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My year in parenting books: The Baby Sleep Solution (aggressively early sleep training regimen, yes please), Your Baby's Bottle-feeding Aversion (a godsend Kindle purchase found after desperate googling), and Cribsheet by Emily Oster. I'm going to talk about breastfeeding now.
About 15 minutes after I gave birth, my 4-lb. baby was whisked to the NICU, where he was bottle fed (formula instead of donated breast milk, due to COVID concerns), and I hemorrhaged a massive amount of blood (no transfusion, also due to COVID), decimating my milk supply.
No one told me this might happen, even though I met with multiple doctors and lactation consultants before I left the hospital. I started pumping as soon as I could and pumped dutifully every two to three hours for the next six weeks.
My baby was so small that breastfeeding wasn't even a real possibility in the beginning, so I gave him every drop of breast milk I could while feeding him mostly formula. I put him on my breast between pumping and bottle feeding so he could learn to latch when he was bigger.
Meanwhile, I waited for my supply to come in. I read mommy forums and took supplements and talked to lactation consultants and pestered my doctor. My supply inched up until I started getting mastitis/clogged ducts, which both knocked me out and depleted my already low supply.
The fucking misery! There were weeks when I cried every other time I pumped. I loved being pregnant and I thought it was going well until I got preeclampsia and gave birth prematurely to an underweight baby, and then I couldn't even feed the poor boy. Felt like such a failure.
Thanks to two mom friends (and literally zero medical professionals) who were vocal proponents of formula, I made the difficult but incredibly freeing decision to stop pumping at around seven weeks. If I'd read Cribsheet, I think I would've stopped much earlier.
There are definite benefits from breast milk, but they are much smaller and less important than I'd ever let myself believe. The one IQ point I worried about, for example, is a difference that doesn't show up in sibling studies, which like, why is it even worth mentioning then?
It turns out wealthy, educated mothers are more likely to breastfeed, and most studies just don't account for that difference, or the obvious effects of parental resources on child health outcomes. I'd been told this, but must not have fully believed it until I read this book.
Anyway, this is a lot for a book rec thread, but if you're planning to have a baby and decide how to feed it at any point, you should absolutely read Oster. Breastfeeding can be shockingly difficult (honestly, how are humans so bad at it?) and you don't have to do it!
We hear a lot about the marginal benefits of breastfeeding and almost nothing about the benefits of having a happy mother and a father who participates in the most crucial, time-consuming part of childcare from infancy. These can't be outweighed by lower rates of ear infection.
