and while I'm being irritated

[eirias]

Here's something I don't get. There appears to be a vocal contingent of people who condemn mothers who bottle-feed their little ones. Recently, I heard rumors of a government campaign promoting breastfeeding and warning of the dangers of not doing it. (It's a stupid link, so if readers have a better one, please pass it on.) What gives?

Breastfeeding is good for a kid -- I buy that, I really do! I haven't done the research myself, but I think the reported findings of its benefits for health, nutrition, and parent-child bonding are totally plausible. But it's a long long way from this fact to using scare or shame tactics on mothers who don't do it -- because in my understanding, breastfeeding is not actually *possible* for everyone. Maybe you don't make enough milk! Maybe you are taking necessary medications that might find their way into your milk supply! Maybe you had a radical mastectomy! Maybe breastfeeding is so painful that doing it is debilitating! Maybe you're a single mom of twins and there just isn't time in the day to pay the bills and pump enough milk for everyone!

The whole thing seems like just another case of "let's prey on mothers' neurotic tendencies by shining a bright light on everything they do." I mean, not that there aren't bad parents out there; but I have an hypothesis that the only parents who pay attention to parenting campaigns like this are the ones you don't need to reach, who will only become more neurotic and annoying. And I really don't think that's necessary.

Comments

[knell.livejournal.com]

Knowing people who have been in exactly the situation you describe, I find the "Look! I am breastfeeding! I am a better person than you are! Bask in my motherly radiance, you slovenly bottle-feeding person whose children will be permanently scarred for life! I am going to breastfeed my children until they leave home!" brigade mightily annoying for, well, just the reasons you describe. Then again, militant *anything* is pretty annoying to me.

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

maybe the mom has to work for a living, and get back to work as soon as possible after the baby's born, and can't afford a good quality breast pump, even if she does want to breast feed...

yes, i'm a big fan of breast feeding, and will encourage women to at least consider breastfeeding when they're about to have a kid, but it all ends up being the mom's decision based on whether or not it works for her. if she can't produce enough milk, it's fine to supplement, because at least the kid's getting enough nourishment.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Well, you see, children are helpless. And therefore they are EVERYBODY'S RESPONSIBILITY, in case their parents SCREW THEM UP. We must be intervening, proselytizing, legislating, and so forth at every turn lest people abuse their children by, eg, hitting them, bottle-feeding them, or raising them Republican.

Why, I find it bizarre that other people seem to conflate the last two of those with the first as well. And my increasingly paranoid notion of "the sanctity of the family" equals uninvited people getting the hell out of it. But no one died and made me God.

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

Who would have to die for that to happen?

[rms10.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hear you. It's another battle in the fucking mommy wars, and I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole. And no matter how successful you are at breastfeeding, or how long you stick with it, there's always someone who breastfed tandem for 18 months, or something insane like that. Gah. Parenting is not a competition.

(And don't get me started on how hard it is for working mothers to breastfeed. Or how bottle-feeding allows fathers to be a primary caretaker. Oh, look, there I went.)

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

heh... i should point out that dads can use breastmilk in a bottle to be take part in baby feeding. ;)

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

I completely agree, but no matter what the women will at least need to pump it, and given the expense and inconveince of that, a lot of couples will just say, "eh, let's just do it straight from the breast."

I think that people just need to chill out and realize that bottle feeding can be totally ok, especailly if it means the parents (mom) are getting more sleep and being less stressed and are able to devote real time and attention to their kids. I've heard of people going crazy due to the time/energy involved with breast feeding.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

And no matter how successful you are at breastfeeding, or how long you stick with it, there's always someone who breastfed tandem for 18 months, or something insane like that. Gah. Parenting is not a competition.

Hahaha!! I guess that's what prom queens and other alpha females do once they turn thirty and start their slide into obsolescence...?

I seem to have been relatively immune from that kind of competition growing up; I mean, I was aware of it and aware that I wasn't on top, but managed to be happy enough anyway. Hopefully that's a good sign for my future parental sanity...

Also, I definitely hear ya on the primary-caretaker-daddy thing.

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

"And don't get me started on how hard it is for working mothers to breastfeed. Or how bottle-feeding allows fathers to be a primary caretaker"

That is exactly what bothers me most about this. It's just another way of saying, "women belong in the home raising kids full-time, not in jobs." I'm sure people will call me a feminazi for saying that, but I'm just trying to resist the subtle message they're sending us.

[eldan.livejournal.com]

I will call you "correct" for saying that, because it's what I was about to comment but you beat me to it. I don't think it's even subtle, when you consider the totality of the "mothers need to drop everything or else they're being evilly neglectful of their baybeeeees' needs" social pressure.

[nein09.livejournal.com]

I've also heard so many stories from women who had pumped milk for later, put it in a bottle, and were feeding their baby with it in public. And got harassed by someone for being a demon bottle-feeder.

In today's society, you cannot win. If you are a woman, and especially if you are a parent, you are considered public property, and treated as such by every goddamn nutcase who happens to cross your path.

[nein09.livejournal.com]

Also, this is personally insulting to me, since I was bottle fed, and I turned out JUST FINE THANK YOU except for the "full of rage and swears a lot" thing.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

hee hee hee hee :).
Yeah, I was bottle fed too, and failed to wind up short, malnourished, sickly, or whateverthehell.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Me too!

And my mom still feels guilty about it. (She ran into a lactation consultant at some party recently, and discovered that breast pumps are now totally ubiquitous ("uh, yeah, my friends buy them in stores" I said to her), and just launched into this huge rant about how when SHE was trying to breastfeed there were, like, two breast pumps in the entire state, and you couldn't get them for love or money, and she really needed one, so she lost.

Mom, say I, it's OK. It's not like I turned out stupid or anything. Or pretty much ever got sick in my life.

"But you could have won a Nobel Priiiiiize by now! And never even had a cold!"

I can't really tell if she's joking. I think the mommy hormones do that to people.

[ex-miang438.livejournal.com]

I turned out JUST FINE THANK YOU except for the "full of rage and swears a lot" thing.

*snerk* I was breastfed, and I turned out the exact same way. :D

This whole "debate" is just so asinine. There are kids all over the place getting starved and neglected and beaten, but the biggest menace to our nation's children is bottlefeeding? I don't freakin' think so.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The arguments are, of course, statistical and not about individual examples. But as long as we're tossing in individual irrelevant examples... I was breastfed, properly for quite a while. And I've always been kind of weak and sickly and am now horribly disabled.

No, I don't think there's a connection. :)

[darlox.livejournal.com]

This phenomenon happens in a lot of things, particularly it seems with the religious right. It's sort of the opposite of jealousy... "Oh wow this is such an amazing experience and I feel so fulfilled and my baby must be bonding with me in such an incredible way that he'll be totally at peace and grow up to be the Pope!"

... and then...

"Look at that mother! How can she ABUSE her baby that way, feeding from a bottle. Doesn't she WANT her baby to grow up to be the Pope???"

It's not so much self-righteousness, but so mentally wired-in to your own bliss that you actually get angry when you encounter others who aren't as blissful as yourself... They do it for babies that don't get baptized too!! ;)

What ever happened to the good old days where we could just leave our children in the woods, to be raised by wolves. They'd come back to us 18 years later, speaking the language of the forest, and get hitched with the most popular girl in school who would be the only one to see their true inner beauty. Ahhh... THOSE were the days!

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Believe me, it's not just the religious right. They are, as always, easy to pick on, but this is a very cross-ideology sort of fascism. I mean, google attachment parenting. Or don't.

(There are plenty of non-psychotic attachment parenting sorts, but it seems to be the modern parenting fad that most strongly lends itself to complete busybody psychosis, and it's very popular among hippie or yuppie liberal sorts.)

Unfortunately, self-righteousness is one of those human characteristics that simply crosses political lines.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Yeah; in particular, I've found it interesting how most of the comments sort of seem to assume a right-wing anti-woman role, when my knee-jerk assumption about the "BREASTFEED OR DIE" women is that they're probably natural-foods crunchy-granola sorts who mean well. But clearly there are nuts on both sides of the fence.

And it's inevitable that some people in *every* conceivable group will be self-righteous; there are even people who get self-righteous about not being self-righteous. If ever it were conclusively determined that a group was free of this sin, someone would get self-righteous about it for sure.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Huh! I definitely got an anti-woman vibe, but from most comments I didn't get a right-wing vibe. I'm equal-opportunity; I assume there are anti-woman positions on many parts of the political spectrum :/. (For instance, I think Mary Pipher, darling of the left, is extremely anti-woman and just doesn't know it.)

Really, I think any general stance which limits the options of group X, regardless of which direction it limits them in, is likely anti-X in some way. "Women are squooshy and nurturing" is just as limiting as "women are ballsy and strident", you know?

[eldan.livejournal.com]

"I definitely got an anti-woman vibe, but from most comments I didn't get a right-wing vibe"

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I see a lot of the crunchy granola types as being the sort of middle-class hippie who has the luxury of being able to breastfeed and fails to appreciate that the option just isn't there for everyone else, or at least isn't there without major sacrifices.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's definitely possible to be anti-woman and left-wing -- but I've yet to see left-wing types criticizing women for not staying at home, or mandating things that pretty much rule out stay-at-home dads. Which is the sort of reaction I've seen in this thread, and not one I'd immediately jumped to.

[eldan.livejournal.com]

Screw being the Pope. Babies raised by wolves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus) founded Rome. Allegedly.

[darlox.livejournal.com]

*laugh* My point exactly! How EVER did the human species survive before we had all of these parenting experts telling us the millions of ways we can kill, damage, or emotionally scar our offspring??

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Well, in the case of early Rome, killing, damaging, and emotionally scarring other people's offspring seemed to work ;).

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

You know, the word "lupa", meaning "she-wolf", also means "prostitute"? So you could read that story either way. Funny how everyone always, even in ancient Rome, reads it the she-wolf way. Yeah. Go figure.

(Of course this is Latin we're talking about, where you could randomly draw a Scrabble tray and probably get a word for prostitute...)

[eldan.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! I didn't know that, but then it's not surprising I should have heard the she-wolf version, as I'm pretty sure I first heard the story from a tour guide in Italy....