PLANK AUGUST 1, 2012
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
I formula-fed my daughter, starting from the first hour of her life. I loved it. And I would do it again. Do you hear me, Mayor Bloomberg?
New York City already has an aggressive program to promote breastfeeding called Latch On NYC, and the city’s health department has convinced most hospitals to stop distributing free formula samples to new parents. But that apparently still made it possible for some mothers to bottle-feed their newborns. So starting September 3, the city will urge hospitals to put formula under lock-and-key. Parents who want to bottle-feed their infants will have to convince a nurse to sign out formula for them by giving a medical reason for every bottle. They’ll also have to endure a lecture about why they really should be breastfeeding instead.
This breastfeeding madness has gone far enough. Not just because holding it up as a universal ideal shames those mothers who physically can’t nurse their infants. And not just because the expectation adds further stress to the lives of women who have jobs that aren’t compatible with pumping. But because it is pure and simple snobbery.
What about the studies proving that breastfed children are smarter and healthier, you say? Doesn’t everyone know that “breast is best”? The only disagreement is over how long to breastfeed, right? The U.S. Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics all agree that breastfeeding is the ideal choice. So many experts can’t be wrong, can they?
That’s what my husband wondered as well when he realized that I was serious about formula-feeding. He is, to put it mildly, neurotic. Once we knew I was pregnant, he had our house tested three times for radon—and we don’t even have a basement. He made me leave the kitchen whenever the microwave was in use. If I let him, he would still leave the windows open to air out paint fumes from two years ago. So to get him on board with formula-feeding, you better believe he checked out all the relevant research findings.
What he found is that nearly every study that purported to prove breastfeeding led to more positive outcomes for children relied on flawed methodology—there was no control group. Two neuroscientists writing for Bloomberg View a few weeks ago explained the problem in the case of studies about breastfeeding and IQ:
“Although it is true that children who were breast-fed as babies have higher intelligence than bottle-fed children, the reason for the correlation is in the mother’s brain, not her breast. A U.S. mother whose IQ is 15 points higher than her neighbor’s is more than twice as likely to breast-feed. Women who breast-feed are also more educated and less likely to smoke. Intelligent parents pass along their genes and also create a more stimulating environment, two advantages for the baby’s development. In short, smart mothers have smart babies.”
If breastfeeding doesn’t automatically provide extra advantages and it does require women to go weeks without getting more than two hours of sleep at a time, why is it the undisputed standard for loving, responsible parenthood? So far as I can tell, people need to believe that breastfeeding is better precisely because it’s harder. The rules of modern parenting say that whatever requires the most sacrifice from us must be best for our children. This belief also allows us to look down on selfish previous generations that turned to formula as the answer. And what better way to validate our own decisions than by requiring that others follow in suit?
To get a sense of how blinkered the conversation about breastfeeding has become, consider those few brave thinkers who do take on the breastfeeding purists, most recently Alissa Quart, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, and the wonderful Hanna Rosin. Even their arguments are reluctant. They point out the economic factors that make breastfeeding incompatible with the lives of many working women. They reassure women who have physical problems nursing that formula won’t harm their babies. But they all breastfed their own children and assert that of course any woman who could make that choice would.
Breast-feeding is a perfectly valid choice, and I would never stand in the way of any woman who wanted to nurse. But it is not the only or even the ideal option available for new parents, despite what advocates claim. Which is why I want to present the full-throated case for formula-feeding and its unacknowledged benefits.
I made the decision to formula-feed for one reason: I wanted to have a fighting chance of setting up an equitable parenting arrangement. I was already alarmed by the fact that every parenting resource was addressed just to mothers. “A strong, lasting bond grows through regular day-to-day interactions,” read one helpful update from BabyCenter.com. “So encourage Dad or your partner to get involved in even the most basic baby care tasks, like changing diapers, bathing, and feeding.” Encourage him to get involved in changing diapers? Oh, hell no.
My husband fed our daughter her first bottle in the delivery room. And he gave her the next three or four as well before showing me how to feed her. That didn’t stop him from directing baby questions to me: “Should I give her a bath?” “I don’t know. I’ve never had a baby before. Does she need a bath?” But it did start us out on something close to equal footing.
The choice to formula-feed also gave us a precious gift in those first few exhausting months: sleep. We were fortunate to have my mom stay with us in the beginning. Bottle-feeding gave us a three-man rotation during the night. That meant it was sometimes possible to manage a glorious eight hours of sleep before I was on-duty again. Eight hours, people. (I bet the La Leche women don’t mention that!) To have a happy baby, you need a happy mama. And a rested mama is a very happy mama.
More importantly, bottle-feeding allowed both me and my husband to bond with our new daughter. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that breastfeeding creates an amazing bond between mother and child. And while I’m sure it does, it also guarantees that fathers have that much less time to develop a bond. I may have initially been a formula-feeding proponent because I bristled at becoming the Parent-In-Charge. But once I saw how my husband adored our daughter and loved their ritual of nightly bottles and stories, I could not imagine denying him that special time with her.
My bond with our daughter did not suffer as a result of formula-feeding. Now almost two-years-old, she spends hours wrapped around me like a baby koala. It would frankly be frightening if she were any more bonded to me—she’d have to be surgically attached. I love her madly. And I was surprised and thrilled to find I enjoyed middle-of-the-night feedings, both because we were the only ones awake but also because I was rested enough to relish that time. Parenting a newborn was both much less exhausting and far more fun than I ever expected.
As for that shameless promise that breastfeeding will help women lose weight faster after giving birth, I am sorry to report that’s not true either. Yes, women burn a lot of calories breastfeeding. But they have to consume a lot of calories as well. My appetite diminished once our daughter arrived, while my activity level rose. Because I was relatively well-rested, we could walk for miles around the city in gorgeous autumn weather. It didn’t take long to walk my way back into old clothes.
Six weeks after our daughter’s birth, we went to lunch with some other moms and infants after a baby yoga class. I didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation because it was entirely about the woes of breastfeeding. One woman was worried about her son, who had been projectile-vomiting because he was apparently allergic to something she had been eating. Another made trips every other day to the pediatrician to weigh her daughter, who hadn’t been gaining enough weight. The woman next to me was close to tears: “I had no idea it would be this hard.”
I looked down at my sleeping daughter, her belly full of formula. I knew from the experience of friends that breast-feeding would get easier for these women. But I was so grateful not to share their complaints during these blissful early weeks with my little girl. I grinned at the realization: I had become a smug formula-feeding mama.
Follow me on Twitter at @SullivanAmy.
18 comments
AMEN!!!! I am appalled at Bloomberg's latest efforts at nanny-state over-control. (Yes, pun intended.) Hospitals should indeed encourage breast-feeding, but putting the formula under lock and key? That becomes dictating an outcome, not encouraging one. I will never forget how grateful my husband and I were for those free formula samples -- especially because they came essentially ready to use -- a few days after my son and I left the hospital. Although I was trying to breast feed, I was having all the typical problems and when he was howling in hunger at midnight, the free formula did the trick. Eventually, after visits from the lactation consultant and promises to myself that I could stop any time, but should try just one more feeding, taking them one at a time, the problems subsided and I managed to mostly nurse until I went back to work. But, as all the articles and commentary report, being able to pump at work is very difficult (and how, exactly, does hooking yourself up to a milking machine that makes you feel like dairy cow strengthen the bond with your baby?). Although I'm a lawyer with a private office, it had frosted glass panes next to the door, so I had to go to a "sick room" to pump and having to stop my work, go to another floor, etc., became too much after about two weeks. With kid #2, I didn't have the technical difficulties that I did with #1-- with latching on or with an office where I couldn't pump right at my desk -- so I managed a full year of nursing/pumping. But I don't know that it brought me closer to my daughter than I would've been otherwise (or closer than my stay-at-home husband who was her full-time caregiver) and will defend the right of every woman to CHOOSE for herself which way to go.
- shellski
August 1, 2012 at 1:34pm
I'm a doctor, and I have always been appalled by the breast nazis who insist that anything other than breast milk is some kind of child abuse. We have three children, and though my wife wanted to breast feed all three, anatomy made it not work out, so we ended up with formula, and I did my share of night feeds. In the Third World, formula mixed with dirty water is very detrimental, but that is not an issue here. The most important factor is the love and attention given to the child, not the molecular formula of its nutrition.
- nayyer_ali
August 1, 2012 at 1:43pm
Some have to do both, bottle and breast feeding. My wife couldn't produce enough milk to satisfy my daughter's hunger but we didn't realize it. The nurse at the pediatrician's office was hyper-critical of my wife for supplementing, not knowing better we quit. The infant was constantly crying until she went on solids. We'd switched doctors by the time our 2nd child came (insurance reasons, another plus for our superior free-market system). Their nurse suggested supplementing with formula. Our 2nd child quit crying. That's why we quit listening to the breast-milk Nazis and tell new parents we meet our experience.
- tmmats
August 1, 2012 at 1:46pm
Bravo Amy Sullivan - by the way, it's interesting reading comments around the Web about this issue from people (lots of men) who apparently consider themselves "progressives," who sound exactly like the right wing busybodies who are also trying to tell women what to do and intruding on our most private decisions.
- Sophia
August 1, 2012 at 2:14pm
Does this mean that women's breasts are headed for the evolutionary scrap heap? In, what, 100 years men will have no hair and women will have no breasts! What a fine looking couple those two will make. I suspect times, and customs, will change. When my son was an infant formula was the rage; no breast feeding Nazis back then (1970). No helicopter parents either. It seems today's young parents believe nobody had children until they came along, or if they did, they didn't know what they were doing. I suppose that carries with it the burden of being smarter than everybody else.
- rayward
August 1, 2012 at 2:18pm
Another issue is for those who have twins or more multiples (an increasing proportion of the population). Even pumping, it's hard to initially satisfy two or more hungry mouths, and the sleep problem is worse. What's weird about the Bloomberg decree is that the most effective way to learn to breastfeed is with a lactation consultant, and sometimes that needs to happen 2 or 3 times, often many weeks after birth. By pushing a draconian hospital policy, they're making it more likely exasperated women will just turn straight to bottle feeding after they leave. So glad to have Amy Sullivan writing at TNR.
- polcereal
August 1, 2012 at 2:22pm
Besides, if we were to be given the choice between a given number of posts solely by Noam or the same total but half by Noam and half by Amy, I'll take the latter.
- rayward
August 1, 2012 at 2:34pm
To suggest that one should not breast-feed in order to assure parity in child-caring is nonsense. Breast milk is not something created by an evil corporation. It is a product of our evolution perfectly developed for providing optimal nutrition for a baby. There are no maternal anti-bodies in formula. I have no time for Nazi anything, but it is entirely appropriate to encourage breast-feeding. Its free, completely healthy and lots of poor woman bottle feed because those evil corporations have found a way to invade the hospital with their free stuff.
- davidman820
August 1, 2012 at 3:15pm
Hard to tell whether this is an intentionally misleading polemic or ill-informed. Of all the hypothesised benefits of breast milk, higher intelligence is the hardest to substantiate, and the evidence is the weakest. So why is this article only about IQ effects, rather than about respiratory infections, allergies, or SIDS? Everyone is welcome to weigh the health effects against other needs, but to pretend that the health effects are not there because the evidence for IQ benefits is meagre sounds like someone trying to convince herself (and others). And fear of microwave ovens is not really a guarantee of effective research skills. And even for IQ, while it's impressive two (not just one) neuroscientists claimed that the studies supporting a breastfeeding-IQ link didn't have control groups, it's just not true. A few seconds on Google Scholar would disprove that. I won't remark further on the disgraceful commenters who choose to compare public-health advocates to people who are best-known for, in addition to promoting breastfeeding, mass murder and war crimes.
- dsteinsalt
August 1, 2012 at 3:19pm
Sooner or later, all parents realize there is stuff in the world that can actually hurt our kids. Once that awful moment passes, the breast milk battles (or those over medicated deliveries, or ... really, the list o' judgement just goes on and on) reveal themselves to be magical thinking: If *only* formula was the most dangerous thing our children will ever encounter..... Happiness comes from worrying about real stuff, taking action to fix it, and letting the rest of it be. Oh, and sleeping. :)
- Wonderland
August 1, 2012 at 3:25pm
Let your young latch on, ladies, just like the chimpanzees. Republicans, including even moderates like Bloomberg, see women primarily as animalistic breeders. We can make our own decisions about breastfeeding, abortion and birth control, thank you very much. MYOB you sexist, freedom-hating jerks.
- heppner52
August 2, 2012 at 9:25am
"Breastfeeding is more difficult . . . " Not for me! I'm a man with a 9-week old, and I get to sleep through the night while my wife does the feeding. Muahahaha! We do a bit of the breast, and some formula when convenient. The only difference I've observed is that the baby gets a little gassier and barfs up the formula. The breast milk seems to go down easier. This whole "controversy" is just part of a larger trend of "perfection parenting." So many of our mommy-friends whisper in hushed voices about the lower-class moms they observe feeding their children sugary fruit juices and junk food. Well, I was raised on formula, fruit juices and junk food. I used to proudly eat a half box of Count Chocula for breakfast. I turned out okay. My .02: status-conscious parents just want some sense of control over the fate of their children. It's a false sense of control, but whatever gets you through the day . . .
- mowencarp
August 2, 2012 at 10:37am
I'm with "davidman820" who sums it up well. I will add that a major reason breast-feeding is even an issue in the U.S. is the lack of coherent and comprehensive parental leave policies. With decent parental leave, a mother who can and chooses to breastfeed could do so with less exhaustion and inconvenience. And there are many ways dads can assist and bond with infants than just feeding them.
- Claris
August 2, 2012 at 1:14pm
Locking up formula is dumb. This is the nanny state at it's worst. But jeez, can all of you families out there feeding formula get the hell over you umbrage at the notion that breast feeding is better for children (and mothers)? You're making a choice that for most babies is modestly sub-optimal because in your judgment the alternative (formula, plus a sane work life and career options) is better for your family's situation. Good for you. We do it all the time (I chose to live in the country when my career situation would have been better by far had I moved to one of the coasts because we thought it was better for the family overall. Big deal. Others would have chosen differently.)
- IowaBeauty
August 2, 2012 at 1:19pm
IowaBeauty -- I think the umbrage is not at the notion that breast feeding is better but at the criticism of women who choose not do do so or can't do so. (I would love to see some research on whethere the benefits are there for babies who drink breast milk that's been pumped or only those who nurse, which might help sort out whether the benefits come primarily from the milk itself (which would seem to be the case if we're talking about benefits to the immune system, etc.) or the bonding, etc. that goes along with breast feeding. Because if the breast feeding itself is key to the benefits, facilitating pumping for working moms wouldn't be the answer. I'm curious if anyone knows of research that has differentiated between the two situations.)
- shellski
August 2, 2012 at 7:15pm
My first wife and I adopted two boys, so naturally we formula-fed them; no problems, except that we had to put one on soy-based formula for a little while. No SIDS, no abnormal number of infections, and both quite intelligent now, thank you (in their 20s-30s). I think the point about this whole much-ado-about-not much is that it's all about statistics. It's like side effects and adverse events with drugs: every prescription and OTC drug you see has a short or long list of them, which the companies have to publish for legal reasons. But in fact, unless the drug is a real stinker, most patients who take them don't experience the side effects and adverse events, or if they do, the effects are pretty mild. Formula is like a drug in that respect; there are very rare adverse events, which get a lot of attention, but mostly formula works (provided it's prepared correctly and administered properly, of course). I think a lot of the uproar is related to the great interest these days in "natural" medicine. Many people think that anything manufactured is horrible. (Ironically, they complain about machines using their Internet-connected machines.)
- JonJg
August 2, 2012 at 7:29pm
I'm with "davidman820" as well. Damn, so much hysteria about a busybody Mayor of just one city. My first two children were born in China so damn straight I thank God my wife breastfed as real bastards laced formula with a toxic ingredient to pass inspections, many babies died before the people were caught. Absolute nightmare. Now I am not saying that formula in the states are like this but what the hell is so wrong about people relying on millions of years of evolution whenever possible. And to say healthcare practicioners are evil bastards for promoting breast is best is ridiculous. I have news for you women, having a baby does not make you an expert on nutritional needs of infants. A Doctor would be remiss in not telling you that breast feeding is best if it is possible. And the notion that not getting free formula is terrible is just silly. If there is a medical reason, or you do not produce enough yourself it will be given to you. Now I am not against all formula (except the third world kind), there are a myriad reasons why women will use it, not getting a few free samples in a hospital is nothing to go ape over though. As to breast feeding at night, my wife slept with the baby, I was relegated to another room, and she got enough sleep each night. It is called turning off the tv and going to bed early. Again, evolution pretty much figured this out millions of years ago. And if you want enough sleep each night, don't have kids. And this kills me: Six weeks after our daughter’s birth, we went to lunch with some other moms and infants after a baby yoga class. How out of touch is this writer and her friends? If she had time to do baby yoga and take nice long walks then she had enough time to get enough sleep while breastfeeding. Having lived in Asia and traveled throughout it I can tell you there is no such thing as baby yoga. It is just doing what mothers do everywhere with babies (play with them, move their arms and legs, etc.) but being a pompous self satisfied twit while doing so. Sorry about the tone but someone has to speak up for the billions of women in most of the world who are not spoiled and entitled, places where formula could mean death.
- blackton
August 3, 2012 at 2:07am
I agree that the "War on Formula" in New York City is absolutely absurd, but Ms. Sullivan, you make it sound like formula-feeding was the only way to get your husband involved in caring for your infant.
- Zuri-K
August 3, 2012 at 5:33am