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Whether I should breastfeed or use formula
is something I thought a lot about when I was pregnant in 2012. Back in
the '70s when I was an infant, formula was more popular and so I was
bottle-fed. Nowadays, breastfeeding is back in style, and it's deemed healthier and more economical. In some cases this is true, but not in all.
When I was pregnant, my husband and I took an intensive childbirth class. It included a session on breastfeeding,
where I learned about all of the benefits, how to do it easily (or so I
thought), and how to pump. I decided it was what I wanted to do when my
child was born.
[post_ads]However, things didn't go exactly as planned.
When I was still in the hospital after my son was born, I met a
lactation consultant who tried to show me how to get a proper latch. But
it didn't work so well for my son and me. Every time I tried to get him
to latch on, he would scream at the top of his lungs and turn bright
red. Even when I left the hospital, he latched on sometimes but wasn't
getting the nutrition he needed. He didn't seem to like breastfeeding, and because of his reaction, I didn't like it much either.
At that point, I decided to move to formula.
He started with a brand that was provided by the hospital when we were
there. My son seemed much happier on that for a while, but soon he
started crying a lot during the day and incessantly through the night. I
took him to the pediatrician, who thought he had colic, and we changed
his formula to a different brand. That changed everything. He stayed on
that until he moved to solid food.
Another reason that I decided
to use formula, outside of my son's tummy issues and inability to latch,
was that I knew that I wouldn't have much of a maternity leave because I
had started a new job that year. While I could have pumped, formula feeding was just much easier.
The
fact is, while I took the less popular route in today's society, I had a
choice between two healthy options. I can't help thinking about women
who currently live in developing countries who don't or mothers in the
past who didn't. According to a BBC.com article, "Breastfeeding: Was there ever a golden age?,"
women who had their milk come in late or were unable to breastfeed at
all had limited, and usually unsafe, alternatives. Many hand-fed babies
died because of the germs and non-sterilized bottles and accessories. It
was the relative instability of these hand-feeding methods, along with
an explosion of infant deaths accompanying the immigration and
employment booms of the industrial revolution, that led physicians to
seek a safer way and to the creation of formula.
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I know that some
mothers think of themselves as failures because they have to use formula
because they couldn't provide the amount of milk their babies needed.
There's no reason to feel this way because we have another healthy
option. Like parenting in general, everything is trial and error. Some
things that you thought would work for you change when you actually
become a parent—the same goes for the choice between breastfeeding and formula.
More From
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