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Did you feed your baby 20 minutes out of every hour??
I don't remember it to that degree of precision. But I do remember that during growth spurts, it FELT like it was constant.
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Eating around the clock, 20 minutes out of every hour is not healthy for anyone involved....it establishes poor eating habits for the infant and is exhausting for the mother....
So on the one hand, they won't still still be using a pacifier or sucking their thumbs when their 18, but feeding them when they are hungry during a growth spurt will establish poor eating habits? That is a bit strange thinking.
Really? You could tell all that from one post on CD?
We're not talking about a two day old or even two week old baby here; he's two MONTHS old. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating". There are MANY babies who nurse successfully at both breast and bottle. Some have parents who have posted here. Here is a good article on "bottle preference", which also says that nipple confusion is most common in newborns. Low Milk Supply -- Bottles
This article suggests waiting 6 weeks to give a bottle to avoid nipple confusion. Nipple confusion in the breastfed child
Here is another article about nipple confusion: When Supplementation of a Breastfed Newborn Is Medically Necessary - FamilyEducation.com
Nipple confusion is relevant to very young babies in whom breastfeeding is not yet established, and involves any artificial nipples (bottles or pacifiers) because the latch on these nipples is different than for the breast. As your first link pointed out, bottle preference is a totally different thing, and happens at any age, certainly including older infants. It happens because the bottle is typically easier to get more milk more quickly without waiting for a letdown. It is very common in the population that I work most with - women who go back to work and whose babies drink bottles while they are separated. Another related problem that these women deal with is overfeeding via bottles. Many women who have these problems don't even know to attribute them to the bottle, and will say that their baby "self-weaned" at 8 months onto the bottle (actually a bottle preference), or that they couldn't keep up with pumping the 15+ oz that their daycare insisted their baby needed during the day so they must have had low supply (actually overfeeding via bottle).
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If breast feeding were the delicate process that can be disrupted by the least little thing as some people on this forum claim it is, society would not have gotten this far. We would have died out.
I don't at all understand your claim about society not getting this far, being that we are talking about the impact of the relatively quite modern influences of bottle feeding as a societal norm. 75% of new mothers today intend to breastfeed, and that only 25% of them are still doing it a year out. If that were the norm throughout history, then yes, our society would not have gotten this far. But historically, this past century has been a pretty low point in breastfeeding success, or even this past millennium.
Eating around the clock, 20 minutes out of every hour is not healthy for anyone involved....it establishes poor eating habits for the infant and is exhausting for the mother....
This is a cultural norm, not a biological one. In other cultures, it can be common for babies to eat frequently and around the clock.
In addition to holding and cuddling, the !Kung calm their babies by putting extra emphasis on breastfeeding. They give quick little feedings 3-4 times an hour. That’s 50-100 times a day!
Yeah bottle preference can happen at any age so it is definitely a possible risk for a 2 month old. My baby started to develop bottle preference at 5 months old when she was having one bottle a day and I had to stop all bottles for quite a while to get her to breastfeed again (she refused the breast for a couple of weeks except for at night and in the shower - not a fun time and definitely not worth the little breaks I got from those bottles!)
In addition to holding and cuddling, the !Kung calm their babies by putting extra emphasis on breastfeeding. They give quick little feedings 3-4 times an hour. That’s 50-100 times a day!
And besides, eating little and often is a healthy eating habit (for everyone, not just babies), not a poor one.
There are a lot of shoulds and should nots that don't hold up to a lot of people's experience. One might even read less than perfect conviction in the universality of the assertions. Be that as it may, I am not sure what problem you are trying to find that needs solving. Mom does not appear to be the one concerned. And the underlying reason for bottle feeding is g'mas concern that the baby is not eating enough for which there is no reason.
There are a lot of shoulds and should nots that don't hold up to a lot of people's experience. One might even read less than perfect conviction in the universality of the assertions. Be that as it may, I am not sure what problem you are trying to find that needs solving. Mom does not appear to be the one concerned. And the underlying reason for bottle feeding is g'mas concern that the baby is not eating enough for which there is no reason.
If you had read my posts, you would see that I had my own problems with getting my kids to take a bottle. But there's nothing wrong with trying a bottle if the mom can't be there.
Well that depends. sort of a lot on how strongly mom feels about it.
There is a risk, granted a small one, that a bottle can have a negative impact on breastfeeding success. That is a fact.
Also, the child is apparently, healthy according to the doctor. So there is no reason to give a bottle.
So what you are advocating is to take a risk, even a very small one, for zero long term benefit.
If bfing is very important to mom, it isn't for gmom to decide if that risk is worth it.
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The IQ-raising advantages of breast feeding are overblown. It may be that moms who breast feed (as I did, again, read my posts) are more intelligent to begin with.
The above link is one of the better reports of this research that I found.
The link you gave showed that even when studies control for maternal IQ at 7 yo BF kids had a 4 point higher IQ.
"Compared with some other studies on the subject, this one does a better job of separating out confounding factors, such as maternal IQ, family income and education, that have been known to influence a child's IQ, says Gail Herrine, an obstetrics and gynecology physician at Temple University Health System in Philadelphia. She was not involved in the study."
Maybe you don't think 4 points is much, but given it is parametric scale, it is not a small difference at all (especially if you are at one end or the other of the distribution to begin with).
I think you are right. Many people are looking for reasons of why their children are so smart and so much brighter than other kids. And breastfeeding many times comes up. " my child has such high IQ because I breastfed him or her for 2 years" ....What about those breastfed kids who doesn't have high IQ, or even lower than average IQ? There are plenty of them. What happened with the breastfeeding = high IQ theory here? Not to mention all these formula fed kids. There are plenty of very bright , high IQ formula fed kids too. I was breastfed and I am not ashamed to say my IQ is not higher than average. My sister was also breastfed and she is very bright; maybe she was just born that way......
This is why statistics matter.
We know how much an effect lots of things can have on iq, especially genetics. So if you have a large sample of moms, and match them up into groups with similar IQs, some who bf, and some who do not (and as in the study linked how much and long they bf for), if you find a difference in average IQ of the children, you can determine how much of that difference is accounted for by various factors through what is called regression analysis.
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