Infant Feeding Parity

In a lame attempt to balance all my recent posts about breastfeeding lately, I dedicate this post to formula feeding.  I am officially "coming out" as an obsessive reader of the "Fearless Formula Feeder" website, whose tagline is "standing up for formula feeders without being a boob about it," which I just LOVE.  The writer of this blog struggled to breastfeed, and after repeat bouts of all the pain that comes along with a baby with poor latch, she decided to switch to formula and write about it.  The thing is: in her demographic, she was just about the only person she knew having these problems, and she felt so guitly.  If you read my post from last May, "Crying Over Spilled Milk" lately, you may recall that I went through that guilt.  I decided to press on.  But only because I was so emotionally invested in it and knew the health implications and am in nutrition and public health school blah blah blah.  But not everyone does.

The fact is that it's not right for every family, and there would be a lot more sick/dead children in the US if it weren't for formula as a back-up.  To paraphrase childhood nutritionist Ellyn Satter and author of "Child of Mine: Feeding Your Child With Love and Good Sense," the benefits of breastfeeding are small, but real.  Breastfeed for as long as you can.  And then know that the vast majority of babies do just fine on formula.  What's most important is that you are happy with your choice because your baby will know if you're unhappy and absorb your stress.

I think the reason I'm so into that website is because I am still recovering from the experience of 6 months of breastfeeding and supplementing hell before Calvin's lip tie was diagnosed and fixed.  As a side note, I have to wonder how many other mothers out there went through this still not knowing that their kid simply had tongue tie or lip tie OR were told by a pediatrician that there's no sense fixing them. (I'm here to tell you that there is.)  In any case, it's sort of healing to know that I'm not the only person who struggled in the beginning, regardless as to the outcome of whether I continued to breastfeed or not.

That's not to say that we don't still need to promote the health benefits of breastfeeding.  Breastfeeding does legitimately have public health and individual health benefits related to cancer and diabetes, some of which come down to your chances of developing certain diseases if you weren't breastfed or didn't breastfeed and some of which are related to how long you were breastfed or breastfed.  Breastmilk is awesome stuff that we'll probably never be able to replicate exactly because mother's bodies are programmed to respond to their babies' needs even after they are out of the womb.  Breastmilk was recently shown to kill the AIDS virus and also recently shown to increase antibiotic sensitivity (read -- good in the battle against antibiotic resistant drugs).  I'm kind of obsessed with breastmilk.

But I'm kinda also obsessed with FearlessFormulaFeeders.com because of its message of promoting infant feeding tolerance one way or the other.  The reality is that infant feeding gets criticized one way or the other, so we need to be understanding of each other and not leap to judging people because we don't know what they've been through. Breastfeeders have it hard because so many people expect breastfeeding mothers not to nurse in public.  Formula feeders have it hard because people gawk at them and tell them what horrible parents they are if they formula feed.  So please keep this all in mind next time you see someone feeding a baby in public.  In any manner.  You don't know what they've been through or what courage it is taking them to feed their baby in public at all.