If it wasn’t for the fact that I know my mother only started smoking to lose the baby weight after my brother was born this could have been my answer. My parents both worked for General Foods and if it didn’t come in a bottle or a package it just wasn’t good food.
I was born in 1959 and my mom breastfed me, even though that was in the middle of the era when formula ruled. My mom was a registered nurse and with her medical training was conscious that breast is best.
My mom couldn’t nurse me, as soon as they delivered me I was taken to another city because I was, um, dying. She stayed behind in the hospital I was born and damn near died too.
Oh my, Panda! What happened?
My mother was also hospitalized shortly after my birth for a hemorrhage, and in 1963 nobody was worried about making sure she expressed milk and would be able to nurse. I went home to my grandmother’s house and “had” to be bottle-fed. My mom nursed my brothers and sisters, though understandably she didn’t nurse my twin sisters for long; it was too exhausting for her. She had the help of the rest of us for feedings, though of course it would have been better if she continued to nurse. I nursed all of mine, though my daughter put up a nursing strike at six weeks and I panicked and put her on formula. I wish I’d stuck it out, though.
I chose “breast baby” in the poll. My sisters and I were all breast feed for 4-6 months, then bottle fed. My mom would have preferred to breastfeed longer, but didn’t have enough milk (or, more likely, enough support). We were born between 1973-1977.
Male, born in the 70s, breast-fed. Though then again, my mom considers “dirty hippie” to be a compliment, and we also happened to be poor. I’m certain that she would have made the same decision had we been rich, though: She was very upset about how the processed-food manufacturers pushed bottle-feeding so aggressively, especially in developing countries.
Female, born in '60, youngest of three, all breast fed for a couple of months at least then switched to bottle.
My mother has told me that after I was born the Dr and nurses in the hospital wanted her to bottle feed, but when they brought her the bottle, it was dirty so she said thank you, but no. (When she told me this, she scrunched up her face in a look of disgust and shook her head a little, like eww! - it’s funny, I have such a picture in my head of her telling me this.) She also said that the hospital (a military one) was over crowded and they put her in a bed on a screened-in porch.
Bottle fed, my mother wasn’t a cow you know.
I breast fed my son, something which my mother found disgusting and my son considers to be TMI.
Being adopted, bottle was pretty much a given. But given the timeframe, still probably would’ve been bottle anyway, since the whole breastfeeding thing hadn’t come back into vogue.
I feel proud I was born into a family that was ahead of the curve. Mom breastfed all 5 of us girls (I’m the eldest), and as each new one came along she made sure we observed their breastfeeding, to indoctrinate us that this is how it’s done. Actually, I’ve assumed that with her medical education she would have been conscious of breast benefits, but this was the 1950s and early '60s, when, as many here have noted, it was medical professionals who put pressure on moms to bottle feed. So this reminds me, I need to ask Mom how she got to be so enlightened in that era. I guess she must have learned it from her mom, who was also a nurse back in the 1920s, before formula took over.
My mother and my sister and I all have an issue where our milk production has a delay - milk usually comes in 24 to 48 hours after birth - for me it was five days. For my sister five and six for each of her kids. I don’t know that my mothers ever came in. For my sister and I it took stimulation with a pump during the time we couldn’t feed (our babies wouldn’t latch with no reward), my mother didn’t use a pump.
With two of us she tried, and had the same issue each time - with the third she never tried.
Male - I voted no idea, though I strongly suspect bottle-fed would have been correct.
Male, born in the 50s, breast then bottle fed, but I have no idea for how long, and I’m not going to ask.
I was born in 1971; at the time very few women breastfed, so bottles it was. My sister, too, born in 1977.
It’s a stereotype. A mother will sometimes lay a guilt trip on a child to get that child to do something for her. As in, “You never call. You never visit. Why won’t you? After all, I carried you inside me for nine months, I suffered horrible pain when I was in labor with you, and I nursed you at my breast. I’m the one who brought you into this world. You owe me.”