If making breast milk is vital for survival why do many mothers claim to fail at it?

Factual Questions
1

A substantial number of women in modern industrialized nations rely almost exclusively on baby formula, and say they cannot produce anywhere near enough milk for their infant children’s survival. I could understand if there were issues involving a lack of nutrition for the mother, but in almost all cases of the aforesaid circumstances plenty of food is available, the claim is simply that their bodies will not produce milk.

On the face of it this is somewhat counter-intuitive evolutionarily as human children are pretty resource intensive and for a woman’s body to go to the huge trouble of making a baby, and then not be able to feed it is something you think would have weeded out of the gene pool. Why this seeming evolutionary incongruity?

2

Women resort to baby formula because they can. If baby formula was not available and breast milk was the only option, women would have no choice but to stick with breastfeeding and the extra stimulation of having an infant suck serves to increase milk production. But many women in industrialized nations simply forego the painful stimulation in favor of formula, because it is easier.

3

Evolution doesn’t work at the individual level, it works at the species level. A small number of the species will always fail. Humans fail in thousands of different ways.

Individual mothers could fail because of genetic anomalies or lack of proper nutrition or psychological factors or other reasons. This is no more inexplicable than finding men who can make sufficient viable sperm.

4

People used to live in small multi-family groups. That meant that a baby could always nurse with another woman if necessary.
It also meant that women had better “nursing teachers” around. Also, the combination of an inexperienced mom and an inexperienced baby makes things more complicated. Having a nursing relative around allows a new mom to learn nursing with an experienced baby who shows her how it’s done, while her own baby can practice on a mom with tough, experienced nipples.

5

Breast milk isn’t vital. At least not currently, and I would guess it hasn’t been since people domesticated cows, goats and other human-drinkable milk producing animals.

FWIW: I was malnourished as a baby because my mother didn’t produce enough breast milk. I would probably have survived, but I’m pretty glad it was diagnosed and I got additional formula.

6

Some women who ‘succeed’ at breastfeeding do so because they don’t have any alternative (no availability of formula,) and thus devote all their energies and attention to producing enough breast milk. Lots of rest, eating, pushing fluids, nursing constantly, and doing little else besides.

And often what turns out to be ‘enough’ for the child to survive still leaves the child under-developed compared to better-fed peers.

7

There is also a LOT of pressure to “succeed” at breastfeeding at any cost, which leads to stress, which isn’t very conducive to adequate milk production.

In my case, my son was born with ankyloglossia, which caused a lot of problems with latching for the baby and a lot of pain for me. Eventually, he got frustrated that he had to work so hard to get enough to eat, and I got frustrated with excruciating pain. Once I switched him to formula, he was fine and I was fine since he could eat enough to be satisfied and not have to work so damn hard at it, and I didn’t have raw, irritated nipples. The wonderful :rolleyes: ladies at La Leche League told me that it was far more important to nurse no matter how frustrated we got or how physically painful it was for both of us. The lactation consultant I talked to told me otherwise; that it was more important for the baby to be fed than it was to breastfeed.

Robin

8

Exactly. “More XYZ will be born than can survive.”

I myself had plenty of breast milk for my first child, but inexplicably produced very little with my second child. It happens. I am a well-to-do white woman in a developed nation with good nutrition and good health- go figure.

9

As soon as civilization developed enough to have upper and lower classes, upper class women had wet nurses feed their children.

10

As a veteran breastfeeder (of 2 kids, both for extended periods), I can attest that while it IS natural (and ideal from a nutritional standpoint, being far different in composition from the milk of other species and/or formula) it is not always easy.

As determined as I was to breastfeed, it was a struggle in the beginning with both mine, even my second, with literally years of experience under my belt (or should that be under my bra? ;))

When the milk comes in a few days following birth, there is engorgement, which is painful and can make it difficult to acheive latch-on. It takes time for the nipples to toughen up, and esp. if proper latch-on is an issue, they can quickly become very sore, even cracked and blistered.
Newborns need to feed every few hours around the clock, (breastmilk digests more rapidly than formula, so formula fed infants tend to sleep longer, sooner than their bf peers…not a sign of malnutrition, but of the different compositions involved) which, esp. if coupled with feeding difficulties, can really cut into sleep time for the mom (and whole family). (co-sleeping can really help with this, since there is no need to allow baby to fully wake and get to the point of crying every few hours, or to get up and prepare a bottle, and it allows for the frequent stimulation so important to successful production)

Add to all this the cultural stigma that exists in many areas against breastfeeding, the lack of experienced and supportive role models in many womens’ lives, the economic realities of many women who must return to some form of employment away from their infants (and often lack the support needed to continue breastfeeding when they do), and, of course, the ready availability of substitutes, and it can be a perfect storm that sabotages the process.

Had I NOT been so determined to breastfeed, based on the known benefits and my own preference, I would have given up in the first week or sooner.

And it’s not that there are “so many” women who can’t produce enough milk (though that is often accepted as the cause of the “failure”). It is relatively rare for a woman to not be able to produce enough milk; even women who are severely malnourished can produce enough and nutritious milk, since the components are drawn from the woman’s stores.

But if nursing is not frequent enough, milk production will lag behind the baby’s needs, and factors like stress and improper latch-on agrivate things and can lead to a fussy, hungry baby and the woman giving up before production stabilizes.

All in all, a mother in modern industrialized society is about as far removed from her foremothers as an animal in a zoo is from their wild relations. (and we know that our primate relations require role modeling and peer support to parent their young effectively…it is NOT all instinct)

11

  1. This is somewhat of an ignorant question to ask, as the OP obviously has no experience with mothers whom have been distraught that for some physical reason they cannot nourish their baby with breastfeeding alone.

  2. Nursing problems have probably been around for a milennia. Which is also probably a reason why the infant mortality rate has been terrible compared to modern times. The fact that the infant mortality rate in modern times has gone down has as much to do with successful alternatives to natural breastfeeding, not that breastfeeding has gotten any better or any worse.

  3. True, you can cite cases where inability to breastfeed is a “choice” rather than “mother nature”, but again the OP lumps all non-breastfeeding successful mothers into one basket (choice) rather than the experience of knowing that it’s just not that simple.

12

I wanted to add one additional reason why women in industrialized nations might be more likely to use formula…they have jobs that take them outside the home. I know this was the case with me-I had a newborn who was a poor latcher and I also had a fulltime job. I didn’t have the option of having a baby at my breast all day since I had to go to work.

13

Sorry, but as Map has pointed out, the only ignorance evinced is ignorance of the way that evolution works. He made no judgments about those “whom have been distraught,”[sic] or any others. He observed that the lack of milk production seems to be counter to the notion that humans need to be fed. He did not understand that individual failure is not an evolutionary event for the species. We try to be accomodating here.

14

Was this common?

15

Common and ancient.

Wiki:

Two contracts for the services of wet nurses for slave children. Alexandria, 13 B.C.

Hiring a wet-nurse. Italy, 3rd/2nd cent. B.C.

Advice on hiring a wet-nurse. Rome, 1st cent. A.D.

Choosing a Wet-nurse. England, 1612

16

I hope they’re not under your belt by now :stuck_out_tongue:

17

Of the humans alive today, it is estimated that only a very small percent would survive “in the wild” for one reason or another. Problems with breast feeding and a zillion other things propagate through our species as we are more and more removed from evolutionary pressures due to to modern civilization and medicine/technology.

That’s probably at least a piece of the puzzle.

18

Oh, much longer than that. “Modern civilization and medicine/technology” hasn’t been around long enough for much of an evolutionary effect anyway. As soon as humans became smart enough to cooperate well, you’d see a lessening of Darwinian pressure for efficient milk production. More children of mothers with low milk production would survive to breed, because some other woman would let them nurse on her instead.

19

Also, it is easier to claim that you tried and failed, than to incur the wrath of the vigilant by saying that you had no intention of ever breastfeeding your child.

20

I totally disagree with those posters who claimed that the question was ignorant or betrayed an ignorance of evolution. Nor do I think it has been satisfactorily answered.

Evolution theorists debate whether evolution takes place mainly at the level of the gene (the “selfish gene” hypothesis), the individual, or the species. Species evolution is a difficult concept, although I do believe that it is more and more accepted. But ultimately, it is individuals who reproduce or fail to. And if a trait leads to reproductive failure, then it is should be quickly eliminated since such individuals will fail to reproduce and the frequency of any associated gene should decline. The OP wanted to know why this trait has not in fact declined.

One possibility mentioned is that people lived in small groups with perhaps a number of lactating women in the group who could take over. While that is an explanation, it should still lead to a decline in the genes (if it is a genetic trait at all) involved, albeit more slowly. Wet nurses are another possibility, but I hardly think that something available mainly to upper class women in recent civilization could have much explanatory value. Finally, we come to what I think is the likeliest explanation: that it is not fundamentally genetic. That most of the difficulty is explained by the fact that most women are not giving birth in their teens and twenties, but more and more in their thirties and even forties. This has to be a fundamental change in human reproductive life and that is where I would look first for an explanation.

There must be statistics on lactation and age, which is the first place I would look.