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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

The results of additional, external, pressure could do more harm than good.

Yup. My wife, for reasons no one could really explain, hardly produced any milk. Fortunately it only took us a few days or so to realize this and start bottle feeding, but a lot of the nurses and midwives we met along the way felt no compunction in making my wife feel like a failure as a mother and human being because of this.

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Came here to write the same thing, my son was born 6 weeks early, hormonally my wife was not ready to breast feed at all, and we had a hugely painful, and for my wife embarrassing experience sitting hour after hour in the hospital with breast pumps and formula bottles trying to get enough, and the right balance of breast milk and formula into my son. The hospital were adamant that we kept at it, and now some four months in, I think my son has only had to be fed with ~20 bottles, total. Mostly when we're travelling or my wife and I are exhausted, I think it's a natural and important part of raising a child, but not everyone can do it, we were lucky, and we need more tolerance of personal choice or circumstance without being judgemental.

Of course until becoming a parent, I had my strong and largely invalid opinions (i.e breast feeding in public is inappropriate, etc) I'm happy to say I've got past those short sighted and ill conceived views and won't judge anyone for anything they do for their child, probably there's a damned good reason why they're doing it, lack of sleep, exhaustion, and a baby crying are pretty powerful motivators to step outside of one's own personal comfort zone.

Other hot topics (especially as a Brit living in Germany, seeing the cultural differences) are sharing a bed with an infant, bathing with them, skin-on-skin contact, etc, etc.

Yes, having a child changes you fundamentally. The difference in me has been dramatic. Despite all the stress, I am overall far more emotionally stable. I'm more industrious. There's no stress like having next to no sleep and having a screaming baby who needs you. Most things that work throw at you are nothing.

The most important thing is that it teaches you what is and isn't important in life, or at least it did for me. I used to panic when a server or website died at work. For me, now, it's nothing. Of course, it's still urgent and I fix but it actually gets done faster as I'm not stressing about it. The most important thing for me is having healthy and happy children. Work is now a means to that end.

I consider myself successful at this moment in time because my baby is happy, nothing else. Even doctors, whilst she was unwell, noted how happy she was. Her nursery notes how incredibly fast she is developmentally, both mentally and physically. That's all in spite of being bottle fed the majority of her life.

Skin on skin is beautiful. If you want to feel less stressed and find an unexpected inner peace, do skin-on-skin. It's known oxytocin is realised with skin contact, regardless. Doing so with your baby, knowing he or she is so totally dependent on you to live, makes for a profound experience.

A big thank you for sharing that insight here.

+1000 Last night I got three hours of sleep, in one hour increments. Five month old has a cold and a head full of snot, would not sleep. My wife and I do night on, night off so one of gets some sleep every other night. I'm sitting at my desk wondering how I'm going to get my head into the code today. Three to four hours a night was common for the first 3-4 months.

About breast feeding, my wife produced plenty of milk, only the anatomy of her breasts keeps the baby from latching on. So she pumps and we bottle feed. She really wanted to breast feed this one, but it just didn't work out.

I'm getting ready to propose to my girlfriend, and reading what you've written has made me immeasurably more excited to become a father. I constantly worry about what we're going to do when we raise our kids and if we'll raise well-developed, smart and productive kids, and this just gave me a shot of confidence that we'll do okay.

> but a lot of the nurses and midwives we met along the way felt no compunction in making my wife feel like a failure as a mother and human being because of this

That is absolutely horrible, sorry you had that experience.

My wife was in the same situation with our first, basically she anatomically did not have enough tissue to generate the volume of milk required. Luckily we were able to get donor milk and rely on this technology: http://www.lact-aid.com/. Amazingly she was able to build enough tissue so that by our 3rd kid we have not used any donor milk at all.

Same experience. We noticed that things were not going well for our daughter, Maggie, too. I told her many times "Look, if you don't feel right about this, we can go on bottles". 6 days she endured, Maggie needing to be latched pretty much every minute. The midwives encouraged her to continue, despite clear signs recent history was repeating itself.

Regardless of anything else,6 days without sleep in any form is dangerous and encouraging that behaviour could really tear families apart. Even though it's disgraceful, with this type of pressure, it's no wonder we see shaken-baby syndrome.

It's been said that the NHS is wrongly focused on curative medicine as opposed to preventative medicine. If there was ever a case for it, I'm sure this would be one.

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