Breastfeeding - Bottle-Feeding Culture

One of the reasons why breastfeeding is so hard for many Western women is that we live in a bottle-feeding culture. Breastfeeding is natural but not instinctive. It needs to be learned. However, it is hard to learn about breastfeeding in a bottle-feeding culture.
    This page describes the bottle-feeding culture we live in. For related information, see the page on breastfeeding culture.

• Many of us have never seen a baby being breastfed.
• Practically none of us have seen a toddler being breastfed. Even fewer people have seen a tandem-nursing mother.
• All of us, however, have seen many babies being bottle-fed, including babies propped with bottles.
• No wonder that we think of bottle-feeding as the normal way to feed a baby!
• Images of bottle-fed babies abound in movies and on TV, but breastfed babies are more or less restricted to anthropological films (usually we see a starving woman with a malnourished baby at her apparently empty breast--can we help form the impression that breastfeeding is for unfortunate, poor, uneducated, hungry people, and bottle-feeding for the modern and healthy?). There are relatively few movies featuring breastfed babies.
• Many children's books depict bottle-feeding as the normal (usually only) way of feeding a baby. Few children's books feature breastfeeding (although, fortunately, the number seems to be increasing).
• There are many bottle-feeding doll sets, but few breastfeeding dolls.

To make the matters even worse, the casual observer gets a distorted picture of current baby feeding practices:

• Bottle-feeding is highly visible
  • Bottle-feeding parents do not feel compelled to hide what they are doing--everyone can tell that they are giving their baby a bottle.
  • Even when not feeding, bottles in a stroller, diaper bag, on a dinner table, etc., announce that a baby is bottle-fed.
  • In the supermarket, one commonly sees people buying formula.
• Breastfeeding is much less visible
  • Some breastfeeding mothers avoid nursing in public. They might instead use bottles in public. Or they might practice "back room nursing".
  • Mothers who do breastfeed in public usually try their best to be discreet. While a careful observer can tell that a mother is nursing her baby, a casual observer often has no idea.
  • Nursing mothers are not easily recognized as such except while nursing (cf. bottle-fed babies--you can see their bottles in their hand, in their stroller, etc.). Even those mothers that wear specially made nursing tops would not be recognized as such by most people, and many nurse in their everyday clothes.
• Bottle-feeding is also disproportionately visible because manufacturers of artificial breastmilk substitutes promote their products through advertisement. Breastmilk, although superior in just about every imaginable way, is not vigorously promoted.

Our society is desperately in need of mothers nursing their babies in public openly. We also need books and TV programs featuring breastfeeding mothers. Our children need breastfeeding dolls, not bottle-feeding ones.
    If a girl grows up thinking that breastfeeding is the normal way to feed a baby, she will be much more likely to try it, and knowing that a lot of women can do it with no difficulty, she'll have more confidence in herself as a nursing mother. A child growing up seeing breastfeeding as the normal way to feed a baby will be much less likely as an adult to be disturbed by the idea of a mother breastfeeding her baby in public or in private. Such a person is likely to be supportive of his or her mate in breastfeeding their baby. He or she will also be friendly to all women nursing their babies in public.

Back to the breastfeeding main page

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