“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’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.
This myth is a huge cause of depression in new moms
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 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.
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.