Many women struggle to breastfeed. Scientists are starting to ask why
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
It's a miracle people are still able to reproduce at all given our isolation from reproduction and the processes of rearing children.
I don’t know what, if any, effect that kind of culture has in breastfeeding, but it sure does seem pretty remarkable.
She has had trouble breastfeeding each of her three babies.
Median individual income: $40,000, poverty level for "replacement" families (two adults, two children): $30,000.
Probably doesn't count the vehicle troubles, but more the added food, board, and transportation in general.
[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/single-parent-day.ht...
Affluent families in 1960: 95% Working class families in 1960: 95%
Affluent families in 2005: 85% Working class families in 2005: 30%
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1178310819332984832
I don't know if these stats are due to income levels needed for children, I suspect that's only a small part of the issue. But every statistic out there points to the fact that 1 parent children do far worse than 2 parent children. It's like a terrible self perpetuating cycle has taken off in many ways.
I don't think "poverty level" is the correct term here. I believe once below the poverty level, everything is basically free (if you have kids to claim at least). Free rent, school, food, healthcare, etc. But there are many other "levels".
I know for a fact that 5 years ago in small town Texas you got food stamps and extremely reduced healthcare costs if your yearly take home pay was less than $40k and you had two children. I know because my brother-in-law's wife would give us all the free junk she'd get from the SNAP program that she didn't want. Sugary juice, snacks, etc. We'd throw it straight in the trash. She tried breast feeding but gave up in an hour because she got free baby formula and she could then dump her kids on anyone to babysit without a need to worry about feeding the infant. Once her two boys were 3 and 4 years of age, she qualified to put them on a bus at 7am (they were still in diapers) to be taken to a preschool that was restricted to low income families only. She would then spend the next 8 hours sitting at home and trolling my wife on facebook. My wife only posts pictures, to which this woman would then critique in the most Karen way possible. "Your kids are too small for that car seat", "That car seat should be rear facing", "That doesn't look safe", etc. If we called her out on anything, she'd get mad and spend hours digging through our old photo albums to put the red angry face on whatever she deemed necessary. Felt extremely invasive. Absolute crazy lady. We put up with that for nearly two years before blocking her. Which then made family meetings awkward so we quit going to those as well. Which that just turned us into the "stuck up" "snooty" rebels of the family. But oh well, we are much happier now. No clue why I just typed all this, but what ever.
"I'm super happy and am living a great life" is probably also a phrase you'll never hear from this person.
Because what people are really saying when they say "I'm too poor to have kids" is "I would have to sacrifice a great deal of the comfort and stability of my life to have kids" and they are choosing not to do that.
From one perspective it's a selfish choice.
From another, having kids when you can't afford them is the selfish choice.
From yet another, having kids at all is a selfish choice.
From yet another, not having kids is a selfish choice.
The winners in this story are childless singles: women can now have a proper carrer without help from a man, and single men suffered essentially no downside, in fact it is a win since they are not expected to cover every expense the women they meet may have anymore.
Some countries are starting to notice that and are passing laws that give both mothers and fathers equal benefits, like parental leaves, bringing back what the result of feminism should have been: giving the option of stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, also allowing fathers to assist mothers who are recovering from pregnancy or breastfeeding with household tasks instead of being forced to work.
To each their own, but I'm not convinced they're winning overall either. Humans are, for better or worse, extremely driven to procreate and have families and communities. We're absolutely butchering those opportunities at a grand scale in North America, and so far it seems to be having adverse effects on our mental health. I don't know how this will play out but I have serious concerns.
While the option for mom OR dad to stay home with baby is nice, I worry that it's nowhere near the correction that we need.
I say this with the awareness that everyone wants something a little different out of life and this reflects my take on what that is; not everyone would agree at all. I'm certainly not trying to make a statement about what people should want.
But in reality, marriage has fallen off a cliff. It's the lowest ever.
And women are much more money-oriented than men - men want a hot young woman, women want a provider - even if they work themselves, they want a man to make as much or more. Men don't care - they will marry a broke waitress if she looks good to him. And the reality is that men ar dropping out of society - women are earning 60% of undergrad degrees, and I've read that it will be 70-75% in 10-15 years. These women are not going to want to marry men not at their level.
If any woman disagrees here, I'll gladly be the stay-at-home partner while you go work and I play video games all day.
August 2020 Pew report (describing data from 2019): "Half of all solo single people don’t want a romantic relationship or even a date."
A long, long time ago I made the decision not to get married because marriage is a really, really bad deal for the man. I feel that no man should get married, not one. You may say "what would happen to the human race, then?" Well, the world might not be flamed baked like Venus if the human race was to die out in the next 100 years.
We spend so much time solo doing activities that would have been communal or at least shared, which puts more pressure on people as well.
Our society is utterly riddled with anti-natural facets like that which cause no end of problems.
Baby is tired: I shall make lots of noise so the predators will go away… right.
Eaten I tell you!
I still get pretty low key dehydrated if I try to subsist on tap water. I suspect my body is balancing my need for water against something in the water it doesn't like. Fluoride is a prime suspect, but any number of other things are possibilities and I wouldn't really have any way to know. But I do often wonder if I'm far from the only one with such an issue, and most people never find it. I didn't for a long time. It is an easy guess for me that if there's something in the water that's bothering you, and you need to dramatically increase your intake to support two people, biological problems and tradeoffs might ensue. And nursing in particular does require an awful lot of water.
I ultimately started filtering all of my water, and it seems like an obvious thing to do in retrospect -- like having a firewall for your home network. It seems silly to me now that I ever assumed that any old pipe sludge that found its way into the system at any point was something I would necessarily want in my body.
Also why Berkey? They're extraordinarily expensive relative to alternatives, primarily for aesthetic gain.
"To join the armed services, men had to have six opposing teeth in their upper and lower jaws; in 1941, almost 10% of recruits were rejected for this reason alone"
Like it doesn't even matter if army recruits is a skewed sample, young men not having 6 pairs of teeth that touch is insane.
"In the early 1950s, two public health researchers stated that on average young men between the ages of 20 and 35 years had already lost an average of 4.2 teeth and that 90% of them were in need of bridges or full or partial dentures."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504307/
The authoritative source of water fluoridation is https://www.york.ac.uk/media/crd/crdreport18.pdf which, broadly concludes that there isn't any strong evidence of harm.
Do wisdom teeth count? Because if they do, I am already missing 4 teeth, in addition to 4 more that were taken out to help make space for the rest of my teeth to prevent crowding.
So missing 4.2 teeth on average doesn't actually sound as bad as you make it out.
The positives of flouridation far outweigh any of the negative consequences that could occur. But I have never heard of anyone with a flouride problem in my life.
I can subjectively tell good and bad water apart in double blind tests over a period of several hours, so I know that what's happening to me isn't just in my head. So -- I don't know whether it's fluoride or not, but it's definitely something.
The reason to suspect fluoride specifically is that a working Berkey "black" filter still produces "bad" water for me -- the white filter stage seems to be necessary. Twice now, I've had a white filter go bad on me that I didn't realize had happened, felt like crap, tested the water, found tap levels of fluoride, replaced it, and felt much better. The white filters are advertised to get fluoride and arsenic, so that makes it a prime suspect. I don't know exactly what else they might get that the problem might be, but there are a lot of suspects the black filter would block, and it's none of them. So if the problem isn't fluoride, it's something that that fluoride is a good proxy for in this setting.
As the problem I'm trying to fix is low key dehydration (as opposed to avoiding something medical like fluorosis), I don't expect there would be any medical research pointing to fluoride as a culprit. Neither will there be any saying it's safe for my purposes. I have found that while medicine as a field is excellent for healing injuries and saving lives, it's sort of terrible at optimizing health.
What I do know is that I drink a lot more water than is typical -- about two gallons a day when I am not nursing, and much more when I am. I also know that the studies that proscribe fluoride levels in drinking water are ancient, optimized narrowly for dental health, and based on average intake. I know as well that the difference between an effective dose of fluoride and a dose considered potentially dangerous is about an order of magnitude -- right about the difference between my water intake and what is typical. (And as an aside, it blows my mind that we make formula for babies with water like this, dosed based on evidence like that. They don't even have teeth!)
Hence, it's a prime suspect, but even if it turned out to not be that, I would still filter my water very aggressively because something real is definitely happening to me, and that definitely fixes it.
My choice of Berkey is that I want a maximally aggressive solution. I'm not looking to save money. I'm looking to nuke whatever it is that is causing me problems, and am perfectly fine with paying a bit extra to nuke everything. I bought one actually originally concerned about PFCs; discovering the filtered water made me feel much better was an unanticipated happy accident.
That's 3 times the recommended amount of water intake for pregnant women.
Most local teens grew up on well water and their teeth suffered for it.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Countries-with-Endemic-F...
It's the diet, flouride is a bandaid.
Read Weston Price's Nutrition and physical degeneration.
Some support for this, some rebuttal.[0] But yes, diet does seem to be acknowledged as very impactful.
On the flip side her late 90s grandmother still has some teeth and walks around unassisted. I don't think any of my grandparents made it to their 80s.
So basically while we don’t suffer for lack of fluoride to harden our teeth… the extra fluoride gives us a lot of protection. And yes you can have too much fluoride, but your never going to see that kind of medical pathology unless you somehow get a lot more bioavailable fluoride in you in a short span of time than you could possibly get from drinking multiple litres (or even gallons) of fluoridated water per day, they don’t put enough fluoride in the water to turn teeth brown, and we have ample evidence that fluoride bearing spring water above these concentrations does no harm for long periods of time.
I get being concerned, but we got so much more important things to worry about with regard to environmental chemicals than fluoride. It’s pretty easy to read the history, find out about the kids with the brown but perfect teeth, find the other stories from around the world, the second generation families living healthy on spring water that is/was naturally highly fluoridated, and put it all together yourself without need to take anyone’s word for the fact this actually is a pretty good “one weird trick for perfect teeth”.
1. Although filters are expensive upfront, they last a very long time and are cost-effective as a result
2. The large containers keep clean water accessible and at hand for things like cooking, and not just drinking
3. The simple design makes it so, were something to go wrong, I could craft my own filters onto their plumbing once the filters are spent. A ceramic filter would be trivial to make, for example.
4. Their filters last a long time so I don't need to frequently buy disposable filters and generate more waste. The waste from their filters is also minimal and predominantly biodegradable.
5. The system is low tech. It'll clean rain water in a pinch with no electricity. I don't need anything special to keep it working.
6. If the filters slow down, I can clean them to get them working better again. This makes them very versatile for off grid use where the inputs into the system might not be as clean as city water. This would ruin a lot of filters on the market.
7. The aesthetic gains!> But in our test on chloroform, the Black Berkey filters performed poorly, lowering it by just 13% in our test sample
> New Millennium Concepts, however, claims—right on the box the filters come in—that the Black Berkey filter reduces chloroform by 99.8%, to “below lab detectable limits.”
> However, he said that they stopped meeting the NSF removal standard after approximately 1,100 gallons of filtering—barely more than a third of the 3,000-gallon lifespan New Millennium claims for the Black Berkey filters.
Distilled water is not good to drink. It dehydrates the body, so you could feel the need to drink more. Being devoid of salts can cause also an entire set of undesirable problems if you are pregnant and drink it for too long. The concept of osmosis is very important in biology and disrupt it can cause undesirable effects.
Of course context matters. Heavily filtered water is better than drinking biologically contaminated stuff or water with heavy metals but at long term will hit you.
Orthorexia and OCD tendencies are real and destructive but I'd be equally wary of normalizing the oftentimes highly toxic exposure of modern life to the point where anybody who express tangible concerns and takes meaningful countermeasures is pointed to as a potential basket case.
Is it Orthorexia to worry about tap water? At least in my case, I don't think so. I'm a very unusual case in a lot of ways, but I'm very sure what I am doing helps me. Looking at broader society? I mean, I know we as a society have problems with chronic and widespread dehydration. I know relentless messaging to people to drink more water doesn't seem to help. I know in my case, the problem certainly wasn't in the motivation, but in the filtering. Maybe I'm weird, but wondering if this is more widespread doesn't seem like an unnatural guess to make, particularly when it comes to a water-heavy activity like nursing. None of this seems paranoid to me. Eccentric, sure, inconvenient, sure, unpopular, sure. But if this is all crazy, I don't see how.
I bought mine because I saw it filters both Fluoride and Chlorine, as well as approximately 360+ other chemicals
It's possible that it's always been hard. Being in a social group large enough that there are other mothers would solve the issue, largely.
Plus I'm looking to see if it is worth the risk -- a lot of articles are clickbate.
Note, snark like the above is explicitly forbidden.
You may recall the famous dictum "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." -- possibly Bruce Ediger. That turns out to be wrong. While human infants have an instinct to suckle on a nipple rubbed against their lower lip, human adults have no instincts about presenting the nipple, holding the infant, or anything else close by. All of that is learned behavior -- and bad positioning can be very painful.
If you don't have women breastfeeding around you to teach you, you're at a major disadvantage. It used to be the norm; now we have certified lactation consultants.
I think it's kind of implied by the causes that are hypothesized in the article. Hormones, nutrition, your schedule and routine around breastfeeding. Are these not all frequent topics on the subject of modern life and environmental pollution?
That said, it's great to hear that scientists are exploring the mindbogglingly complex hormonal interactions at play. We won't change the culture, failure to breastfeed will still cause shame for this perfectly normal occurrence. It would be good for new parents to feel less stress in regards to this aspect of childrearing.
2. Because we now have formula, which was intended to allow society to move on in a way which allowed females more freedom after birth.
3. Because, to quote Lenina Huxley, "Eeewww, disgusting! You mean... fluid transfer?"
---
We ended up nearly unknowingly starving both of our children through breastfeeding. We only knew this happened after the second one ended up in the NICU for four days even though we were working with Lactation Consultants, Pediatricians, and Nurses who assured us our children were getting enough to eat.
My wife, instead, had to spend 2+ years pumping and exclusively bottle feeding because we didn't want to go with the formula route and we had the means to have her stay at home--something most parents cannot do.
There are many organizations like La leche foundation and human milk banks. They usually direct their donations to premature and severely malnourished infants. Donation of human milk saves lives. Milk is pasteurized before consumption. It is also tested.
Web article link: https://www.forbes.com/health/family/donating-breast-milk-wh...
When it’s expired or when women don’t want to donate their excess milk, I have known some mothers turn it to cheese.
On a lighter note, there is a fetishized demand for breast milk soap. A lady on our Nextdoor forum sells them like hot cakes and I heard she bought herself a new car . We all had a laugh about it but I guess every dollar helps!
I'm confused as to what you're referring to here - breastfeeding, or wet nurses? Or that only the biological mother can feed the baby?
Wet nurses have always existed across the world, but outside elite society, they were the exception, not the norm.
What I find interesting is that our first didn't eat for TWO DAYS until we got that piece of silicone. It was recommended by the lactation consultant, but the hospital didn't stock them because they had a policy against assistive devices. It took two days because the lactation consultant didn't work weekends.
The hospital's view was essentially: Breastfeeding had to "just work" or else formula. Nothing in-between. Ultimately our kid was 90% breastfed with minimum supplemental formula, we also were able to move away from the Nipple Shield within a month. But yet things like Nipple Shields get fought even by some lactation consultants and many hospitals.
You can find numerous articles pointing out why they're bad, but in my view "fed is best" and by attacking assisted devices like they do, all they're indirectly doing is hurting mothers trying to breastfeed, many of which will give up, and just use formula (since they're essentially called bad mothers either for using assisted devices OR formula, so may have well lean into it).
When we had our second, he was a larger baby, and while we did need the shield, he only needed it for a week total. The different lactation consultant recommended "trying without" every time we met her even when it was self-evident it was ineffective.
TL;DR: Breastfeeding information, advice, and assistance is shit-tier in the US and is very hit-or-miss.
Most current bad policies in the US originate from wanting to be "Baby-Friendly Certified"[0]. For example MANY (most?) US hospitals have closed overnight nurseries in Labor & Delivery, so post-operative mothers cannot get better sleep which improved their recovery times and reduced risks of post-operative issues, this is from a bad reading of "Baby-Friendly" key clinical practices No.7. The problem is that third party certifying organizations have taken WHO's fairly commonsense ideas and run wild with them in order to make certifying a time-consuming and expensive process (and done tons of harm in the process).
The specific reason Nipple Shields are the current evil is Key clinical practices No.9 even though it directly contradicts Key clinical practices No.5, and worse No.9 doesn't actually forbid assistive devices, it is the intermediate organizations that have interpreted it that way.
Here's a quote from the below Wikipedia article:
> It questioned whether full compliance with the ten steps of the initiative might inadvertently lead to the promotion of potentially hazardous practices and/or counterproductive outcomes. Specific concerns described in this paper included increased risk of sudden unexpected postnatal collapse, rigidly-enforced rooming-in practices leading to exhausted or heavily medicated mothers caring for newborns, and an unnecessary ban on pacifier use.
Keep in mind this isn't some government initiative nor is the WHO really responsible for many of the US specific problems. This is for-profit US hospitals competing against one another to appear superior, while actually creating situations where both mothers and babies get worse care in the process (and the financial savings of not having on-site nurseries, is likely a huge bonus).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Friendly_Hospital_Initiat...
Nursing mothers need capable nutritionists as well as lactation consultants. The advantage of crone women in the family assisting is that they usually have a history of all related women and the various births in their heads. Women usually went back to their mothers’ home after seventh month of pregnancy and stayed there for at least 6-12 months post birth.
Had a similar experience and I came to believe part of the dad's* jobs is to act as a circuit breaker if you end up with a militant lactation consultant. Some seem to think guilt and browbeating new mothers will somehow get things to work. Then it's time to step in and suggest some one else or some other solution.
*Dad, partner, whoever. Just someone who isn't on a hormone induced emotional rollercoaster.
Not to disagree with your point, but to note: Fathers' hormones also change during pregnancy and postpartum. Most commonly known is that there is a slight decrease in testosterone. This is often suspected as being something to make the man a better caregiver.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/baby/fatherhood...
> And chronic stress has been found to deplete the body of the energy it needs to make milk.
lets just say our profit and growth driven society is not structured to nurture humans, neither grown nor newborn.
> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
> The branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.
Original question was about "society" which is sort of nebulous, but I think (hope?) most people wouldn't define their relationships with their family and close friends, or with most of the world around them, through the lens of an economic system, be it capitalism, communism, mercantilism or feudalism.
Humans by their very nature possess the instinct to outcompete their rivals as a result of millions of years of evolution. Anyone who was not like that, was removed from the gene pool by those who were either by taking their resources or by outright murdering them.
for clarity, feudalism lasted twice as long as capitalism has currently existed.
and while competition has dominated the scientific and cultural narrative for a while, that's not the exclusive interpretation, or even necessarily the best or correct one.
Was the blacksmith selling the products of his labor to people in the community not capitalism?
What exactly do you mean by capitalism?
Now, sure, that manorial land was technically the means of production, and those in charge of these manors technically owned it (maybe much more like we are used to in civilizational phases, like with the Roman empire ?), but isn't this really stretching the intuitions we have around "capitalism" ?
if we are going to make a distinction between feudalism and capitalism, surely we can similarly make a distinction between capitalism and X, instead of simply defining capitalism uselessly as "free markets" or "human nature." it's inclusive of the institutions which uphold these relations.
For a very long time, helping your community and being involved in it meant you got to eat. That's no longer the case. It's perfectly viable to clock in, say nothing to anyone, clock out, repeat. It's also possible to give all you can to your community and starve to death.
The survival strategy is no longer "seek community" but "seek profit", because human society is now more dangerous and rewarding than the natural environment.
Exactly. You have a prior hypothesis about stress. This article makes a brief mention of stress and you take it as evidence of your hypothesis even though the article doesn’t support that at all.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90980-3
my point is, I'm not a scientist, so pointing out a bias (in my case a preconceived speculation) won't change my methodology for a future study. you're just going "nuh uh" with nothing else to say.
I am creating a narrative, and based on the discussion from my comment, it was exactly the narrative I wanted to provide.
They didn't have as much safety from pillaging tribes, hungry animals, they didn't have antibiotics, anesthesia or life-saving surgeries. They didn't have access to a grocery store a short drive away, or a fire department.
Can all of the advancements in human QoL above be undone by turning on CNN on one's 70" LCD TV in one's warm, electrified, illuminated and weather-proofed home?
"our records indicate you have not used your cloud connected CPAP machine frequently enough. a healthy night's sleep is necessary for maximum productivity at your place of employment. you must use this machine on average 6 hours per day or the portion already paid by your insurance will be rescinded and charged to you. a copy of this email was also sent to your supervisor"
"your smart speaker indicated that you have expressed illegal opinions while home alone, this recording has been forwarded to the Scottish criminal justice system for review"
"healthy employees are critical to our business. To that end we are issuing every employee a smart watch to help monitor and enforce our physical activity requirements to bring down our medical insurance costs"
Also, do they need to deal with phone notifications, or a boss demanding something right now? There are very few things that demand an immediate now in their lives compared to ours.
Whether I'd like to live like that is a different matter, of course. (Among other things, I'm convinced Thag will bash my head first, before I even notice something is wrong.)
srs? lol. back in the day your concerns were food, warmth and that is about it. now it's social media, covid 19, spy balloons, nuclear war, pronoun war, civil war, market crashes, wealth disparity, climate change/refugees, toxic chemical plumes ... I mean the list goes on and on.
This is true for people who are able to detach from the events of the world, but that is not a universal skill.
Plus a lot of the concerns I listed are not just news you hear about - they are things people are living on a daily basis. Just the other day a guy walked into MSU, about an hour away from me, and killed a bunch of people. For some you can tune that out and carry on with your life. For others, notably people in the community or families who were directly impacted, it's traumatic.
The plume of shit in the air down in Ohio is also about an hour from me. It's not just a news story, farm animals are dying. That is someones livelihood and its indicative that the environment is toxic. That would stress you out, wouldn't it? Should I drink the water? Do I need to move? Can I move? Can I even sell my house now that the local area is toxic?
I think you can stick your head in the sand for a certain amount of time but at some point you need to come up and look around at the world we are creating and become proactive instead of just watching it crumble.
News is written in a way that exploits human psychological flaws. It is written in this way to gain attention. News outlets game attention because newspapers that relied on ad-revenue out competed subscription revenue models. The reason this is so is that people place relatively little important on the time value on their attention compared to the monetary value of their subscription. The reason behind this is...
EDIT: I'm not saying that 'modern' stressors aren't actually stressful. I'm saying that not knowing when and where your next meal is coming from or if you're surviving the winter is just as stressful.
Fuck Lovecraft, but I think he was right. It's not our job to know everything about everything, all the time. But that's what we're incentivized to do.
Maybe thousands of years ago humans were just blissfully ignorant of the dangers that existed?
All of these stressors amalgamate into a chronic "fuzz stress" that has no form and no distinguishable source that constantly sits in the back of the minds of the collective public and is very difficult to expunge because doing that would require addressing all of the individual contributors, which is for all practical purposes impossible without sweeping societal change.
They wouldn't even dream about these things, so they weren't unhappy because of it.
You can't feel like you need something if it doesn't exist (in your era at least).
Today we still don't have casual space travel, time travel, the elixir of life or the wonder drug, but it's not the lack of these things that is making us unhappy.
The study says, "Psychosocial stress may affect the composition of breast milk via several pathways."
If I'm reading it correctly, a single sample was taken from 146 women. Breastmilk composition tends to be higher in fats and carbohydrates in the first few weeks of life and varies by time of day[1]. It's highly variable (even within a single feeding) in composition, depending on many factors, like if an infant is sick and their age.
Breastfeeding duration seemed like it may be negatively associated with cortisol in school age children in one study[2]. If that's the case, the best thing a mother in a stressful environment can do is breastfeed.
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33017792/ 2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355137223_Breastfee...
It was very difficult as the start, getting the latch right, etc.
There's the element of "how to do it" which isn't passed down so readily. Great Grandma didn't tell grandma, and grandma had a hard time helping mum. Western society doesn't have a good track record of intergenerational support and family wisdom.
Stress is also a large part of it. We turned off all news and removed TVs, etc. Once she's on "perpetual maternity leave" and not pressured to return she was a lot calmer just staying around the house with me and the baby.
I feel so terribly ashamed of that. I did not know the basic fact that one must not pour water over the face of a baby. There was nobody around me to teach me how to bathe a baby.
National Geographic must also write an article about dad like me who can’t bathe their babies.
My daughter is okay. She is a grown kid now.
A thick booklet came in her mail. Part of the pregnancy ad deluge. It was a free cookbook, of easy to prepare recipes for the nursing mother. But curiously, the recipes overlapped with her causes-distress list. Like, massively overlapped. I was puzzled - how could this be? Then, in small print, on a back page: Nestlé.
I wonder how many of those they send out each year?
As a new parent you go to class for the delivery experience, an experience which lasts for a day or so and is well-supported while it happens by all kinds of staff. You also get a couple of classes on breastfeeding, an experience which lasts for months and is very poorly supported while it happens.
The emphasis is off -- as noted by the OP when it observes that we know far more about cow milk than breast milk.
And of course, there has been a lot of back-and-forth (google term: Mommy wars) on practices and expectations around breastfeeding.
Formula now is better than formula in 1980 and far better than formula in 1940, so no one should feel bad about using it, but I don’t regret the effort I put in. I think it’s a lot of why, unlike said grandmother and mother, I got back down to my pre-pregnancy weight without much other effort.
But I know it's so ubiquitous it is in the water.
To paraphrase one bankrupt demagogue: "it's makin the frogs gay"