^ How I feel about babies. At the time of birth? Ew, ick, too many bodily fluids and gore.
Cleaned up they’re not too bad, but between the pooping and the peeing and the spitting up and stuff they don’t stay clean all that long.
Yes, more people should mind their own business.
That’s called “hair coloring”. Or “bleach”.
Yes, what is it with the “Oooo, babies smell GOOD!” thing? Babies smell like people and whatever they’ve recently eaten/spit up. A clean baby smells like a clean person, which is somewhere between OK and good, but a not-recently-bathed baby smells… funky. Or like old food. Or dirt if they’ve been in dirt. Or whatever.
I also think modern folk, particularly first time parents, are a bit too obsessive about the cleanliness thing. Sure, keep them aware from sick/contagious people, if they got a medical issue that’s something to be concerned about, but honestly, a little dirt isn’t going to kill the kid and might even be good for the immune system. They smell better clean, and might feel better clean, and of course you have to clean the diaper bits but a grubby kid is OK. They wash off just fine.
Oh, yeah - I don’t even have kids and those people annoy me, it can only be worse for parents.
Um… yes and no. It’s best in the sense that freshly picked from your backyard garden vegetables and fruit are best - yes, in a sense that’s true but in the real world it’s not and never has been the only option. Frozen or stored in the fridge for a week vegetables are still good, too, and perfectly healthy. Canned vegetables are better than no vegetables. There’s a continuum and you don’t have to nail yourself to one end of it to have a healthy kid.
They don’t know - and they don’t care, and if you did reveal a condition they’d just get all judgmental about that.
Back in the 1990’s I worked at an inner city health clinic. We had a number of women with HIV, and back then it was much more of a death sentence than it is now. Women with HIV who had delivered babies that were NOT infected were told do not breastfeed because doing so might infect the kids. So the women, who were battling a terminal disease, formula fed their babies. And judgmental assholes would give them shit for it, and if the woman unwisely revealed why she was breastfeeding well, people like that shouldn’t have kids! Why wasn’t Public Aid putting the baby in foster care?
Decades later and it still pisses me off how judgmental assholes were cruel to dying women.
Oh, and the father who was raising three kids, one an infant, because their mother was in a persistent vegetative state? On several occasions people seriously told him he should turn them over to a female relative. Because, I guess, men weren’t competent to raise their own kids. :rolleyes: Needless to say, baby was formula fed - he got grief over that “Don’t you know breast is best?” “Yeah, well, mom’s in a coma so that’s not gonna happen.”
As I said - yes, in a sense “breast is best” in the same way that a fully ripe fruit just plucked off a tree 10 seconds ago is “best”, but in the real world most of us don’t have that luxury. Breast is also “best” for the poor in theory because it’s low cost (it’s not free - mom will be eating more while she’s lactating) and cheapest.
But people seem to have forgotten that before we had reliable formula babies died on a regular basis. Or were permanently stunted. Nature is a brutal mother and doesn’t always provide. In the old days if a women couldn’t provide adequate milk her baby often simply died. If the baby had a medical problem making feeding difficult the baby died. If the mother was absent the baby died. Wet nurses were available to the wealthy, and in some cases a female relative that happened to be nursing might take over an infant a mother couldn’t care for, but a LOT of babies died in the old days.
Compared to that, formula is a godsend. Even better, we have different kinds of formula these days.
Fortunately, people are in general resilient. You don’t need a perfect diet to be healthy and have a good life. Better to live on adequate formula that to chase after an ideal that in a particular case is unobtainable.
Even if there isn’t a medical problem the bitter truth is that many jobs are not compatible with a mother nursing her baby. It’s the woman’s/family’s business whether to give priority to the woman’s employment (because financial resources are also important) or to nursing a baby.
Bottom line - people should mind their own business. Whether or not a woman nurses or uses formula or even both should be seen as a private decision of the woman/family/doctor and the lay public should just STFU.
Nicely said, Broomstick.