The advice from medical experts changes regularly on feeding, weaning, sleeping amd swaddling.
It's not detrimental to your child not to breastfeed until they are toddlers as far as i ve read, the constraints of most modern families don't allow for this anyway.

The benefits past 6 months (past weaning onto solids, really) are definitely vastly reduced, and of course the first few months are the most important, and I wouldn't say it's detrimental not to - all the nutrients can be found in other foods - but it's certainly an easy and efficient way to get all of the essential nutrients into younger infants without having to worry about any deficiencies. I agree that societal constraints make it difficult or impossible for most, although I do know lots of families who do it, usually with just a feed in the morning or evening. It's far from essential, but mot useless either... Like most healthy options, I suppose.

My plan (had she taken it) was to do most of the night feeds, but have maybe one or two nights a week where I just expressed a bottle so gav could do it.

As it happened, the nurse at the hospital scared the **** out of me..said that it was dangerous because baby hadnt ate for over 12 hours since being born (was never given the option of feeding right after birth but this could be because I was quite drugged up) and baby would be dehydrated etc, and she all but threw a bottle at me and told me to feed her. I was crying my eyes out

I have since found out that babies can survive on nothing for 48 hours as they have reserves and stuff.

Anyway, since I had been quite forced to give her formula, my milk never came in properly. And she wouldnt take the breast anyway after the ease of bottles. So I tried expressing for 2 months, which was just pitiful. At my best I was getting 5oz per day..and eventually gave in because it was so much work for so little milk :(

So yeah, I agree they should put the money towards getting more training for midwives and such about breastfeeding. As I wouldnt have had to go through what I did had mine knew what she was talking about.

I've got £200 spare. Just throwing that out there.

Unfortunately a lot of people have this exact experience! The midwives are of course highly trained, but most of their training is centred around prenatal care and the actual birth itself... many, many midwives will insist that a baby isn't getting enough and suggest even just a "top up" bottle feed, and of course this completely interrupts the whole natural process... and once that's done there's not much that can be done to sort it out. The truth is they don't get huge volumes of liquid at all at first, just the very calorie and nutrient dense colostrum, but it's those first colostrum feeds that START the milk production process. Midwives / hospitals misunderstanding of that is what leads countless women to incorrectly believe that they had insufficient supply.

What you mention with her not wanting to even try after a bottle is very common too, so much so that most experienced breastfeeders if they TRULY can't feed for whatever reason (post-partum issues / surgery, things like that) will insist on cup+syringe feeds of formula or donated milk rather than a bottle. The commonly used term for it is "nipple confusion"... basically, the feeding instinct / reflex can be totally interrupted if it's so early on. Usually combination feeders wouldn't introduce a bottle until at least after the first month (when they "know" how to feed rather than it being pure instinct).

But yes these are the reasons that I believe firmly in what I first said: paying people to breastfeed is a massive waste of money and doesn't solve anything, many many people who WANT to do it will still not be able to. That money could easily be spent on either providing training to existing staff to improve people's chances, or even better, to employ specialised support staff. NHS staff are already stretched painfully thin - another part of the problem but a separate issue really, it affects all aspects of care at the moment. But yeah... even if they did train up midwives and other current maternity staff, I suspect people would find them often too busy to really spend time sorting out any issues.

...putting that in context of just the title, this looks like you're interested in cheap implants... :hugesmile:

Actually, the whole title could be about gender reassignment :shocked:

I'm not ruling anything out at this stage!!