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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy."

Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy.

But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.

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“Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy”

It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.

It is very reliable indeed, but there's still variation.

Compare https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3726904/ :

> Data that were collected prospectively from a child health study conducted in Gaza show a strong relationship between breastfeeding and two major components of birth intervals, the postpartum anovulatory period and the waiting time [from resumption of menstruation] to conception.

> The finding of a strong positive association between breastfeeding and the length of postpartum amenorrhea is as expected from numerous other studies.

The effect appears reliably when looking at groups of people. It is not a reliable method of birth control.

My wife and I were warned about this by nurses. The effect is real, but it's absolutely not reliable as a contraception method, as it can easily break down for various reasons, including the mother not following a strict and consistent regimen of frequent breastfeeding. And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.

> And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.

This myth is a huge cause of depression in new moms

It’s sad that it’s so little known. I know that not everything can or should be taught at school, but I’d argue in favour of this: breast feeding is often not as easy as it seems it should be, so you should find out more about it when preparing to have a child.

There are massive issues with hiding the real challenges with children from potential mothers and fathers.

I suspect it's a combination of:

1) Prior/older parents worried about embarrassment or being shamed for going through what they did - a lot of it things that no one likes to talk about.

2) Folks worried (potentially correctly) that many folks would opt to not have kids, which is already a population problem, if they understood what it really meant.

It's the same about War and men returning from it, frankly, though war movies tend to be a lot more glamourous, even the gritty ones.

I think 1 could also be parents actively forgetting how hard it was. I think I even read a theory that the mother's brain releases chemicals during childbirth that help her remember it as "not so bad"

I also suspect that older generations were less isolated socially and it was much more common to have parents/grandparents/cousins/etc in the same house who could care for the baby for an hour while mom caught up on sleep. It takes a village to raise a child but we have no more villages, so people try to do it on their own and discover it's incredibly difficult.

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