> The water isn't safe to drink, and Coke can be cheaper than milk or formula, so some moms feed their babies Coke instead.
Fucking hell that's awful.
Fucking hell that's awful.
She told me when they first brought him home (he was 5), that he could barely speak, was terrified and kept screaming "oda!".
They thought perhaps Oda was the name of his brother who was sold into slavery by his birth mother.
He was unrelenting in his crys. Finally, exhausted, my cousins husband sat down at 3am and opened a Coke to drink. The boy pointed and screamed "oda!".
He wanted Soda. They gave him some and his entire nervous system relaxed and he could goto sleep.
He was raised in a drug house, spent most of his life locked in a closet with little food and plenty of feces.. and his mother bottle fed him soda.
When they adopted him he was like a feral animal, hiding and picking food out of the trash.
He's now 9 and doing much better (they had to ween him off soda). He's relaxed and is in a loving and safe home.
But fuck sakes, I don't think most of us have any idea the horror that many people are facing on a daily basis.
> We in the developed world enjoy a dream-like existence few in the whole of human history have ever known.
You just have to ask yourself; how many of my ancestors were able to afford a hot shower in the morning and you begin to realize, how mind-fuckingly amazing the life we have actually is.
Thanks for putting it into words.
That's a big reason why breastmilk companies are ready, willing and eager to "help" with sample product. Hell, somehow two of those companies were able to estimate the birthdate that our child would have likely had if my wife hadn't miscarried early. They go to the expense of mailing 10 lb boxes of product with a retail value of around $75 to people -- it's almost an "addictive" product with ROI high enough to justify that large marketing expense.
In third world countries, they go so far as to send people dressed like nurses to provide samples and "help".
I'm male, but I'm a parent and remember dealing with this stuff.
In addition to difficulty getting the baby to latch after feeding formula very early, there's also the issue of building and maintaining supply. The first few days of life are important for both mother and baby - there isn't a lot of milk being produced at first, and the child's attempts at nursing encourage milk production to begin in earnest. The natural course is that the mother's milk comes in to meet the baby's growing need. If you "skip" a day or two in the beginning, even if you get the kid to latch there isn't going to be enough milk to satisfy them. This leads to supplementing with formula, which in turn solidifies difficulty latching and further delays milk production.
I remember having to be very firm with hospital staff to under no circumstances feed our first daughter formula. In the first couple of days they really pushed us to, justifying it by saying "Momma needs her rest!" and "Dad should experience feeding the baby, too." We had a good experience overall with both our children, but in both cases I had to really take command of the situation to ensure that our wishes were followed. In a couple of cases that was even "against medical advice".
There is a lot of noise around breast feeding on the Internet but if you've got references to something other than apocryphal about formula preventing breast feeding I'm sure my daughters would like to know about it.
If your wife and daughters breastfed in the hospital or immediately thereafter and then supplemented, that is different (and lower ROI) scenario.
There’s a ton of published material on the topic.