Oh, and you’ve never really seen anyone else do it! That’s so shocking to me - as I have a batch of girlfriends - most of whom had babies, and a normal function for us (we get together once a month for bookclub) is to sit around a nurse babies and talk about pregnancy and labor.
I still remember pulling out a loaded breast to get my daughter to latch on. She was never an easy child to feed, I was never a great breastfeeder, so discreet was not something the two of us ever did. And one of my girlfriends looked at me, stopped the conversation and said “I just have to say this, but you are huge!”
We’ve showed off c-section scars, compared cervical bruising from dating men a little bigger then we were, talked about our infertility and adoptions. Had detailed conversations about potty training.
One of these women breastfed her children til three. Until after a year or so is pretty normal. Although, being a group of women, we’ve had several that didn’t breastfeed (some had issues trying, some of us adopted from overseas, making breastfeeding difficult).
(Just never, never in public).
Thanks for reminding me again how lucky I am to have them.
Grant you, I do leave my kids home with my husband when this is possible, and I try to get out by myself once a week for my sanity (although sometimes ‘by myself’ is defined as ‘me and the baby’ rather than ‘me and 4 kids’). But he works hideous hours at McDonald’s and I have to take kids with me much of the time, or else be stuck at home.
Now, I view every outing as an opportunity for them to learn correct manners in public, rather than a place to take them after they’ve already learned. So before we go in Target, I will say “Don’t even ask for a toy today, because we’re not buying any. You have plenty of toys at home.” And correct them later if they forget. I will say “What are the rules when we go into a store?” And they tell me in chorus, (in rather dull voices), “Don’t touch anything. If you break it, you buy it.” and in general, they’re very good. Like I have said elsewhere, I rarely get complaints, and most people will tell me without any fishing that I have delightful children and they enjoyed them. So as a method, it seems to work.
But I personally shy away from the concept of children as inconveniences. Granted, many people do not like children - one of my sisters in law is vehemently ChildFree and has effectively removed any interest I ever had in talking to her by going into a rant about how horrid all children are, and how they should be ‘seen and not heard’. However, children are people. So, in my view of the world, they are no more inconveniences than any other people, provided they are even halfway civilized. Or, provided the parents are at least attempting to train them while they are out in public.
I can tell you that I am always, every single time, both gratified and surprised to hear that people enjoy being around my children. I don’t expect anyone to like them (though I do expect people to tolerate well-behaved children even if they don’t like children). In fact, I’m beginning to suspect I’m perpetuating a family pattern I had not recognised until very recently. My parents always told us that they raised my brothers and I to be “people they liked to be around” which as far as I can tell meant that we didn’t act like children. What I learned - in contrast, I’m certain, with what my parents intended to teach me - was that if I wasn’t perfect or if I dared to speak up, disagree, make noise etc, I was an inconvenience, and any conflict with adults/authority was clearly my fault for which I deserved punishment (and would even punish myself as a young adult for such ‘faults’, long after I ceased to be a child).
I do not wish to raise my children this way. I am not suggesting that’s what you’re doing either. But I think that’s what my parents did, whether they meant to or not. So I’m making a conscious effort to not think of my children as ‘inconveniences’ to anyone…they’re either well-behaved people in public or private, or they’re ill-behaved people in public or private. Ill behavior is addressed; good behavior is praised an encouraged wherever we happen to be. And lemme tell you, some of our trips out in public are wearying and even angering. But, I figure the kids are learning something every time. So there you go, another insight into a different method of doing things, with reasons why.
Wd:How about it, mothers of the SDMB? After you gave birth, was “getting your body back” a primary concern? IOW, was nursing your child a huge PITA, something you wanted to be over with as soon a possible, an unplesant experience you just wanted to be done with?
Female nonparent here, but I think your question about stopping breastfeeding “as soon as possible” is a somewhat odd response to ns’s negative reactions to breastfeeding a 4-year-old or a 7-year-old. Even if you’re perfectly happy with breastfeeding **for a year or two[/b, and don’t regard it as “an unpleasant experience you just want to be done with”, that doesn’t mean that you might not be getting tired of it several years later.
I do know a couple of mothers who breastfed until their kids were 4 or 5 (only occasionally during the later years, though), and yeah, they were happy when it was finally done with. I don’t think that makes anyone a bad mother or a selfish person who doesn’t care about her kid.
After all, many women also appreciate the special time and self-devotion involved in pregnancy, and care about their unborn babies very much, but they’re still quite happy to be through with pregnancy and move on to the next stage.
Whaddaya say that Ms. Charkoudian is out for a few million from STARBUCKS? Heck, the chain could get some advertising out ofit as well.
Think about it:
“Woman Sues Strbucks; Sez Her Right To Breasfeed Is In Danger”!
Heck, I’ll write the brief!
I know you’re joking, but I have to point out that “nurse-ins” and protest letters from breastfeeding advocates are some of the most benign forms of protest I’ve ever encountered.
I’m sure a few people have filed lawsuits (and depending on the circumstances that may be called for), but in a case like the Starbucks situation, women usually just want to raise awareness, and exert their consumer influence on companies. They let local media know, and then go, buy something from the establishment, and nurse their babies there. It’s hardly a money-grab.
Oh and one of the reasons breastfeeding requires so much advocacy is that it doesn’t make tons of money for anyone, the way formula does. Breastfeeding advocates tend to act out of conviction, not greed.
I’m not sure I understand this. Why does breastfeeding require so much advocacy ? I guess I understand advocacy on behalf of nursing rooms at places of employment (I’ve pumped in a bathroom at work where it was the only place available).
Maybe its just that my experiences have been so positive regarding support to breastfeed - and, by the way VERY negative over bottlefeeding from breastfeeding advocates. I still harbor a lot of bad feelings toward the LLL for their attitude about adoptive breastfeeding (they were all for it, of course, but they weren’t at all realistic, were very patronizing, and “since I had to do the second best and adopt, they supposed this would be the best of a bad situation.” The working mom thing didn’t win me any points with those nutcases either. I’m sure other chapters or other individuals within the LLL are much more reasonable and sensative than the breast nazis I encounters). I never had a peditrician or OB do anything but be supportive and recommend breastfeeding for my bio daughter (though I did need to suppliment my daughter for the first week because she didn’t latch until my milk came in - which took a full week). The place I worked where I had to pump in the bathroom apologized profusely - they’d never had the situation before (it was a small office and I was a contractor coming in on short notice).
I have a very small sample to work from, but the people who complain loudest to me (off this board, I don’t know you guys well enough to put together your attitudes) about people being insensitive to breastfeeding are often the ones fastest to make unsupportive comments about bottlefeeding. I think that is what gets me most in this whole debate.
If you read post #159 you’ll see she expressed the attitude that age 2 or 3 seemed late, and that she felt that nursing at this age was incompatible with the child’s natural desire for more independence.
But as for me, I breastfed for 13 months. Sad when it was over. I felt like I “had my body back” once I stopped pumping and was only feeding him at night. I still had to watch what I took, medicine-wise, but otherwise nursing didn’t seem an imposition on my body, my freedom, or my sense of self. As for getting my body back to what it was like before the baby… it is to laugh. Most of my friends worked at it and succeeded. I didn’t work at it, with predictable results. LOL
I have met no overt negativity toward breastfeeding. No one ever told me I wouldn’t be able to do it - not even that I couldn’t nurse twins (and many women are told they can never nurse twins). I have never had anyone say anything negative toward me while breastfeeding any of my children in public, even the toddlers. (Ah, I lie: my grandmothers are/were both heartily offended at me breastfeeding a child beyond the age of 18 months, and said so in no uncertain terms.)
I have however met with or observed an appalling amount of ignorance and deliberate or unwitting actions that undermine breastfeeding, for example:
***** Hospital nurses who give a pacifier or bottle to a newborn even though mother specifies otherwise
***** Hospital policies that create long separations between mother and newborn
***** Relatives who insist they must give a bottle to bond with the baby, or to ‘give mother a chance to nap’, or whatever. Or who insist that baby is starving even though baby is perfectly fine, and bully mom into supplementing.
***** Relatives (and friends, and complete strangers) who see a baby “too old” in their own minds for breastfeeding (this may be 6 weeks or 18 months) and start harrassing the mother with questions of when she’s going to wean.
***** Doctors who have absolutely no clue, none, how to treat the all-too-common breast yeast (‘thrush’) and either give unrealistic expectations, or inadequate treatment, or plain old wrong advice, or begin to gently suggest that weaning will make the pain go away (which is true, but devastating to a woman who wants to continue, but wants the pain to stop).
***** Lactation consultants whose answering machine message promises they’ll call back as soon as possible, but don’t call back within 24 hours (or at all) when a new breastfeeding mother is struggling with a baby with a bad latch, with nipple injury, or other pain.
***** Husbands who are jealous of the baby taking “their” breasts, or who want their wife’s libido to return, and pressure the woman into weaning for the sake of their own immediate sexual gratification.
…Fortunately, I haven’t run into most of these in my own life, although I did have the most absolutely clueless doctor in my first lactation…told me I could get rid of a persistent case of thrush by applying a little Gyne-Lotremin to my nipples a couple of times a day for 3 days. Yeah. Right. I’d like to have seen HIM cope with the pain I was in. And his advice was so woefully inadequate that it’d make me cry if I didn’t just laugh at it. I eventually got help, and I got over the thrush, but it was no thanks to him. If I’d have followed his advice, I’d have had to wean just to escape the pain.
Oh, and I’ve had the problem with the lactation consultants. Very unhappy with the service they provided. I managed to get better support, and far more immediate, online at misc.kids.breastfeeding.
Anyway, I think the negativity that does exist is far more subtle and insidious than somebody giving a woman a dirty look in a Starbucks. It’s pervasive, it’s culture-wide, and it’s hard to resist. It’s more lack of support than open hostility, but if the result is the same, what difference does it make?
I breastfed my 18 month old for 5 weeks. Most of the time it was in public because I was one of those that “tried to get my body back” I ended up with West Nile Virus that caused meningitis. I was in the hospital for a week on Dilaudid (sp?) and didn’t get to see my baby the entire time. By the time I got home, he was bottle trained and would NOT take the breast.
I NEVER got comments from anyone about covering myself while BFing. I was never asked to take the baby to the bathroom. I already had a plan if I was. I am the type of person that would have said “no I am NOT feeding my child in the bathroom. YOU go eat in the shitter and see how YOU like it!!” :mad:
I do have to wonder tho why people equate shitting and pissing with feeding a baby… :dubious:
I had trouble breastfeeding, so I went to the LLL. Basically got told I wasn’t trying hard enough, formula costs $300/month (What type of formula is that? And where? The most it’s cost me was $140.) and to try harder. Well thaaanks. I gave up not too long after that and Caterpie just was not having any of that. It probably didn’t help that he had to go to the hospital at a month though. So I just pumped until my milk dried up. Hasn’t harmed him at least. He’s a good healthy boy now. I wish I could’ve breastfed though. And the LLL certainly didn’t help.
I will never understand why so many people think feeding a baby the way God and Nature intended is so weird. Really. I will also never understand why, in light of all the evidence that breastfeeding is far better for the baby than formula feeding, the vast majority of mothers still continue to bottle feed, especially in the lower income groups. I mean, hell, formula is freaking expensive, breast milk is free. Add to that the fact that the weight gain from pregnancy comes off faster if a mother breast feeds (it takes a lot of calories for the body to make the milK), and you’d think that the vanity factor alone would lead a lot more women to breast feed.
When my niece was born, my sister wanted to breast feed. Unfortunately, after a complicated pregnancy and an extremely difficult birth, for the first few weeks, Beth was on heavy medication, which she didn’t want to be feeding her baby, so she opted to bottle feed for the first few weeks, and after that, when she tried to nurse, the baby wouldn’t latch, so my niece ended up being a formula-fed baby.
In a situation where there is a medical problem which makes breastfeeding extremely difficult or impossible, I can see a mom opting for the bottle because the alternative would be the baby not being fed at all. But the fact that a mother would choose not to breastfeed, or even that bottle feeding is considered the “default” mode, well, I think that’s just too damn weird.
And, FTR. both my sister and I were bottle babies.
Dangerosa, I know that those “breastfeeding Nazi” attitudes are out there, and it doesn’t help the cause. I myself, while usually avoiding sexism, racism, and homophobia, have to constantly watch myself about slipping into prejudiced thinking about formula. (This is probably because I had to steel myself against using it during my early nursing days, and the easiest way was to develop a habitual thought pattern of “formula is evil!”) I try to remember that formula is a good option for people who can’t breastfeed - and that even emotional concerns can be a legitimate reason not to nurse.
However, I think the extreme push for breastfeeding grows out of a desperate and seemingly impossible effort to roll back our formula-feeding culture. Even formula companies have to acknowledge that breastfeeding makes for healthier babies - to the point of saving some babies’ lives. And yet breastfeeding is largely invisible in the U.S. If you don’t have a baby yourself, you can be completely ignorant of the issue, as I was before I got pregnant.
Baby dolls come with bottles. Babies in books drink from bottles. Movies and TV show new parents juggling bottles, warming bottles in the middle of the night, and so forth. Daytime TV has warm fuzzy ads for formula that will give your baby “the best start.” For shower gifts, new moms get bottles, bottle sterilizers, bottle brushes, bottle drying racks, and so on. Everyone thinks it’s just fine for a baby to have a bottle in a Starbucks or a mall or a McDonalds. It’s not even a question. Unless you are inducted into the breastfeeding world, it will seem that bottle feeding is not only the standard, but perhaps the only way to feed a baby.
Then if you want to breastfeed, people say, “Oh, that’s great - just don’t do it where anyone can *see * you!” Everyone from mothers-in-law to your own pediatrician will tell you to use formula to get a baby to sleep through the night. Pediatricians often advise weaning at the drop of a hat, for problems or situations that in no way warrant it. The immensely popular *What to Expect * series has bad advice on latching and infant nutrition, and encourages moms to start weaning around 10 months. As **Chotii ** said, there are a lot of subtle but pervasive anti-breastfeeding influences.
The simplest way to show that we need breastfeeding advocacy is to look at some numbers from the CDC’s Healthy People 2010 initiative. First, they reiterate that babies should be breastfeed for at least a year, according to the AAP and WHO. Yet the **goal ** of a huge campaign to normalize and support breastfeeding is to have a mere 25% of mothers breastfeed their babies at least a year by 2010. (See here.)
In 2003, 17.2% of American mothers were still breastfeeding their babies at one year.
IMHO (and, evidently, the CDC’s and HHS’s), we need to make breastfeeding a normal, accepted part of our culture, and make it convenient and simple, if we are going to get babies what they need. Nurse-ins and other awareness events help at least put breastfeeding on people’s radar, which is the first step to making it an accepted part of life.
I would have to say because in the low income groups often a woman has to go right back to work to help support her family, and pumping does not maintain the milk very well unless you use one of those electric pumps… expensive electric pumps. At least IME.
Really? I’m kind of surprised, because I once walked in on a coworker who was expressing milk in the bathroom (not the best of all places) using a hand-operated suction pump, and she seemed to do quite well with it. It was a bit tricky for her to get the milk flow started, but once she did, she ended up with a nice bottle full.
Oh the hand pumps work, that’s what I had. But according to the reccomendations up here you need to use one of the electric ones to maintain your milk. But bloody heck if those ones don’t hurt.
Of course IANAD or any of that stuff, this is just by my expereince and what I was told while I was trying to get my son to breastfeed.
It really depends on the woman. I could never get much, even with an electric hospital grade pump, and my milk dried up within days of my daughter stopping nursing - even with me pumping four times a day.
A friend got gallons (ok, I’m exaggerting) in twenty minutes, and her milk completely dried up a YEAR after stopping nursing. Hand expressing was never much of a problem, although she did prefer an electric pump.
Having breastfed and bottlefed, I found far more support in the culture I’m in (I’m in Minneapolis, Minnesota) for breastfeeding. I had coworkers discourage my conference attendence because “travel wouldn’t be good while you are breastfeeding” before I even gave birth! I got snide comments about formula not being best. And even those formula commericals always say “breast is best, but if you can’t breastfeed…”
My daughters dolls have come with no bottles at all (buy them seperately).
Medical professions - peditricians, OBs, nurses, and family practioners have all been professional and supportive of whatever choice I’ve made. Giving good advice when I needed to formula feed and when I had problems breastfeeding. The only bad advice I got from a medical professional was also from a lactation consultant - who assured me my daughter was doing fine on the breast and my milk would come in - she wasn’t - and was about eight hours away from hospital admittance for dehydration when we moved to the bottle as a temporary solution.
I’ve heard many of the same sorts of stories Chotti has, but none of them firsthand. All from people talking about how society isn’t great for breastfeeders and how “a friend of a friend had a nurse give her baby a pacifier in the hospital.” It doesn’t sound endemic to me. And I’ve been guilty of the “you know, you could give the occational bottle.” I’m trying to be supportive, not unsupportive - when a new mom complains about four times up in the middle of the night or anxiety over her ability to pump enough for the baby during work hours.
I don’t know why more women don’t breastfeed. Every woman I know personally who could try did (and a few who didn’t have great chances - adoptive moms and lesbian partners). About a quarter didn’t succeed for long at all - for a variety of reasons - poor milk supply, latching issues, post natal depression, medication. Another quarter only managed for six months or less - pumping at work is difficult, my own daughter had enough at six months and preferred drinking out of the bottle to “the real thing” (the bottle allowed her to see the outside world). The remaining quarter breastfed past a year - with a few until two or three and one person I know until her daughter was five (which does seem odd to me, my daughter is about to turn five and I can’t imagine still breastfeeding her - but to each their own).
As to me, I had mixed feelings about breastfeeding. It was never easy for me, although it wasn’t a personal imposition. Because my son was only a year when my daughter was born, it made a difficult situation more challenging - a 13-19 month old and a breastfeeding baby aren’t a good combination and I didn’t have a lot of time for him. I was sad when it was over, but it was a relief to be able to have others feed her.
It might be so in some places, but I found that unless I said I was okay with a pacifier and had brought one the nurses didn’t even try to give my son one. The only time I had someone say a pacifier was good was when he was in the hospital for a week and they had to give him medicine. It was easier to get it into him that way (slip him the medicine then immediately pop in the pacifier and he’d swallow the medicine)
Just chiming in as another woman who used a hospital-grade pump and never got a good let-down.
Also, not all women have jobs where their employers make it do-able. I’m guessing that lower-educated women (who have the lowest breastfeeding rates) might be more likely to have those sorts of jobs.
That said, I don’t think that’s the primary reason why lower-income and lower-educated women don’t breastfeed… but I do think it would become a barrier to those who chose to try.
What Dangerosa said. I’ve never actually seen a woman act in such a way as the one in the OP. If I do happen to notice a mom nursing her baby (and IME, it’s difficult as most are pretty damn discreet), I get an “awwwwwwwww” kindof nostalgic feeling for the days when I nursed my son.
HowEVER. The woman in the article doesn’t appear to be doing that. She seems, at least based on the article, to be using this instance to step up on her nutso la leche soapbox and shove this down people’s throats.
And THAT, I believe is what most people are in disagreement with, not the right to breastfeed, or to what age, where, how covered up and so on.
Slight hijack. IME, La Leche league was (perhaps they’ve changed since then) a militant group bent on having every mother ONLY breastfeed, and to breastfeed to 4, 5 years old or longer if possible. In my experience and those of several fellow moms in my area when my son was a baby, the La Leche League’s platform was to make any mom “not measuring up” to these standards feel subpar and shameful for her “failures”. Two friends of mine and I were “low producers” and were forced to supplement with bottle feedings and were subjected to some heated “lectures”. We dropped the dubious assistance of the LLL and did the best we could on our own. That was many years ago, and I’m hoping that they’re not so fanatical, but the way the lady in the OP sounds, it kindof brings back memories of some of their, as another poster put it “shrieks of outrage” if everyone doesn’t see breastfeeding as the most glorious and noble undertaking of all time.
I managed to get better support, and far more immediate, online at misc.kids.breastfeeding.
By the time I got home, he was bottle trained and would NOT take the breast.