve all got one!
To say I have two brain cells is going a bit far and we all know I’m all about the boobs but …
I don’t have much of an opinion on this. Not with standing the odds of little sevitz, are looking significantly long (I hear you need to have a girl somewhere in your life for kids)
I kind of reckon I will be supportive of my (theoretical, hypothetical) wife, in making the right choice. The right choice being dependent on the wife, the kid, and the situation and probably not fixed.
Aside from that breast feeding completely takes the fun out of being sleazy.
I wanted to breastfeed and I did and I had no trouble doing so. I also really, really enjoyed it. I was hugely lucky, clearly. Less enjoyable was going back to work when he was three months old and expressing endlessly in toilets to keep the stocks up for when he was at the childminder’s. Initially he wouldn’t take a bottle at all and determinedly waited until I came to pick him up in the evening. I had to sit in the car with him clamped to a tit before putting the key in the ignition he was so desperate. Eventually he would have bottles of expressed milk during the day which was a huge relief. We kept up with a morning and evening feed until he was about one and it tapered off because that was the way that he wanted rather than any planned withdrawl.
The second one, of course, was a completely different story