Notes on breastfeeding

In all honesty I didn’t really think much about breastfeeding prior to having a baby, even during the pregnancy. We’d been to NCT classes which devoted an entire three hour session to the topic, but the men had been diverted to another room while our partners learned about pumps, hand expressing and positions. In my ignorance I’d assumed it was pretty routine: women have milk, babies drink it. You hold the baby in place until it “latches on”, and then it’s a case of sitting there with a book or Netflix until the baby’s finished feeding.

Of course it’s not this simple. The very fact that so many support groups, campaigns and even activists congregate around the topic of breastfeeding suggests that it’s not the simplest skill to master, or maintain.

If you follow the “breast is best” mantra then you’ll know that breast milk is scientifically proven to be the safest and most beneficial food source for your baby for the first year (or more) of its life. Follow it too far, though, and you’ll become a zealot, preaching at and judging other parents for their choices. I read somewhere that “fed is best” – that’s certainly my mindset.

We were all set for breastfeeding: as soon as Ted was born he successfully “latched on” and was feeding. By the second day, though, the midwives weren’t convinced he was getting much from it, and kept us in hospital until we persuaded them otherwise (see my earlier posts on this). Five days later, he’d lost 15% of his birth weight and we were sent back to hospital for a strict regime of scheduled breast feeds, topped up with formula feeds. At the end of this period, we discovered Ted had a tongue tie (along with an unusually high roof of his mouth), which meant he was struggling to breastfeed.

This meant he wasn’t getting much milk when feeding, and consequently Maddy’s milk supply was limited as her body produced less in response to Ted’s feeding patterns. We went to multiple different breastfeeding clinics and asked visiting midwives for advice. This resulted in us buying expensive fenugreek supplements (which did little except make Maddy smell like curry), trying weekend-long feeding sessions (the advice was to stay in bed all day and keep the baby at the breast), and expressing (eg. pumping using a hospital-grade machine) 8 times per day.

None of these things really helped. Ted would nurse at the breast for a bit, then fall asleep, or just give up. We were “topping up” with formula milk, but really this represented the majority of his diet and the breastfeeding was more of a complement to that.

It was difficult for Maddy not to feel some degree of failure here. Women are told all kinds of things about what their body in motherhood “should” do, so for something this fundamental it was particularly hard to realise that it wasn’t working out. We paid for expensive private surgery to correct the tongue tie but it made no real difference. We bought different pumps and gadgets to try to aid breastfeeding, but none of them made much difference. Eventually I remember one night where Maddy told me she’d been crying that day because she was “in mourning”, knowing that realistically she wasn’t going to be the mother of a baby who was solely breastfed. I surprised myself by having a similar, private moment of tears when I acknowledged the same reality.

But this isn’t the way it should be. Increasingly, researchers and writers have interrogated the “breast is best” slogan. While it’s true that breast milk is safer for babies, this is often based on comparisons with third-world environments where water isn’t safe to drink and therefore formula is a risk. Likewise the “evidence” suggesting that breastfed babies go on to be healthier or even more successful in life tend not to control for other factors like parental income, education, and other social aspects. When these are factored in there ends up being almost no difference between a breastfed baby and one reared on formula milk.

Ted is three months old and sleeps almost through the night – last night he went to bed at 8pm and slept until 4am. We know parents who solely breastfeed and their (older) babies still wake every two hours for feeds. Some breastfed babies won’t take bottles because they’re not used to it, which puts a huge dependency on the mother to always be on-hand for a feed. I can take Ted out on my own with a bottle in my bag and know I can feed him without Maddy being around.

I’m not saying that breastfeeding is a bad idea or that everyone should just use formula. The faff of washing/sterilising bottles and heating/cooling formula is definitely a drawback, not to mention the cost (and you’ll rarely see formula on offer or discounted because the state doesn’t want to be seen to encourage its use over breastfeeding).

The thing to avoid, though, is judging other parents for their choices, particularly with something like this where much of the “evidence” is emotive and perhaps even unscientific. Our plans didn’t turn out like we expected (perhaps the unofficial slogan of parenthood) but there’s still sometimes a stigma to describe your child as “formula-fed”, which I think is wrong.

My advice to other dads: breastfeeding is hard, even when it works, and you’re going to need to be there for your partner however it ends up going. But don’t let anybody else make you feel guilty for your choices. A tired, guilty and sofa-bound mum is not a happy one, and we have to weigh up how that affects a baby, too.