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I've given bottled breastmilk to my son for almost a year while my wife worked.

Breastmilk can be kept at room temperature for up to 6 hours.

I usually had a bottle ready for an hour or two before my child was hungry.

Also since it lasts for so long, if the baby doest finish it at that point I can usually give it a few hours later with the second batch. But I usually wasted 20-30ml a day, as I preferred to err on the side of my baby not being hungry.

Getting a child on a schedule, or close to it, is very possible and relieves all.the problems you mentioned, except when he is on a growth spout, but thats a problem even with breast feeding.

Yeah, schedule brings some method into the madness, but the counterparty still likes to throw a curveball or two by refusing to follow the schedule, spilling the bottle, etc.

Not every mother produces adequate supply where you can just leave extra milk out and if the baby doesn't drink it, say "oh well" and toss it out. Not every baby gets on a predictable schedule either - my 6 month old didn't fall into a regular nightly feeding schedule until he was about 4 1/2 months old.

That said you make a good point that with careful planning and measurement, and with an adequate supply of milk, you can do a pretty decent job. But it still doesn't equate with my wife's no-muss no-fuss ability to roll over at 3AM and pop the crying baby on her breast, or the oxytocin she gets from the experience.

Not every mother can breastfeed either, if she can't pump enough (which happened to us with our second child) then you'll have to consider mixing with formula.

My wife was usually pretty mad at me for wasting even the little I wasted, but the alternative is to warm up only a bit at a time- that gets the baby angry very quickly.

Frankly the nights are extremely hard with bottles, but my wife breastfed in the nights, so it I didn't get to experience that part much. That said it doesn't have to be bottles exclusively, just when the mother isn't home.

My baby had mostly formula, we trained him to take it room temperature or refrigerated. The bottle warmers are all crazy junk, we tried one and all it seemed to do was make the outside of the bottle uncomfortable to hold without warning the contents in an appreciable way. It's definitely worth a little more screaming early on to train to accept milk at any temperature. (Keep in mind, babies are classically conditioning you while you're conditioning them)

Also breast feeding doesn't work for all women either.

Infants have less ability to maintain homeostasis than older humans; there are good reasons to give them milk/formula at or near body temperature.

And there are bottle warmers that work quite well. (For formula, I've heard that there are devices that do measuring, mixing, and warming, do it all quickly, and do it well, but I've not personally used them.)

Room temperature feedings are really not an issue.

8 pound baby investing a less than 3oz feeding at room temperature is really not an issue. 100f vs 70f = 30 degrees * 3 oz / 128 oz ~= at most 0.7f temperature drop however this is spread out over time and a fairly extreme example to begin with.

That said cold milk is a larger issue.

It's about maintaining digestive track temperature to allow for proper ingestion of nutrients in which case room temp (20c) milk or formula does hinder the process.

We didn't came up with warming it to 34-37c for no reason. Serving it at 10-15c colder than body temp puts a lot of stress on the infants digestive system and prevents proper nutrient absorption.

Nutrients are obsorbed below the stomach which releases milk fairly slowly and in plenty of time to warm up to very near body temperature. If you have some actual studies I would be happy to read them, but this seems physically unlikely because digestion is a very slow processes where temperature exchange is not.

> We didn't came up with warming it to 34-37c for no reason.

A lot of people do it because their parents did it. After you've trained your baby to prefer warmed bottles, they will likely throw a fit with room temperature bottles. I don't see how you could construct a sound study on this (because it's pretty hard to double blind warmed vs cold bottle), but you could probably do a correlation study on reported bottle temperatures vs miscellaneous infant maladies.

I was able to find that there are at least some studies on temperature in preterm infants (where better feeding response certainly justifies maximum hassle), but I couldn't find anything for infants that reached full term.

It depends on each individual, but having looked at how my wife breastfed my son, I wouldn't say "just offer her breast". Creating milk in women's breast isn't free. They must prepare for it, and also have to take care of their breasts. My wife said it was very tiring and also got mastitis a few times. The experience may vary and I guess it'd be generally easier for young, healthy women, though.

We couldn't switch to formula because after the initial few weeks my son refused to take it. We tried various ways but couldn't make it work except breastfeeding. If we could, I wouldn't have minded preparing formula, considering how much work my wife has done for pregnancy and delivery.

Exactly. Everything else being equal (salary, career impact, societal expectations), it simply makes more sense for mothers to care for the babies, because biology (assuming, of course, that exactly one parent has to work; both being home is ideal, and both having to work offers no choice).

Do you have children? Because this is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

>who meanwhile is crying his socks off, pretty convinced at that point that a 3-minute delay means eternal starvation for the rest of his short life

What a long and useless story for women who can't feed with breast (there's a lot of reasons for this). It's a sexism.

This is an entirely self inflicted problem. Breastfeeding has few proven long term benefits.[1] I did all the night feedings for my daughter and I barely had to wake up. Throw some formula powder in room temperature water and you're ready to go. An entire generation was raised that way (almost nobody in the 70s and 80s breastfed) and they turned out fine.

[1] The benefits ascribed to breastfeeding tend to evaporate when you account for socioeconomic factors: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614...