In an odd, meandering conversation with a couple of work friends I mentioned that my dentist remarked that I had been a breast fed baby.* One woman laughed and said she had been, too but the man in the group just looked at us like we were loons. I asked him if he had been bottle fed or breast fed and offered my opinion that he had been bottle fed since he had a narrow dental arch. He replied that he had no idea if he had been bottle fed or breast fed. I restated my opinion that he must have been bottle fed because no nursing mother has ever let her babies forget what she did for them.
*not a question, a statement, based on my wider dental arch. He claims he can always tell.
tl:dr version: were you a bottle baby or a breast baby?
I think it is not a coincidence that it was a man who didn’t know. I bet this is a conversation that happens more often with women and their daughters than women and their sons.
I’m pretty damn old now, so I was an infant at a time when breast-feeding hadn’t come back into style in the US. My family lived in Europe, though, so my mother breast-fed my brother and me until we were at least a few months old.
I’m a woman, and I learned this information when I was pregnant with my first child and talking to my mom about my plans to breast-feed. My brother probably wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t been around during some of the conversations, although I imagine if he’d married and had children, it would have come up then.
on a side note I was not able to BF my twins, but I plan on BF or at least trying to with this new baby coming in June. I am a little worried about the logistics of BF when I work from home and have to be on the phone with clients and bankers all day, and often spend the day traveling around the South East to meet with clients. I would have to find time to pull over and pump in a discrete place and don’t know how I would store the bumped breast milk, I’d hate to have to discard it. The fact that I have to continue to work while trying to breastfeed a baby will likely doom the whole idea from the start
Just a quick note for you, April - if you decide you’d like to at least try to pump, there is a group on Babycenter called “The Exclusive Pumpers” that has lots of helpful info, or you can feel free to PM me. I just finished pumping for my little guy at 7 months (wanted to go longer but it was too tough to be tied to a pump with a crawling baby). Whatever you decide, congrats!
Female, 45, I’ve never asked but I’m sure it was bottle all the way. I doubt they even put down their cigarettes first. In fairness to my parents, breastfeeding was only something dirty hippies and poor people did, at the time. Bottle feeding was scientific and clean (and smoking was good because it kept the baby’s weight down!)
I’m assuming I was bottle-fed because my mother had uterine cancer while carrying me and had to have a hysterectomy when I was born, some 3 weeks premature. Of course, I told my siblings the reason I’m the last is Mother and Dad didn’t have to keep trying - they finally got a good one.
I was 100% breast fed, exclusively until 8 months, weaned myself at a year. Like my dad, I have a narrow dental arch with crowding of my teeth and a severe overjet. But my teeth themselves are straight, strong, healthy and naturally very white - I believe good early nutrition is mostly responsible. My sister, who was born a year after my mom had a full-term stillbirth (and went through a fairly deep depression after), has absolute shit teeth, poor thing - as well as the family overbite.
All three of us were breastfed, but Middlebro’s narrow arch needed medical treatment; Littlebro and myself didn’t. I think any relationship between narrow arches and bottlefeeding is in the head of those seeing it.
Also, we don’t need conversations: there are pics of all three of us feeding. And I have yellow teeth due to tetracyclines, yet for some reason whenever I go to a dentist born after those of us who got tetracyclines, they assume yellow teeth are due to smoking.
It did make her rather insufferable when I had problems breastfeeding my own two, however. She just couldn’t grok that this wasn’t coming easily and that my huge bazongas weren’t making enough milk when her itty bitties did just fine. (Milk production is not correlated with breast size, Mom!)
My mom started us all on the breast, then switched to the bottle, but I’m not sure at what point. We were all born between '54 and '65, and I recall that the two youngest went from breast to cow’s milk, so I assume the 3 youngest of us did also. No formula in our pantry! And yes, she was a SAHM.
But my teeth themselves are straight, strong, healthy and naturally very white - I believe good early nutrition is mostly responsible. My sister, who was born a year after my mom had a full-term stillbirth (and went through a fairly deep depression after), has absolute shit teeth, poor thing - as well as the family overbite.