Pregnancy: What's Unexpected

genuinegirly add to the unexpected list, some guy who you have never met smiling at the threads you have started on TFP about this. I'm happy I/we can share in your excitement at this time.

 

I would just point out the there are studies which find pretty much no benefit (but perhaps some small, kind of random clinical benefit) to breast feeding and that the methodology required by these types of studies can be prone to spurious findings. And I would like to add that years of casual observations is piss-poor evidence of anything.

I understand the biological mechanisms of breast feeding and when it happens. As I said before, being white, middle class and educated has a much larger demonstrable effect on the average baby's well being than whether or not the mother breast feeds, but I suspect we'd be hard pressed to see anyone ask a poor black women why she'd want the moniker 'mother' given the untold tragedies which will no doubt unfold by virtue of the fact that her child will have a poor black mother. Sounds absurd, because it is. However, this judgmental, mother hen, tsk tsk-ing that occurs with respect to mothers shaming each other over breast feeding choices is fucking dumb.

I'm not saying breastfeeding is bad, or that it should be avoided. What I am saying is that babies who aren't breastfed -assuming access to clean drinking water, etc- do just fine. Breast feeding makes sense from an economic perspective and, as Charlatan mentioned, because it helps melt off pregnancy weight. Babies are like "whatever" though.

 

Neither of my kids liked fake nipples, neither of them even used a pacifier though my daughter did immediately think that was what Barbie was for. Once nothing came out of Barbie's boob she gave up.

 

My son drank from a bottle once, then refused to drink from one for the rest of his liquid-only phase, but he always had easy access to boobs. I suspect he'd have changed his tune if his mom couldn't or didn't breastfeed him. My daughter could only be breast fed for a short time and then she was formula fed until we switched her over to solids only.

I think the power of breastfeeding can get built up to the point that it's no longer about feeding a child at all and it becomes some sort of measure of motherly fitness, despite the fact that breast feeding over formula feeding is super low on the list of things that matter to a child's health. Seriously, by the numbers, poverty is worse for a baby than breastfeeding, but you'll never hear a breast is best advocate say something like "Not sure why you'd even want to call yourself a mother if you're not willing to wait to have a child till you're not really poor".


But anyway, I'll refrain from sidetracking the thread further.

 

What we all need to remember, with regards to the breastfeeding debate, is that there was a period where formula makers had convinced people that formula was better than breasts.* The more recent push from public health to ensure that women breastfeed is a direct reaction to that.

Breastfeeding is better, for a number of reasons, a few of which include: bonding, passing of anti-bodies to the baby, weight loss, etc.

The thing is, BVH is correct. It isn't the end of the World if you don't breastfeed.


*this trend (if you can call it that) reaches its lowest point in parts of the World where there isn't clean water (i.e. the so-called third world). Mothers there were encourage by companies like Nestle, to use formula and bottles instead of breastfeeding.

 

What should be completely expected is animated discussions regarding differing opinions on child birth techniques, child rearing, feeding and so on. Someone gave me the book, What to Expect the Toddler Years. Having two babies under the age of three, my daughter was born one month before my son turned two, and the best advice I got from that book amounted to permission to walk away from my baby when I was stressed.
Kids don't come with a manual and all kids and situations are different.

 

An odd thing with my first. I knew certain smells could make me nauseous. My favorite perfume made me ill to the point that when I looked at the bottle, I threw up for several minutes. I called my sister and told her she could have it, but only if she came to get it and not show it to me. Afterwards, I did still get sick when I looked at the empty spot where the perfume used to be until I put something else there.
With my second, I found that while breastfeeding on one side, the other would erupt like a volcano. I learned to nurse and pump at the same time while wishing I had more hands.
By the third, everything "odd" seemed normal.

 

On my first son,I couldn't walk in Debenhams department store without having a panic attack and running out, don't ask me why but I still feel weird walking in there now. I craved bananas dipped in Marmite.......yuck. and strawberry milkshake from Mr D's before throwing it up again 10 mins later. but those ten minutes were worth it.

On the breastfeeding debate I am going to throw my personal opinion into the mix and then sit and wait for the backlash............ I didn't breastfeed either of my children, I didn't want to. They were both happy contented kids, are strapping lads now, we have always been bonded and are very close.
I damn well earned the moniker of mother and defend my decision on the fact it was my decision to make and no one else's.
The kids father bonded well to the kids as he also fed them so was great all round for us.
Your body, your baby do what YOU want and do not bend to pressure from any corner on what's right for you.
Breast milk is naturally designed to feed babies, bottle milk is synthetically designed to feed babies. Of course breast is best, but then like a well oiled machine, you only get out what you put in. So breast milk quality relies on the mother to eat well to produce well.
Bottle milk is constantly the same, never changes.
So there is also an argument there for consistency of quality, vitamins etc.
All down to individual choice, I have seen friends of mine with bleeding nipples, engorged breasts and a starving baby sobbing while the health visitor tells her that breast is best and she would be letting her baby down if she didn't persevere.
I also have friends who have had no problems at all and are like pro's at breast feeding from day one. Seeing a mother breast feeding is a beautiful thing, but bottle feeding mothers should never be made to feel that they are bad mothers if they don't.

rant over

 

What I didn't expect while pregnant was how many people would hotly debate whether or not I (or anyone) breast/bottle fed, had pain killers or not during labor, or even if cloth/disposable diapers were used. I've done both ways on all 3, and
apparently some people think we are bad mothers no matter which way we go.

I just remembered Mosquitos. They usually love to bother me, but while i was pregnant they would not even land on me. Whatever it was in my chemistry that was such a deterrent became stronger with each pregnancy. By the third, my sitting closely next to someone would cause the mosquitos to leave them alone as well. Just an odd thing.

 

That is so true, my daughter is 10 days old and it seems sometimes all we do is change diapers. Change her before feeding, change her after feeding, hell I just heard that magical sound that tells me I have to go change her now.

 

I did not get a lot of advice when I was pregnant. I think it was because I was hopelessly poor and working. My son was born in Cali at a time when natural childbirth and breastfeeding was all the rage. When I got pregnant with my daughter I went straight to a midwife and that was that. Being poor, pregnant and working seems to be the cure for advice while pregnant but it did not immunize me from idiots who thought they knew something about raising children because they had been pooping them out since freshman year in High school.
The best advice I can offer is do things your way. Don't let people push you around or make you feel a good mother would do something else.

 

This doesn't make any sense. Consistently inferior is still inferior. I also seriously doubt that milk quality is much affected by maternal nutrition except in cases of extreme malnutrition, the kind of malnutrition someone with enough affluence to access to this forum is extremely unlikely to suffer. Fortunately this is amenable to evidence. *goes off to find relevant articles*

 

I don't know that there is a lot of inconsistency between feedings. However, there can be a fair amount of difference in milk quality within feedings. The quality of the milk changes during a feeding, with more fatty "hind" (our pediatrician's term) milk coming at the end. The nutritional quality of the milk changes too. I think it would make sense that for feeding problems that tend to consistently cause abbreviated feeding, formula might provide a more consistent solution. Plus, "inferior" here doesn't really mean all that much. In terms of health outcomes, the inferiority of modern, quality controlled formula with respect to breast milk is negligible. Statistically, the effect is probably small for most interesting outcomes and clinically, the difference is largely irrelevant.

Also, I've read that the mother's body uses breast milk as a way of getting rid of various environmental chemicals. In this respect, formula might be better - assuming of course that the formula mix is manufactured and packaged in ways at don't also result in the formula containing said chemicals.

None of this is to say that I don't think breast feeding is important. I just don't think that it's as crucial for a child's health as it is commonly portrayed by some folks.

 

Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk

[Emphasis Added]

Somehow I doubt a lackluster performance by breast milk against formula would result in such a strongly worded recommendation. The list of benefits is long and the evidence strong.

 

Well, if you only go by the abstract, I could see how you'd get that impression. Unfortunately, epidemiology is rarely that simple. Only reading the abstract is a great way to trick yourself into thinking you understand a paper. It's a pretty poor way of actually understanding the paper.

If you dig slightly deeper than the abstract, you'll see this paragraph under Infant Outcomes:

Adjusting for confounders is crucial. Because both childhood health and breast feeding duration are associated with race, education and class, without adjusting for confounders, the effects of race, education and class on childhood health would be indistinguishable from the effects of breast feeding. I skimmed the AAP's list of studies, and I only found three (out of 8? 10?) that specifically mentioned that confounders were adjusted for. One of these studies was specific to premature babies and thus not necessarily relevant to this discussion. Even adjusting for confounders isn't necessarily sufficient if it isn't done right. And depending on the specifics of the data, adjusting for confounders might not even help because the differences between the treated and untreated (breast fed and bottle fed) populations can be sufficiently large due to confounding that the effects of confounders can't be differentiated from the effects of the treatment even if the confounders are adjusted for in the statistical models. This is one major drawback of the observational cohort study design and is why results from these types of studies can be difficult to replicate. This is also why randomized clinical trials are often considered the gold standard, because the design (if done right) makes adjustment for confounding unnecessary. The current consensus seems to be that proper randomized clinical trials are unethical with respect to breast feeding.

So in other words, while the AAP is saying that breast feeding is good, it also acknowledges the large methodological flaws with its supporting evidence. You are, of course, welcome to disregard these problems. I'm gonna retain my skepticism towards the idea that for any significant number of families breast feeding over formula is the difference between good mothers and bad mothers or healthy children or sick children.

 

I gave the thread a chance to not be about breast feeding. And it continued to be about breastfeeding.

 

Perhaps. Though it seems like you already have one.