I think it's almost unfathomable for us to imagine how far we are from a "traditional" homosapien life. I read a book called "Hunt, Gather, Parent" where they describe the life of multiple 'less developed' societies, and how they spent a large portion of their life interacting with babies, adolescents, older children, pregnant relations.
It's a miracle people are still able to reproduce at all given our isolation from reproduction and the processes of rearing children.
Forget the isolation; western civilization all but requires two income earners to have a "median" life. There's remarkably little time or money to raise a child.
Median individual income: $40,000, poverty level for "replacement" families (two adults, two children): $30,000.
This, I think, is a perverse effect of feminism. Women wanted to be able to get a job, they ended up being forced to get a job, and men still have to work like they did before, so, who cares for the kids? It is an example of bringing equality by making everyone miserable, and it is not even equal: women still do more household tasks on average, except that now, it is in addition to their job.
The winners in this story are childless singles: women can now have a proper carrer without help from a man, and single men suffered essentially no downside, in fact it is a win since they are not expected to cover every expense the women they meet may have anymore.
Some countries are starting to notice that and are passing laws that give both mothers and fathers equal benefits, like parental leaves, bringing back what the result of feminism should have been: giving the option of stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, also allowing fathers to assist mothers who are recovering from pregnancy or breastfeeding with household tasks instead of being forced to work.
To each their own, but I'm not convinced they're winning overall either. Humans are, for better or worse, extremely driven to procreate and have families and communities. We're absolutely butchering those opportunities at a grand scale in North America, and so far it seems to be having adverse effects on our mental health. I don't know how this will play out but I have serious concerns.
While the option for mom OR dad to stay home with baby is nice, I worry that it's nowhere near the correction that we need.
I say this with the awareness that everyone wants something a little different out of life and this reflects my take on what that is; not everyone would agree at all. I'm certainly not trying to make a statement about what people should want.
>Humans are, for better or worse, extremely driven to procreate and have families and communities.
But in reality, marriage has fallen off a cliff. It's the lowest ever.
And women are much more money-oriented than men - men want a hot young woman, women want a provider - even if they work themselves, they want a man to make as much or more. Men don't care - they will marry a broke waitress if she looks good to him. And the reality is that men ar dropping out of society - women are earning 60% of undergrad degrees, and I've read that it will be 70-75% in 10-15 years. These women are not going to want to marry men not at their level.
If any woman disagrees here, I'll gladly be the stay-at-home partner while you go work and I play video games all day.
August 2020 Pew report (describing data from 2019): "Half of all solo single people don’t want a romantic relationship or even a date."
A long, long time ago I made the decision not to get married because marriage is a really, really bad deal for the man. I feel that no man should get married, not one. You may say "what would happen to the human race, then?" Well, the world might not be flamed baked like Venus if the human race was to die out in the next 100 years.
I don't know if these stats are due to income levels needed for children, I suspect that's only a small part of the issue. But every statistic out there points to the fact that 1 parent children do far worse than 2 parent children. It's like a terrible self perpetuating cycle has taken off in many ways.
“Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%) … “In comparison, 3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households." [1]
worth noting that 2 children is below replacement rate, so someone needs to be having 3 kids too. which is becoming increasingly uncommon especially because of how many things change between 2 and 3 kids. (Notably: 2 carseats fit in ~any vehicle. 3 fit in very few vehicles unless you rush the oldest into a booster seat.)
just want to say that we have had four kids over 6 years in one of the most expensive states in the us, and went from $30k to over $100k in that time frame. It is a huge jump in salary and feel very blessed regardless of the hard work, but just know most of the time was spent below the top end. If you are emotionally stable enough to have a good marriage (and therefore have kids), go for it! You will afford it, and life couldn’t get better!
I find it funny how middle class people all talk about how it is too expensive to have kids. Meanwhile, a single mother in poverty with 4+ kids is a regular sight depending on what side of town you are on. Yet, "I'm too poor to have kids" is not a phrase you'd ever hear from such a person.
I don't think "poverty level" is the correct term here. I believe once below the poverty level, everything is basically free (if you have kids to claim at least). Free rent, school, food, healthcare, etc. But there are many other "levels".
I know for a fact that 5 years ago in small town Texas you got food stamps and extremely reduced healthcare costs if your yearly take home pay was less than $40k and you had two children. I know because my brother-in-law's wife would give us all the free junk she'd get from the SNAP program that she didn't want. Sugary juice, snacks, etc. We'd throw it straight in the trash. She tried breast feeding but gave up in an hour because she got free baby formula and she could then dump her kids on anyone to babysit without a need to worry about feeding the infant. Once her two boys were 3 and 4 years of age, she qualified to put them on a bus at 7am (they were still in diapers) to be taken to a preschool that was restricted to low income families only. She would then spend the next 8 hours sitting at home and trolling my wife on facebook. My wife only posts pictures, to which this woman would then critique in the most Karen way possible. "Your kids are too small for that car seat", "That car seat should be rear facing", "That doesn't look safe", etc. If we called her out on anything, she'd get mad and spend hours digging through our old photo albums to put the red angry face on whatever she deemed necessary. Felt extremely invasive. Absolute crazy lady. We put up with that for nearly two years before blocking her. Which then made family meetings awkward so we quit going to those as well. Which that just turned us into the "stuck up" "snooty" rebels of the family. But oh well, we are much happier now. No clue why I just typed all this, but what ever.
> Meanwhile, a single mother in poverty with 4+ kids is a regular sight depending on what side of town you are on. Yet, "I'm too poor to have kids" is not a phrase you'd ever hear from such a person
"I'm super happy and am living a great life" is probably also a phrase you'll never hear from this person.
Because what people are really saying when they say "I'm too poor to have kids" is "I would have to sacrifice a great deal of the comfort and stability of my life to have kids" and they are choosing not to do that.
From one perspective it's a selfish choice.
From another, having kids when you can't afford them is the selfish choice.
From yet another, having kids at all is a selfish choice.
Everyone on your street or apartment building cooks, cleans, washes and cares for, ONLY, their little cubicle of people. Even if you're 5 ft away physically our society doesn't allow for sharing of any of that repeated labor - unless money is involved.
We spend so much time solo doing activities that would have been communal or at least shared, which puts more pressure on people as well.
I read a comment here years ago saying that in ancient times the average woman would have only a few dozen menstrual cycles in her life. Most the time between puberty and menopause you were either pregnant or breastfeeding. Does the book discuss that too?
That may have been true for agricultural societies, but it doesn't sound right for hunter gatherers (at least from my memory of an anthropology class I took). Many hunter gatherer societies have strong postpartum taboos and space children at least three years apart.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about - between being a child and having kids of my own, there were practically no children in my life. I’m not unique by any means.
I don’t know what, if any, effect that kind of culture has in breastfeeding, but it sure does seem pretty remarkable.
I understand the cheekiness of this comment, but reproduction in many societies has indeed become more difficult for many of the same reasons (among several others). The sex hormones that orchestrate lactation and mother-child bonding are largely the same that regulate menstrual cycles, sexual desire, pregnancy, and childbirth. If disruptions to these hormone balances are found to be a major cause in an increase in breastfeeding issues, then this likely correlates strongly with issues effecting the entire reproduction “stack”, if you will.
Think about how many millions of years were spent evolving the human brain, human instincts, and human child to adult development process to maximize the survival of children and hence our species. Now think about how psychotic it is, in light of that, to make small children sleep in a separate room from their parents. No wonder they have night terrors.
Our society is utterly riddled with anti-natural facets like that which cause no end of problems.
Having a small kid also got me wondering how chimps cope with the same problems. I mean they’re 98% similar to us, so the babies must go through very similar stages…
I can only assume since we're all here that the survival benefits of incredibly loud infant cries outweigh(ed) the risk of attracting predators. I'm no biologist, but I can imagine how the fact that babies cry promotes formation of close-knit social groups to help defend against predators in numbers.
I started aggressively filtering my water (Berkey black + white filters) during my last pregnancy, and I was amazed how much better I felt and how much more water I wanted to drink. I was trying veryhard to drink lots of water to support the pregnancy, and found it difficult. When I started filtering it, it became really easy and I felt a lot better to boot.
I still get pretty low key dehydrated if I try to subsist on tap water. I suspect my body is balancing my need for water against something in the water it doesn't like. Fluoride is a prime suspect, but any number of other things are possibilities and I wouldn't really have any way to know. But I do often wonder if I'm far from the only one with such an issue, and most people never find it.
I didn't for a long time. It is an easy guess for me that if there's something in the water that's bothering you, and you need to dramatically increase your intake to support two people, biological problems and tradeoffs might ensue. And nursing in particular does require an awful lot of water.
I ultimately started filtering all of my water, and it seems like an obvious thing to do in retrospect -- like having a firewall for your home network. It seems silly to me now that I ever assumed that any old pipe sludge that found its way into the system at any point was something I would necessarily want in my body.
I don't know why everyone just accepts uncritically the water fluoridation stuff. It seems like as a culture we're re-examining so many things we incorrectly thought was "safe" but water fluoridation seems to still be a "sacred cow". I'm guessing it's hangover from Birch Society people being against it, but seems weird to just assume it's fine (especially when looking into the somewhat shady origins of the program)
What shady origins? It was done because because of the horrible state of dental health in the US.
"To join the armed services, men had to have six opposing teeth in their upper and lower jaws; in 1941, almost 10% of recruits were rejected for this reason alone"
Like it doesn't even matter if army recruits is a skewed sample, young men not having 6 pairs of teeth that touch is insane.
"In the early 1950s, two public health researchers stated that on average young men between the ages of 20 and 35 years had already lost an average of 4.2 teeth and that 90% of them were in need of bridges or full or partial dentures."
> "In the early 1950s, two public health researchers stated that on average young men between the ages of 20 and 35 years had already lost an average of 4.2 teeth and that 90% of them were in need of bridges or full or partial dentures."
Do wisdom teeth count? Because if they do, I am already missing 4 teeth, in addition to 4 more that were taken out to help make space for the rest of my teeth to prevent crowding.
So missing 4.2 teeth on average doesn't actually sound as bad as you make it out.
1. Is it actually "accepted uncritically", or has there just been no meaningful evidence that the risks of water fluoridation outweigh the benefits? If there has been quality research showing the risks outweigh the benefits, care to share?
2. What are the shady origins of the program?
Flouridation has been studied and scuritnized pretty heavily since the 40s. No one is just assuming it's fine. It is.
The positives of flouridation far outweigh any of the negative consequences that could occur. But I have never heard of anyone with a flouride problem in my life.
Indeed, I'd sooner ask about chorine/chloramine or any number of dissolved contaminants from pipes and whatever environmental stuff doesn't get filtered out in the water supply. We probably shouldn't be adding fluoride to our water either (questionable medical benefit at best), but as far as things go that my body really doesn't want in it, fluoride is probably not the worst thing in my tap water: https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/system.php?pws=MA3035000
We moved to Montana when my child was a teen, and the dentist immediately remarked that my child must have grown up somewhere else because of her teeth being in such good condition.
Most local teens grew up on well water and their teeth suffered for it.
There are lots of people with excellent teeth in different parts of the world - and most of them are not using flouridated water. I think the diet does make a difference in dental health
Out of curiosity, why would growing up on bottled water lead to terrible dental outcomes? I grew up in India, where the water supply isn't fluoridated, and I didn't see dental health that was significantly worse than the US. We probably got most of our fluoride from ingesting bits of fluoridated toothpaste.
Yeah it's possible that I'm conflating correlation with causation. But her dentist seems to think it's a factor. They coat her teeth with a fluoride paste and it seems to be working.
On the flip side her late 90s grandmother still has some teeth and walks around unassisted. I don't think any of my grandparents made it to their 80s.
Tangential anecdote: I had a co-worker in India who grew up in a region with excessive naturally occurring fluoride in the groundwater. As a result, he had blotchy dark brown teeth - not stained, the substructure of the teeth were brown all the way through. The side effect was that the teeth were substantially stronger than regular teeth, as were presumably his bones. My understanding is that extremely high fluoride can mess with bone and tooth development in the embryo, with lower levels only showing up as the cosmetic blotches but no developmental issues.
The benefits that motivate widespread fluoridation, kick in at concentrations well below those needed to stain teeth. If I recall the history of it all correctly, the level of fluoride needed to stain teeth basically leaves you with teeth that are all but impervious to run of the mill cavities from plaque buildup. The bugs just don’t have the power to degrade tooth enamel containing fluoride minerals at concentrations that are high enough the staining becomes noticeably brown (im talking about an arbitrary colour grade here so please be generous in interpretation of just what I mean by “brown” if performing additional research to refute me)
So basically while we don’t suffer for lack of fluoride to harden our teeth… the extra fluoride gives us a lot of protection. And yes you can have too much fluoride, but your never going to see that kind of medical pathology unless you somehow get a lot more bioavailable fluoride in you in a short span of time than you could possibly get from drinking multiple litres (or even gallons) of fluoridated water per day, they don’t put enough fluoride in the water to turn teeth brown, and we have ample evidence that fluoride bearing spring water above these concentrations does no harm for long periods of time.
I get being concerned, but we got so much more important things to worry about with regard to environmental chemicals than fluoride. It’s pretty easy to read the history, find out about the kids with the brown but perfect teeth, find the other stories from around the world, the second generation families living healthy on spring water that is/was naturally highly fluoridated, and put it all together yourself without need to take anyone’s word for the fact this actually is a pretty good “one weird trick for perfect teeth”.
Agree with everything you're saying. For what it's worth, the concerns about the high fluoride in groundwater are almost entirely about unborn infants - adults seem to suffer no severe issues from drinking it. With teeth, high fluoride exposure causes blotchy teeth before they erupt - once the (adult) teeth have erupted, the fluoride seems to help. It's also a continuum - some regions have such high levels that it's considered unsafe for consumption, period. These are the regions where developmental issues are seen.
I don't know if technologies have changed much in order to change this calculus meaningfully since I last checked, but here's why I like berkey filters:
1. Although filters are expensive upfront, they last a very long time and are cost-effective as a result
2. The large containers keep clean water accessible and at hand for things like cooking, and not just drinking
3. The simple design makes it so, were something to go wrong, I could craft my own filters onto their plumbing once the filters are spent. A ceramic filter would be trivial to make, for example.
4. Their filters last a long time so I don't need to frequently buy disposable filters and generate more waste. The waste from their filters is also minimal and predominantly biodegradable.
5. The system is low tech. It'll clean rain water in a pinch with no electricity. I don't need anything special to keep it working.
6. If the filters slow down, I can clean them to get them working better again. This makes them very versatile for off grid use where the inputs into the system might not be as clean as city water. This would ruin a lot of filters on the market.
7. The aesthetic gains!
> But in our test on chloroform, the Black Berkey filters performed poorly, lowering it by just 13% in our test sample
> New Millennium Concepts, however, claims—right on the box the filters come in—that the Black Berkey filter reduces chloroform by 99.8%, to “below lab detectable limits.”
> However, he said that they stopped meeting the NSF removal standard after approximately 1,100 gallons of filtering—barely more than a third of the 3,000-gallon lifespan New Millennium claims for the Black Berkey filters.
Oh gosh. I didn't mean to touch off a controversy about fluoride. As I said, I suspect, but I don't claim to know. But if you want to know why I suspect, here is my reasoning:
I can subjectively tell good and bad water apart in double blind tests over a period of several hours, so I know that what's happening to me isn't just in my head. So -- I don't know whether it's fluoride or not, but it's definitely something.
The reason to suspect fluoride specifically is that a working Berkey "black" filter still produces "bad" water for me -- the white filter stage seems to be necessary. Twice now, I've had a white filter go bad on me that I didn't realize had happened, felt like crap, tested the water, found tap levels of fluoride, replaced it, and felt much better. The white filters are advertised to get fluoride and arsenic, so that makes it a prime suspect. I don't know exactly what else they might get that the problem might be, but there are a lot of suspects the black filter would block, and it's none of them. So if the problem isn't fluoride, it's something that that fluoride is a good proxy for in this setting.
As the problem I'm trying to fix is low key dehydration (as opposed to avoiding something medical like fluorosis), I don't expect there would be any medical research pointing to fluoride as a culprit. Neither will there be any saying it's safe for my purposes. I have found that while medicine as a field is excellent for healing injuries and saving lives, it's sort of terrible at optimizing health.
What I do know is that I drink a lot more water than is typical -- about two gallons a day when I am not nursing, and much more when I am. I also know that the studies that proscribe fluoride levels in drinking water are ancient, optimized narrowly for dental health, and based on average intake. I know as well that the difference between an effective dose of fluoride and a dose considered potentially dangerous is about an order of magnitude -- right about the difference between my water intake and what is typical. (And as an aside, it blows my mind that we make formula for babies with water like this, dosed based on evidence like that. They don't even have teeth!)
Hence, it's a prime suspect, but even if it turned out to not be that, I would still filter my water very aggressively because something real is definitely happening to me, and that definitely fixes it.
My choice of Berkey is that I want a maximally aggressive solution. I'm not looking to save money. I'm looking to nuke whatever it is that is causing me problems, and am perfectly fine with paying a bit extra to nuke everything. I bought one actually originally concerned about PFCs; discovering the filtered water made me feel much better was an unanticipated happy accident.
Yes, I don't have a lot of faith in standard recommendations. It's not that I set out to drink that much -- I drink water to solve problems. That's just how much it usually ends up being. The idea of a one size fits all recommendation is something I find laughable. Needs are personal based on activity, environment, and biology.
Some worrying Orthorexia vibes in your post. Could mean nothing, but keep an eye on them.
Distilled water is not good to drink. It dehydrates the body, so you could feel the need to drink more. Being devoid of salts can cause also an entire set of undesirable problems if you are pregnant and drink it for too long. The concept of osmosis is very important in biology and disrupt it can cause undesirable effects.
Of course context matters. Heavily filtered water is better than drinking biologically contaminated stuff or water with heavy metals but at long term will hit you.
Your reference to orthorexia is extreme. There's nothing in the parent comment that would take my mind there. It's true that relatively few people realize how polluted drinking water has become - lead and other metals, PFAS, plastic particles - take your pick. I have a hard time understanding why any knowledgable person who can afford to do so wouldn't filter all or almost all of the water that they drink and cook with at home. OP also didn't mention distillation as a filtration method. A reverse osmosis filter with a remineralization stage is vastly more popular and a no brainer to install in any kitchen. If you do drink distilled water then you can supplement with an extra pinch or two per day of salt and minerals in your food and you will be fine.
Orthorexia and OCD tendencies are real and destructive but I'd be equally wary of normalizing the oftentimes highly toxic exposure of modern life to the point where anybody who express tangible concerns and takes meaningful countermeasures is pointed to as a potential basket case.
I appreciate the concern! I actually salinate and mineralize my own water, and agree that it's a necessity. I don't trust the pipes to keep my water clean, and I don't trust the local rocks to mineralize it properly either. I agree this take is unusual, but I don't think it's paranoid. On the contrary, I think it's realistic. Lots of pipes and rocks have documented problems.
Is it Orthorexia to worry about tap water? At least in my case, I don't think so. I'm a very unusual case in a lot of ways, but I'm very sure what I am doing helps me. Looking at broader society? I mean, I know we as a society have problems with chronic and widespread dehydration. I know relentless messaging to people to drink more water doesn't seem to help. I know in my case, the problem certainly wasn't in the motivation, but in the filtering. Maybe I'm weird, but wondering if this is more widespread doesn't seem like an unnatural guess to make, particularly when it comes to a water-heavy activity like nursing. None of this seems paranoid to me. Eccentric, sure, inconvenient, sure, unpopular, sure. But if this is all crazy, I don't see how.
I had a similar issue of always forcing myself to drink water, not liking it very much and ended up not drinking enough anyway. This lead me to have all sorts of "symptoms" (I was probably bordering being dehydrated). Then I bought a filter jug (Brita) and I love water now.
Diet and water intake is very important for new mothers. Soupy foods with less fiber and that are easily digestible also make a big difference. I am going to look up the Flouride part. Thanks for sharing.
We moved to a place with excellent well water a few years ago. When I drink water in a restaurant now... well, I don't. 99% of the water I've tried in restaurants tastes disgusting.
Most of the comments here are implying that there is some environmental change which has caused breastfeeding to become harder or less efficient. The article doesn't seem to say that, though. I didn't see any implication that breastfeeding was better back in prehistory.
It's possible that it's always been hard. Being in a social group large enough that there are other mothers would solve the issue, largely.
There's definitely one issue not mentioned here, and it even has a tie-in to software development.
You may recall the famous dictum "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." -- possibly Bruce Ediger. That turns out to be wrong. While human infants have an instinct to suckle on a nipple rubbed against their lower lip, human adults have no instincts about presenting the nipple, holding the infant, or anything else close by. All of that is learned behavior -- and bad positioning can be very painful.
If you don't have women breastfeeding around you to teach you, you're at a major disadvantage. It used to be the norm; now we have certified lactation consultants.
If you can get hold of one. The one at our hospital was on holiday. We got so much different conflicting advice and brusque indifferent visits. We wanted to breastfeed to help the baby's microbiome because raised infection markers sparked a precautionary round of antibiotics for his first seven days. I was also on antibiotics as a baby in the seventies and have suffered awfully all my life with eczema, asthma and allergies. The doctor was very dismissive about our concerns.
But the baby wouldn't latch, the doctors kept coming round saying they wanted to raise the baby's weight and would have to give him formula if we couldn't get him to feed. Horrible environment, hot as hell in a crowded and loud ward. Very dispiriting. Not surprised babies don't feed, not surprised many women give up.
And to cap it all off it was "breastfeeding awareness week" in the hospital!
To add onto that, for a discussion board that prides itself on being more intellectually minded, there's a disappointing number of clickbaity/misleading headlines posted here on any given day.
Well, it's good I didn't imply that, then. People can miss things in articles, ignore them, or just not understand. All are valid reasons for missing/ignoring that part. My point is that the article doesn't mention it was easier to breastfeed back in the day, despite that being a kind of obvious point to make. So it's possible that they couldn't make the point because we don't know if breastfeeding was difficult back then.
Technically, the rule is against accusing an individual of not reading the article. It's widely known that most of us smash reply before reading the third word of the headline -- that's why the site automatically strips words like "why" and "how" from titles; it really improves the chances that comments will be at least topical.
Note, snark like the above is explicitly forbidden.
> I didn't see any implication that breastfeeding was better back in prehistory.
I think it's kind of implied by the causes that are hypothesized in the article. Hormones, nutrition, your schedule and routine around breastfeeding. Are these not all frequent topics on the subject of modern life and environmental pollution?
My mom breastfed me in the 80s, but didn't produce enough milk. So, she had a wet nurse. This practice was mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and probably goes back even further. That women are taught that this is a biological imperative is astonishingly ignorant of human history. Humans are not solitary by nature. We evolved as a society. It should be no surprise that we have evolved to rely upon that. And, no surprise, wet-nursing occurs in other social mammals too, even cross-species, just as we supplement with cow's milk.
That said, it's great to hear that scientists are exploring the mindbogglingly complex hormonal interactions at play. We won't change the culture, failure to breastfeed will still cause shame for this perfectly normal occurrence. It would be good for new parents to feel less stress in regards to this aspect of childrearing.
I too don’t understand why wet nurses aren’t a thing in our modern times. I suspect being bipedal has been an impediment for motherhood. Most mammals raise their young together communally. Human beings did not evolve to be solitary creatures and in our times, for nuclear families. Large extended families and tribal cohesiveness is how humans survived.
1. Because 'stuff' can be transferred via breast milk and, in general, people cannot be trusted.
2. Because we now have formula, which was intended to allow society to move on in a way which allowed females more freedom after birth.
3. Because, to quote Lenina Huxley, "Eeewww, disgusting! You mean... fluid transfer?"
---
We ended up nearly unknowingly starving both of our children through breastfeeding. We only knew this happened after the second one ended up in the NICU for four days even though we were working with Lactation Consultants, Pediatricians, and Nurses who assured us our children were getting enough to eat.
My wife, instead, had to spend 2+ years pumping and exclusively bottle feeding because we didn't want to go with the formula route and we had the means to have her stay at home--something most parents cannot do.
I am sorry that you had to undergo so much trouble. There should be better lactation consultants for sure. There are breast milk banks where donated breast milk saves scores of children everyday. I think today’s technology that freezes breast milk and allows women to bank the excess they express is the equivalent of wet nurses. It is the most noble form of charity and donation.
There are many organizations like La leche foundation and human milk banks. They usually direct their donations to premature and severely malnourished infants. Donation of human milk saves lives. Milk is pasteurized before consumption. It is also tested.
When it’s expired or when women don’t want to donate their excess milk, I have known some mothers turn it to cheese.
On a lighter note, there is a fetishized demand for breast milk soap. A lady on our Nextdoor forum sells them like hot cakes and I heard she bought herself a new car . We all had a laugh about it but I guess every dollar helps!
anecdotally, my wife struggled to breastfeed our first born. The hospital lactation consultant wasn't very helpful. Ultimately, we found another who's knowledge and bedside manner was very good. I'd hypothesize the lack of generational homes leads to lack of information for new moms. Add on stress about things like jobs, careers, family expectations, and it becomes very difficult.
> "...who's knowledge and bedside manner was very good."
Had a similar experience and I came to believe part of the dad's* jobs is to act as a circuit breaker if you end up with a militant lactation consultant. Some seem to think guilt and browbeating new mothers will somehow get things to work. Then it's time to step in and suggest some one else or some other solution.
*Dad, partner, whoever. Just someone who isn't on a hormone induced emotional rollercoaster.
> *Dad, partner, whoever. Just someone who isn't on a hormone induced emotional rollercoaster.
Not to disagree with your point, but to note: Fathers' hormones also change during pregnancy and postpartum. Most commonly known is that there is a slight decrease in testosterone. This is often suspected as being something to make the man a better caregiver.
Two of my sons had problems with nasal congestion. They wanted to eat, but they needed to breathe even more. A baby who tries, screams, and tries again is the tell. Or who just can't seem to make up his mind as to whether he wants to or not. Or who just can't seem to form any sort of a secure latch. It's easy to blame a bad latch, but babies are good at sucking on things. I didn't find latching was any sort of problem when the noses were working right. They were letting go because they had to. The fridababy nose sucker, saline sprays, and sitting in steamed up bathrooms were life savers for us.
Playing support staff for a 6 month old now..daily massages for the baby in steamy bathrooms is helpful. I have been doing this with my grandmother in our large joint family from back when..one thing I have noticed that is diff now than it was over many years ago are the eczema rashes and esp after vaccinations. I guess that’s the immune system kicking in…treating the eczema gently rather than directly and immediately resorting to steroidal creams is better. The nasal congestions are also on the rise..usually post vaccination. The steamy room massages do help alleviate the distress a bit.
Nursing mothers need capable nutritionists as well as lactation consultants. The advantage of crone women in the family assisting is that they usually have a history of all related women and the various births in their heads. Women usually went back to their mothers’ home after seventh month of pregnancy and stayed there for at least 6-12 months post birth.
child birth was a huge factor on human mortality (both mother and child). Human's ability to conceive frequently (monthly fertility rather than annually) and being able to conceive for many years allows success. If we only bred annually and only bred for a few years, we likely would have gone extinct.
Different poster: But what worked for my wife was "Medela Nipple Shield" in the appropriate size.
What I find interesting is that our first didn't eat for TWO DAYS until we got that piece of silicone. It was recommended by the lactation consultant, but the hospital didn't stock them because they had a policy against assistive devices. It took two days because the lactation consultant didn't work weekends.
The hospital's view was essentially: Breastfeeding had to "just work" or else formula. Nothing in-between. Ultimately our kid was 90% breastfed with minimum supplemental formula, we also were able to move away from the Nipple Shield within a month. But yet things like Nipple Shields get fought even by some lactation consultants and many hospitals.
You can find numerous articles pointing out why they're bad, but in my view "fed is best" and by attacking assisted devices like they do, all they're indirectly doing is hurting mothers trying to breastfeed, many of which will give up, and just use formula (since they're essentially called bad mothers either for using assisted devices OR formula, so may have well lean into it).
When we had our second, he was a larger baby, and while we did need the shield, he only needed it for a week total. The different lactation consultant recommended "trying without" every time we met her even when it was self-evident it was ineffective.
TL;DR: Breastfeeding information, advice, and assistance is shit-tier in the US and is very hit-or-miss.
You'll find hospitals have a lot of "current thinking" policies around babies that seemingly have no real concrete reason. For example, they swung wildly from little to no skin-to-skin (it was "dangerous"), to skin-to-skin being of absolute priority. Co-sleeping has also swung wildly, and is currently in the "you'll kill your baby!!!" side of the swing. Little or low quality science, it is very cargo-cult run.
Most current bad policies in the US originate from wanting to be "Baby-Friendly Certified"[0]. For example MANY (most?) US hospitals have closed overnight nurseries in Labor & Delivery, so post-operative mothers cannot get better sleep which improved their recovery times and reduced risks of post-operative issues, this is from a bad reading of "Baby-Friendly" key clinical practices No.7. The problem is that third party certifying organizations have taken WHO's fairly commonsense ideas and run wild with them in order to make certifying a time-consuming and expensive process (and done tons of harm in the process).
The specific reason Nipple Shields are the current evil is Key clinical practices No.9 even though it directly contradicts Key clinical practices No.5, and worse No.9 doesn't actually forbid assistive devices, it is the intermediate organizations that have interpreted it that way.
Here's a quote from the below Wikipedia article:
> It questioned whether full compliance with the ten steps of the initiative might inadvertently lead to the promotion of potentially hazardous practices and/or counterproductive outcomes. Specific concerns described in this paper included increased risk of sudden unexpected postnatal collapse, rigidly-enforced rooming-in practices leading to exhausted or heavily medicated mothers caring for newborns, and an unnecessary ban on pacifier use.
Keep in mind this isn't some government initiative nor is the WHO really responsible for many of the US specific problems. This is for-profit US hospitals competing against one another to appear superior, while actually creating situations where both mothers and babies get worse care in the process (and the financial savings of not having on-site nurseries, is likely a huge bonus).
I wish it was shareable. If she presented my son to her breasts with a certain posture, he would latch without any issues. If she didn't, then it would hurt her immensely. I want to say the lactation consultant "smashed" the boy's head to the breast, getting his mouth full before he had a chance to do anything, but its been 15 years. I think the biggest thing to learn is that works for one may not work for another. Keep searching with optimism.
Not OP, but one bit that helped for us was insisting that our second newborn doesn't get given a "pacifier" to stop crying (which the nurses all want to do at the hospital because something something... quiet). My best guess is that it makes the baby "lazy" and used to "easy sucking", so they don't try hard enough on a real nipple.
Different position worked for my partner - the sidelying position. Otherwise she found she was having to lift him up higher than was comfortable for any length of time.
Chronic stress is one of many, many reasons listed. It's confirmation bias to go into something looking for a particular answer. In the article, the mention of chronic stress is more of a passing remark and isn't discussed other than that one quote. But it sounds like your takeaway is that chronic stress is definitely one of the main contributing factors. The article doesn't support that.
> my hypothesis is stress is high in society and there are many unknown effects.
Exactly. You have a prior hypothesis about stress. This article makes a brief mention of stress and you take it as evidence of your hypothesis even though the article doesn’t support that at all.
my point is, I'm not a scientist, so pointing out a bias (in my case a preconceived speculation) won't change my methodology for a future study. you're just going "nuh uh" with nothing else to say.
I am creating a narrative, and based on the discussion from my comment, it was exactly the narrative I wanted to provide.
I'm surprised we're more stressed now than humans from thousands of years ago who somehow managed to produce plenty of breast-milk.
They didn't have as much safety from pillaging tribes, hungry animals, they didn't have antibiotics, anesthesia or life-saving surgeries. They didn't have access to a grocery store a short drive away, or a fire department.
Can all of the advancements in human QoL above be undone by turning on CNN on one's 70" LCD TV in one's warm, electrified, illuminated and weather-proofed home?
Humans thousands of years ago had the support of their entire community. A modern human can maybe rely on their spouse. Life as a rugged individual is stressful.
> How is a modern person so much more stressed out?
srs? lol. back in the day your concerns were food, warmth and that is about it. now it's social media, covid 19, spy balloons, nuclear war, pronoun war, civil war, market crashes, wealth disparity, climate change/refugees, toxic chemical plumes ... I mean the list goes on and on.
But they question is why does this stress everyone out. In our day-to-day lives you can basically ignore all of it, provided your basic needs are met and you are living in an environment where more of your material needs are being met. So what is it about "news" that causes more actual physical stress than local conditions?
> What is it about "news" that causes more actual physical stress than local conditions?
News is written in a way that exploits human psychological flaws. It is written in this way to gain attention. News outlets game attention because newspapers that relied on ad-revenue out competed subscription revenue models. The reason this is so is that people place relatively little important on the time value on their attention compared to the monetary value of their subscription. The reason behind this is...
> In our day-to-day lives you can basically ignore all of it
This is true for people who are able to detach from the events of the world, but that is not a universal skill.
Plus a lot of the concerns I listed are not just news you hear about - they are things people are living on a daily basis. Just the other day a guy walked into MSU, about an hour away from me, and killed a bunch of people. For some you can tune that out and carry on with your life. For others, notably people in the community or families who were directly impacted, it's traumatic.
The plume of shit in the air down in Ohio is also about an hour from me. It's not just a news story, farm animals are dying. That is someones livelihood and its indicative that the environment is toxic. That would stress you out, wouldn't it? Should I drink the water? Do I need to move? Can I move? Can I even sell my house now that the local area is toxic?
I think you can stick your head in the sand for a certain amount of time but at some point you need to come up and look around at the world we are creating and become proactive instead of just watching it crumble.
EDIT: I'm not saying that 'modern' stressors aren't actually stressful. I'm saying that not knowing when and where your next meal is coming from or if you're surviving the winter is just as stressful.
It’s not as simple as that. I’ve been hungry and cold (poor, homeless or near enough to it). I’m well off now. I stress about other things than hunger and temperature: but that stress is very real, and just as urgently felt.
There's many dimensions to this but I think the simplest answer is: Stimulation. I live in a big city where I'm always surrounded by noise, stank and people I don't know. It is never really dark outside. Most of the day I'm staring at a screen, with a window to a huge world of other people. While I have an 8 hour work day, there's an implicit assumption of doing more. And that's not bringing food on the table, including commuting/shopping/cooking, I'm already at an 11 hour day of just grinding. And then it's hard not to compare yourself to people doing better than yourself if there's a million of them around you.
They didn't have a newscaster to inform them of any of that. The only threats they knew of were ones they personally witnessed. People today worry about the climate of the planet, back them you'd worry about if you had enough firewood for the night.
we are approaching a day when every aspect of our lives will be monitored and scrutinized for maximum social compliance and productivity.
"our records indicate you have not used your cloud connected CPAP machine frequently enough. a healthy night's sleep is necessary for maximum productivity at your place of employment. you must use this machine on average 6 hours per day or the portion already paid by your insurance will be rescinded and charged to you. a copy of this email was also sent to your supervisor"
"your smart speaker indicated that you have expressed illegal opinions while home alone, this recording has been forwarded to the Scottish criminal justice system for review"
"healthy employees are critical to our business. To that end we are issuing every employee a smart watch to help monitor and enforce our physical activity requirements to bring down our medical insurance costs"
I would say that modern stressors, while each not as stressful as many of those present early in humanity's history, are both far more numerous and omnipresent. Many are arguably less actionable, too — there are many things one can do to help reduce chances of food hardship or being eaten by a tiger but almost nothing we can do to e.g. radically change our economical standing or influence national or global politics. That's not to mention things like the pressures of expectations from family and friends, competition from peers, etc…
All of these stressors amalgamate into a chronic "fuzz stress" that has no form and no distinguishable source that constantly sits in the back of the minds of the collective public and is very difficult to expunge because doing that would require addressing all of the individual contributors, which is for all practical purposes impossible without sweeping societal change.
At some point, you realize, "anything could happen, at any time, and I will die, or my child will die, and there's no point in stressing about it possibly happening, because I can't control it." Once it really sinks in, you just learn to appreciate what you have today because it can disappear tomorrow.
Also, do they need to deal with phone notifications, or a boss demanding something right now? There are very few things that demand an immediate now in their lives compared to ours.
Our sense of fear is tuned for tigers being right around the corner. Modern society has a significant lack of tigers. The fear remains and social pressure is our new set of tigers around the corner.
Well, if the answer to "not enough food" is "throw away my baby," the answer to "get bit by a stray dog" is "guess I'll catch infection and die," and the answer to "Thag from the next cave is really rubbing me the wrong way" is "find a good stone and bash his head in before he does that to you," then... maybe... my life will be less stressful?
Whether I'd like to live like that is a different matter, of course. (Among other things, I'm convinced Thag will bash my head first, before I even notice something is wrong.)
> they didn't have antibiotics, anesthesia or life-saving surgeries. They didn't have access to a grocery store a short drive away, or a fire department.
They wouldn't even dream about these things, so they weren't unhappy because of it.
You can't feel like you need something if it doesn't exist (in your era at least).
Today we still don't have casual space travel, time travel, the elixir of life or the wonder drug, but it's not the lack of these things that is making us unhappy.
I think the 'natural' internal representation of the world is that of a story. Today's stories are downright deranged. What's worse is that many of them are true so we have to internalize them.
Fuck Lovecraft, but I think he was right. It's not our job to know everything about everything, all the time. But that's what we're incentivized to do.
Just imo, humans thousands of years ago didn’t have media that informed them instantly of every horrible thing that can, and does, happen. There were also fewer humans (which I find contribute a lot to my own daily stress).
Maybe thousands of years ago humans were just blissfully ignorant of the dangers that existed?
I think there's a pretty good reasons the gods of myth are capricious and angry. It's not that people weren't aware of the problems of the world, they were just ascribed to deities.
we're more chronically stressed now, which is the stress we are less adapted to.
acute stress (followed by relaxation) is not only better than chronic stress, its better than no stress at all.
Infant mortality right before the 20th century, even in the UK and US, was staggeringly high - yes, a lot of that was childhood diseases that we now have vaccines and better sanitation against, but much of it was also “failure to thrive”. Expectant mothers not getting quite enough to eat? Nursing mothers not getting enough to eat, having to do other labor (paid and unpaid) to care for themselves and the rest of the family?
Sounds like a pretty poor example, wasn't "UK right before the 20th century" one of the worst places to live across all of human history ? (Read : median person : so poor Londoner.)
The line from that article is a poor interpretation of that study.
The study says, "Psychosocial stress may affect the composition of breast milk via several pathways."
If I'm reading it correctly, a single sample was taken from 146 women. Breastmilk composition tends to be higher in fats and carbohydrates in the first few weeks of life and varies by time of day[1]. It's highly variable (even within a single feeding) in composition, depending on many factors, like if an infant is sick and their age.
Breastfeeding duration seemed like it may be negatively associated with cortisol in school age children in one study[2]. If that's the case, the best thing a mother in a stressful environment can do is breastfeed.
Presumably OP is talking about Western societies, in which the dominant form of getting sustenance involves making money, which in turn involves following business incentives.
There are a giant number of people employed by the public sector where I'm from. Not everything is the private sector, and a lot of the private sector is not about relentless growth and profit.
It's deeper than private vs. public. It's more about the "employed" bit.
For a very long time, helping your community and being involved in it meant you got to eat. That's no longer the case. It's perfectly viable to clock in, say nothing to anyone, clock out, repeat. It's also possible to give all you can to your community and starve to death.
The survival strategy is no longer "seek community" but "seek profit", because human society is now more dangerous and rewarding than the natural environment.
Defining an economic system as growth and profit driven is sort of tautological though, given the definition of "economics":
> The branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.
Original question was about "society" which is sort of nebulous, but I think (hope?) most people wouldn't define their relationships with their family and close friends, or with most of the world around them, through the lens of an economic system, be it capitalism, communism, mercantilism or feudalism.
You make it sound like there is a difference between capitalism and human nature, but there really isn't. Capitalism is merely an institutionalised expression of the latter, hence its longevity.
Humans by their very nature possess the instinct to outcompete their rivals as a result of millions of years of evolution. Anyone who was not like that, was removed from the gene pool by those who were either by taking their resources or by outright murdering them.
longevity? uh... no. capitalism is very young in human society.
for clarity, feudalism lasted twice as long as capitalism has currently existed.
and while competition has dominated the scientific and cultural narrative for a while, that's not the exclusive interpretation, or even necessarily the best or correct one.
In the sense that most people were manorial serfs and didn't use money and also the merchant class was despised by the ruling landowner/warrior class before they were overthrown by the merchants around 1800.
Now, sure, that manorial land was technically the means of production, and those in charge of these manors technically owned it (maybe much more like we are used to in civilizational phases, like with the Roman empire ?), but isn't this really stretching the intuitions we have around "capitalism" ?
personally, i adopt the marxist analysis of capitalism being a particular mode of production where private productive property is owned and controlled by the owners/shareholders and labor is exchanged for wages.
if we are going to make a distinction between feudalism and capitalism, surely we can similarly make a distinction between capitalism and X, instead of simply defining capitalism uselessly as "free markets" or "human nature." it's inclusive of the institutions which uphold these relations.
For my wife, it was the fact that our kids all had tongue and cheek/mouth ties. As soon as those were cut, they nursed normally. We'd asked at the hospital if our kids had tongue ties, and their rubric was, "Can your kid make a taco tongue? If they can, then they don't have a tongue tie." It turns out that this is not the case. According to modern American medicine, tongue ties don't exist, and if they did exist, your kid will get over them, and anyway here's a bottle, good luck. After we took our kids to a specialist to fix their tongue ties, they went from nursing and crying all night long, to nursing for 15 minutes and sleeping normally. Tongue ties are a thing. If your kid is exhausted from trying to nurse all night and can't get full, then they might have a tongue tie.
It was very difficult as the start, getting the latch right, etc.
There's the element of "how to do it" which isn't passed down so readily. Great Grandma didn't tell grandma, and grandma had a hard time helping mum. Western society doesn't have a good track record of intergenerational support and family wisdom.
Stress is also a large part of it. We turned off all news and removed TVs, etc. Once she's on "perpetual maternity leave" and not pressured to return she was a lot calmer just staying around the house with me and the baby.
As a young father, I did not know how to bathe my little baby. I poured water over her face and she inhaled the water. She couldn’t breathe and turned slightly blue. I called 911.
I feel so terribly ashamed of that. I did not know the basic fact that one must not pour water over the face of a baby. There was nobody around me to teach me how to bathe a baby.
National Geographic must also write an article about dad like me who can’t bathe their babies.
A friend managed the relationship between her diet and her baby's digestive happiness/distress with experimental care. Slowly expanding her dietary envelope; backing out unsuccessful additions; doing retries; retreating to a small core when there was non-determinism, etc. Careful documentation, timing, observation - I was impressed. She accumulated lists of foods which weren't working. Which isn't novel - there were various on the internet. They even overlap.
A thick booklet came in her mail. Part of the pregnancy ad deluge. It was a free cookbook, of easy to prepare recipes for the nursing mother. But curiously, the recipes overlapped with her causes-distress list. Like, massively overlapped. I was puzzled - how could this be? Then, in small print, on a back page: Nestlé.
I wonder how many of those they send out each year?
As a new parent you go to class for the delivery experience, an experience which lasts for a day or so and is well-supported while it happens by all kinds of staff.
You also get a couple of classes on breastfeeding, an experience which lasts for months and is very poorly supported while it happens.
The emphasis is off -- as noted by the OP when it observes that we know far more about cow milk than breast milk.
And of course, there has been a lot of back-and-forth (google term: Mommy wars) on practices and expectations around breastfeeding.
My wife had major problems in the hospital trying to feed our first born. A couple of days in and a charity worker visited, showed her how to do it, and 10 minutes later all was sorted.
I was about to be the third generation of women who relied on formula (grandmother tried and failed at age 20 around 1940 despite plenty of help from her mother, mother didn’t bother at 35 in 1980), but for a modern miracle: portable, configurable milk pumps, good accessories, and something of a data-driven mindset. If one takes this “exclusive pumping” route, or something close (we supplemented with formula as needed early on), you better track production, consumption and baby weight.
Formula now is better than formula in 1980 and far better than formula in 1940, so no one should feel bad about using it, but I don’t regret the effort I put in. I think it’s a lot of why, unlike said grandmother and mother, I got back down to my pre-pregnancy weight without much other effort.
Breastmilk is still better than formula, even today's standards of formula. One of the very cool things about breastmilk is that it becomes more nutrient dense as the baby gets older, whereas with formula, you need to give the baby more and more of it.
Another thing about the weight, all of the expected weight charts are based on formula feeding. You need to use separate weight charts for breastmilk only weight gain. If you are breastfeeding, it's common for doctors to incorrectly suggest you supplement the breastmilk with formula because your baby is "underweight", when they actually aren't. Supplementing with complex carbs like rice cereal is also probably not very good for your baby, with no real upside.
Strategy that we are going with is no complex carbs at all, just supplementing with steamed veggies and fruits now that we're onto solids.
My baby was failing to gain weight at all (discovered with baby scale at home between appointments), and once I started pumping, realized that I wasn't producing much. With an aggressive schedule, I got to an adequate level. We supplemented with formula until I was able to cover all demand.
This is an important point. BAbies need to do hard work to get milk. But when they get hooked to easy milk i.e. formula, they just won't do the hardwork knowing that nipple of bottle is just a heart shaking cry away. Parents fall for child psychology. New moms think they know better than their moms and that they are experiencing something new.
Lots of folks. Endocrine disruption is a common discussion here and other places. It's debatable how much is related to plastics, hormones in the water, air pollution, or other factors.
To paraphrase one bankrupt demagogue: "it's makin the frogs gay"
It's almost like pink capitalism is about doubling the supply of labor in order to decrease price.
But I am sure all those companies that are promising to provide support for abortion are doing it out of a commitment to women's rights and not as an exercise to avoid having to deal with maternity leave.
After all remember he or she who dies with the most stuff or the biggest 401k wins.
It’s the same thing with paying for freezing their eggs. Corporations are not doing it from the kindness of their hearts or in support of female reproductive rights. It’s not that expensive if the woman is doing such an important job pulling big bucks. It’s human nature to look for ‘deals’. I can’t even…gah. I am not at all worried about the shrinking birth rate and fertility rate. It’s an adjustment that is needed. We have jumped the shark long ago. It’s collateral damage for much needed booming capitalism. So what’s the other option? Starve and live in poverty? I guess the balance is somewhere in the middle and we will get there someday.
It's a miracle people are still able to reproduce at all given our isolation from reproduction and the processes of rearing children.