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If you're breastfeeding, it's gotta be the woman. And ideally, you are breastfeeding. Beyond that, most women strongly want to be with their babies. There was

• xnyan 4y ago
  Pumping and storing breast milk is extremely common. You can absolutely give your child breast milk and work, and I know many professionals who do.
  • dilap 4y ago
    Pumping isn't a full replacement for breast-feeding, though -- there's bonding that takes place during breast-feeding, there's antibody and bacterial exchange, and the milk produced actually changes throughout the day. Of course none of this stuff is critical, but I think for most people, the ideal scenario really is breastfeeding, straight from the breast -- and it's a shame that's so hard for so many to do in our society.
  • fortylove 4y ago
    This is really overlooking the complications that MANY women have with pumping: supply drops, increased mastitis (the pumps are not nearly as effective as the real thing), and most of all, lack of real time response to the babies needs. Just handwaving "but pumps!" really undermines how much effort this takes for women.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      This is an excellent point to bring up, and something that cannot (or rather, should not) be ignored. Still, the approach presumably should be more, not less, support for women who want (need?) to try this?
• DSingularity 4y ago
  Not only that. We are all ready to go to war to protect the right to abort a pregnancy. But where is the passion wrt rights for mothers to not have to feel like they are abandoning their children after shortly after birthing them because they ran out of (or never had) parental leave? Our priorities as a society have been inverted in this area.
  • Volundr 4y ago
    I think you'll find that the cross section of people who support the right to abortion and people who support requiring companies to offer generous parental leave to be quite large.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > Our priorities as a society have been inverted in this area. No, they have not. The states that protected abortion rights are also the states that offer paid parental leave and paid disability leave to new moms. And the states that restricted abortion rights are the states that offer zero parental leave. A significant portion of US society supports helping new parents, and especially mothers. It does not have enough votes in the Senate though.
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  We breastfed our daughter. Her mother pumped to cover times when she was working, and I fed our daughter. The only time this was an issue was when her mother left for a week-long conference. Accumulating supply for that period (and her dealing with the unused supply while away) was mildly challenging but we managed just fine. I then went on to quit work and stayed home to raise our daughter (she's now nearing 28 year old). I'm a strong believer in having a stay-at-home parent, but this "women raise children" thing needs to stop.
  • dilap 4y ago
    We could go even further: You don't need the mother at all; you can always just raise the baby on formula. But that doesn't change that the mother-child bond is a unique and special thing, and that there are real benefits to breast-feeding, straight from the breast. And beyond, the simple fact is that many women really want to be with their babies. It's misguided to pretend that there aren't biological realities underlying these preferences. We should try to tailor our policies to meet the desires of the most people possible. (Not, of course, in a coercive way! If a mother would like to continue working and pump, then of course she should be supported in that. In past societies maybe this was the fight that needed to be fought, but now I think it's the opposite.)
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      The evidence for the benefits of breast milk is overwhelming at this point, and vastly outweighs the evidence for specifically breastfeeding-induced bonding as a factor in a child's early life. So no, there is no reason to advocate for formula and several reasons not to. We should be adovcating for more parent-child bonding, however that happens; for more opportunities for parents to make whatever choices they wish to regarding the work/parenting issues during their child's early (entire?) life; for the normalization of public breastfeeding; for better parental leave policies; and more. None of these things require pushing some point that raising children is naturally women's work (even if breastfeeding itself is).
      • 4y ago
• purpleblue 4y ago
  Breastfeeding is overhyped. Both my sibling and I, along with my wife and her siblings were formula fed. My kids were 100% formula-fed as well, because my wife decided she didn't want to waste her time pumping. Both generations are perfectly normal and healthy. We all caught COVID with only minimal symptoms. Not having to breastfeed took an enormous amount of stress off my wife, and allowed us to split the work of raising our kids more efficiently In Canada, I've heard that breastfeeding has been taken to a religious morality war, where some parents had to sneak in formula into the hospital because the mother couldn't either breastfeed properly or weren't producing enough, or simply didn't want to. There are some advantages to breastfeeding and some disadvantages. I think the narrative of companies in the 3rd world trying to hook low-income families on formula should be considered a crime. But there's nothing inherently wrong with formula and it raises perfectly healthy children.
  • dilap 4y ago
    Without a doubt, a baby can be formula-fed and thrive. It also seems certain that there are advantages to being breast-fed. Exactly how strong these are is hard to stay -- as far as I know, all the research is observational, and so it becomes hard to tease out what is the effect of breast-feeding and what is just coming along for the ride (correlated w/ the type of person that prioritizes breast-feeding). It's still a worthy goal to have a society that makes it easy for women who want to breast-feed to do so. (And I hear you on the moralizing, which is obnoxious. Let the parents decide what is best for their baby and life situation; it is not anyone else's business.)
    • Auracle 4y ago
      There absolutely are RCTs out there for breast milk vs formula- here’s one example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939272/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939272/
      • dilap 4y ago
        Very interesting; thx!
• watwut 4y ago
  Exclusive breastfeeding is for 6 months maximum. That is all there is to it. Any older then that, baby eats solids. Also, the stay at home moms are at risk demographic for alcoholism and mental heath issues like depression - cause the situation causes it.
  • klipt 4y ago
    > stay at home moms are at risk demographic for alcoholism and mental heath issues like depression - cause the situation causes it. Is this true in all societies, or just societies like USA where most people live in car-centric suburbs isolated from any sense of community? In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work!
    • watwut 4y ago
      I dont think it is just car centric thing. The society I am from is not car centric and you actually do have public parks etc. It is super normal to use them. And also, American families tend to own 2 cars, so being car centric does not leave them locked at home. > In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work! I genuinely know much less about social structure in Africa. But I do know that 1 month old being strapped to back in the town market is more likely to get seriously sick - their immune systems are not strong yet. Meaning, this situation happens in places that have much bigger and serious social and health problems. And also, one other question is whether this mom would not picked daycare if she had that option. Moreover, while you can strap baby, you wont strap 4-5 years old and that means they spend a lot of time without supervision too. Which is by the way origin of kindergarten - many 4 years old being unsupervised in German streets as both parents worked 12 hours a day in a factory. Which is default state whenever place is not rich, moms having a lot to do while kids do what they do (and it gets them into problems).
• danans 4y ago
  > I think we've really fucked up as a society when "women can have kids and be with them" is considered strange or a luxury It has always been a luxury. Unless they were wealthy enough to hire domestic servants or happened to participate in the postwar economic boom in the West that reduced the intensity of household domestic labor via household appliances, women of the past also got limited time with their children. They were doing intense labor at home, in the fields, and as domestic servants for wealthier people. The same scenario happens today, as anyone who has hired in-home childcare knows. Historically, precious few women could afford not to work, whether that work was compensated or not. I agree that we should strive for an economic system that gives more parents more options to spend time raising their children, but we shouldn't couch that in faux-naturalistic ideals of what the situation was in the past.
  • dilap 4y ago
    "Do no work and be with your kid" is probably a rarity, but the impression I have is that in traditional indigenous cultures you could do work around your home or village, in a rich social environment of other women and mothers, while being with your baby. People living this way of life are not working themeslves to the bone; they spend lots of time just hanging out and socializing. I think the gruling overwork that most of us experience is more a feature of fuedal and then industrial culture, than a natural state of existence. But still we are in real terms actually super rich, so it should be possible to somehow rearrange things to get back to that ideal, I think. (Of course there are deeper issues here too -- just having a mom sit at home all alone with her baby is actually not very good either. Really, you want mom and baby to be integrated into a meaningful, rich cultural environment. And I think it would be nice if kids were more integrated into normal life, in general.)
    • danans 4y ago
      > I think the gruling overwork that most of us experience is more a feature of fuedal and then industrial culture, than a natural state of existence. Sure, but so are a lot of other features like modern medicine, communications, transportation, that come with industrial culture. Assuming that you are talking about making the privilege of being a stay-at-home parent universal (independent of one's financial means), then I agree with the goal, but that is only realizable via industrial culture coupled with an income and wealth distribution that makes it possible for only 1 parent in the house to work. It would also probably require people to live with less. When mothers were staying at home in the 1950s, the median home size was 983 square feet. Today it's about 2700 square feet. All that extra space and the stuff it is filled with costs a lot, which is another reason that both parents need to work.