Breastfeeding Thoughts: Can Dad Get Change for His Two Cents?

I posted in the comments to Sarah's post last week on the decision whether to breastfeed or formula feed, but I have some thoughts I wanted to share from the father's perspective.

First, I will stipulate that this was one of the hardest decisions about Nicholas (well, at the time, Peanut) for me to offer my thoughts.  It's a strange position to be in.  To advocate breastfeeding, which seems like a logical choice for the baby's sake, is to ask your wife and the mother-to-be to take on completely the most time- and labor-intensive task of the first few months of the baby's life.  Fortunately, we worked hard to talk things through (I know, that's shocking about us) and make a reasoned and informed decision, which Sarah enumerated pretty well.

I suppose that as a father, the most persistent emotion I felt about feedings was helplessness.  There were several points when Nicholas and Sarah struggled to make things work, and I could only encourage Sarah to breathe and relax, and remind her that we could switch to formula if she truly felt things weren't working.  But I couldn't actually make the decision for her.  And there's not much you can do for a baby only a few days old to get him to feed properly.

More significantly, I felt helpless because I was missing out on bonding opportunities, or at least thought I was.  In the "movie version" of having a baby, what people look forward to is feeding time.  You get to bond with the baby, and he's awake, etc. etc.  But with breastfeeding, only mommy gets to feed the baby (at least for the first month).  So I couldn't even help out a little bit.  I couldn't take a nighttime feeding to help Sarah sleep (though I did do diapers, and lots of time trying to get him back to sleep).  I couldn't take a daytime feeding for fun.  I couldn't take a feeding for Sarah to go out for an hour (as she mentioned).  It was an entire portion of Nicholas's life—and that first month it's a pretty signification proportion—that was entirely cut off for me.  So that wasn't fun, and I enjoyed being able to give him a bottle (of breast milk) once he got to about four weeks old.

As for the breastfeeding advocacy groups that Sarah mentioned, I will add just a few things, one of them an anecdote that explains part of our position.  Two things bugged me about the breastfeeding advocacy we heard, mostly through the class we took at the hospital as part of the baby prep package.  First was the demonizing of formula.  For me this was galling because I knew that I was formula-fed as a baby, and so were my brothers, and we all turned out fine.  [ed.: Yes, he's willing to admit that every once in a while.]  Not to mention that probably half of the parents-to-be in the room also grew up on formula.  The second part that bothered me was that no one ever bothered to explain how to breastfeed a baby.  The 2-hour session was mostly propaganda about how wonderful breastfeeding is ... how beneficial for the baby, how wonderful for the mother, how awesome for bonding, and did we mention that if you give your kid formula it'll end up with gills?

Now, about that anecdote.  This was where the rubber met the road, and the propaganda failed us until a little pragmatism arrived.  I can't seem to find anything we wrote on the blog about this incident at the time, but it's possible.  Anyway.  In the hospital, Nicholas spent his first night trying to nurse for five- and six-hour shifts.  Each time, the nurses would announce that he was "cluster feeding," and we should roll with it.  Can't mess with the baby's breastfeeding schedule, because baby knows best what he needs.  Which was a nice sentiment, but Sarah couldn't sleep at all, Nicholas wasn't sleeping because he was nursing so much he never got full enough to rest, and I couldn't do anything.  Sarah's milk would come in within about three or four days, but it hadn't yet, so Nicholas simply couldn't get enough food by nursing forever.  On our last morning in the hospital, the final shift nurse we had came up with a brilliant practical solution: give him some formula.  I'll wait for you to stop gasping.  Now, she figured out a way to do it without giving him a bottle, by using a little feeding tube that they use for preemies.  He nursed as usual, he got nutrition, he FELL ASLEEP!  Within a day, he was getting plenty of milk from Sarah, and everything was fine.  But the dogma of breastfeeding almost kept us from even getting out of the starting gate.  Instead of trying to deal with an actual problem, the nurses simply repeated what they "knew" to be true: baby knows best, just breastfeed and everything will be fine.  But not so much.

So those are my thoughts, for what it's worth.