Infant Feeding: Fill & Download for Free

Babies were often fed by wet nurses, but if there were no women nursing at the time, it was a problem.They were often fed sweetened, watered down milk, which resulted in about 50% of babies being fed this way, dying. Wet nursing was common, as you knew otherwise your baby would likely die. Most women were able to feed their own babies, but in the case of the mother dying, starvation or the like, there was a lot of infant morality.The history of infant feeding is very interesting to read. A History of Infant Feeding

If he’s hungry, he needs to be eating.I bought into the “force your baby on a feeding schedule” thing as a first-time Mommy.But I’m in a lower-level apartment of a huge home with thin walls and ceilings and no noise proofing. Even with the crowd of teens upstairs and adults who insisted they didn’t mind, I wasn’t too keen on inflicting hours of overheard crying on them.Besides, I cannot stand listening to crying.I tried. I tried the “it hasn’t been two hours - of course you’re not hungry” thing.Considering that I was a self-employed traveling piano teacher with a husband working two jobs and a first baby, scheduling was already atrocious. But the books and Moms said it, so force him to wait to eat I did!Not so with our second son. Crying? Feeding time. It helped that medical difficulties left me pumping and bottling for him, with formula to supplement. So an on-demand bottle was an easy thing.I stopped trying to tell our baby what the clock said, and started letting our son tell me when he was hungry.Since we seem to get big, hungry, growing boys - and the second was colicky from his first night on! - I think that was a very good thing.He still loves to tell me he’s hungry… only now he has to wait for snacks. Or at least wait five minutes in between his bowl of oatmeal and his apple and his cheese and his carrots and his peanut butter and jelly…Ditching that restricted infant feeding routine was an awesome decision for us.

Simple planning? I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’ve never experienced the fucking agony of having breasts full of milk and no one to consume it?You definitely haven’t had to feed a baby who didn’t take a bottle well, for one reason or another, or witnessed the calming effect that nursing has on both mother and child. You probably haven’t experienced the fun of trying to keep breast milk at the right temperatures outside of the home, either. Bottle feeding is perfectly fine for a baby, even with formula, but there are pros and cons for every method and style of infant feeding – and it just isn’t up to you to make that decision for someone else.Now that we’ve moved past the idea that pumping and bottle feeding is in any way “simple”, let’s move on to the real question: Why shouldn’t a woman nurse when she wants or needs to? I only ask because we do not as a rule prohibit stuff just for the hell of it, and we don’t restrict the rights of one person unless doing so is necessary to protect the rights of someone else. Breastfeeding involves two people: A mother and a baby. Neither person objects to the breastfeeding that involves them. So what is the problem?Does it bother you to watch infants who aren’t crying from hunger? Or women who aren’t in pain from being unable to express milk? Or are you just afraid of breasts? The first two possibilities are cruel and require no action at all, and the third can be solved by you pointing your eyeballs in a different direction. I think I know what you’re about to say, so let me stop you right there: Breasts are not dicks. They aren’t even sex organs, so there is no need to ask if men should get to walk around with their dicks out. Nursing women have a valid need to (possibly and/or partially) expose their breasts, men have no need to show off their cocks in public.Women who breastfeed are opposed to your suggestion of “planning” because how they nurse is no one else’s business – but why don’t you go ahead and use a catheter when you leave the house, so you won’t have to bare yourself in a public restroom. You know, plan ahead a little?