Why are we still doing this?

Breastfeed, breastfeed not, why should we care?

Look at this kid reading, he was definitely breastfed. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I really wanted to breastfeed my firstborn. When I had him, 18 years ago, “breast is best” propaganda abounded, from parenting forums to posters on the walls of the maternity ward. Newspapers were filled with stories about how breastfeeding elevates intelligence and protects from infections. Of course I wanted to give my precious baby the best chance. And to think that I had a free, mythic resource inside me! Who wouldn’t want to use it?

But it just didn’t happen. I tried in the hospital, with a nurse hovering over me; I tried when we went back home. My son was born five weeks premature, tiny, soft and exhausted. He could barely latch on. He’d wake up an hour after every feeding, ravenous.

I booked a consultation with a lactation specialist. She shifted my boob while I tried, insisting, “there’s no such thing as not enough milk, you’re just doing it wrong!” I entered my home after the appointment and my husband immediately asked, “what’s wrong?” I had the dazed look of a cult member after a public shaming. I hired another lactation consultant before giving up. I breastfed to the best of my abilities, complementing with formula, and breathed a sign of relief when the time came to switch to solids. It was the same with my second-born. Come my third, with a toddler and young kid at home, I no longer had the time or patience. I told her, “you’re getting one month of breastfeeding, missy, do with it what you will.” She grew up to be an intelligent young woman, despite lacking in magic juice. (My sister similarly struggled with breastfeeding and even took part in a tv panel about the unfair pressure on women to breastfeed, go sis!)

I’d been extremely happy not to think about breastfeeding until lately, when a New York Times op-ed hailed bottle feeding as the way towards gender equality in the home, and a certain section of pro-breastfeeding Substack went berserk. My kids had long passed the breastfeeding stage and I naively thought the argument was settled when studies started suggesting the difference between children who were breastfed and those who were not came down mostly to mother’s IQ and social class. As one study explained:

“Children who were breastfed had mothers who had higher intelligence and greater education and who provided a more stimulating home environment. These mothers were also more likely to be older, white, and nonsmokers. The children were more likely to have heavier birth weights and higher birth orders than children who were not breastfed. Maternal IQ was significantly associated with breastfeeding. A rise of one standard deviation in maternal IQ more than doubled the likelihood of breastfeeding. Maternal education level had a smaller but similar effect.”

The research on how class advantages impact academic achievements is long and robust; breast milk is just one more perk. When someone is forced back to work two weeks postpartum, in a workplace that won’t let them express milk, any debate about breastfeeding is purely theoretical.

This is not an anti-breastfeeding post; to anyone who can breastfeed, good for you! Breast milk is absolute magic. I’m just trying to understand why we’re so invested in telling others how to parent. Screen time, toys or no toys - every few weeks or months some new parent war erupts, with judgement on both sides. WHY DO WE CARE? Don’t get me wrong, judging other parents is one of the joys of parenting. But you can do that in the privacy of your home! No need to shame others, or involve the paper of record¹.

The history of telling people how to parent is long and some of it is quite horrific. The history of breastfeeding wars is really about what makes a good mother, but women don’t need additional pressure to feel like we’re doing a bad job - we already feel that without help. And with social media, the pressure to parent in a particular way - gentle, tough, free-range, tiger - has reached fever pitch. Sometimes intervention is warranted, as in cases of abusive or neglectful parenting. But most parents bumble their way through, doing their best and failing to be perfect. The children are fine and if they’re not, it’s not usually because generally loving parents made one wrong choice.

So parents, listen up: don’t get distracted by petty fights when there are real, structural, systemic things that make parenting hard in the US. Let’s unite to fight for universal paid parental leave, so that every parent can choose how to feed their babies. Let’s work to reduce family poverty, so that each of us can choose whether to buy their children toys or let them play with a wooden spoon. Let’s guarantee that everyone has choices! And after they’ve made the wrong choice, let’s side-eye them at their kids’ birthday party like civilized people.

1. My only exception is anti-vaxxers, because they’re not just putting their kids at risk but single-handedly bringing back diseases we’ve managed to eradicate