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Advantages of Breastfeeding to the Father and to Siblings

You might not have considered the many ways your baby's father can benefit from being part of a breastfeeding family. Although fathers often worry that they will feel left out of the breastfeeding experience, the truth is that fathers are positively impacted when their babies are breastfed.

The father of a breastfed baby will reap the benefits of a healthier partner and healthier infant.
Traditionally, fathers view themselves as providers and protectors of their families. Naturally, a father wants to assure the welfare of his partner and his baby. His support, encouragement, and direct help can be the decisive factor in a woman's breastfeeding success. When his infant is breastfed, a father experiences pride and confidence, knowing he has contributed to the healthiest outcome for his baby and his partner. Fewer infant illnesses mean less disruption of family life and less expense, while the long-term health benefits to his partner can have a powerful impact on their quality of life.

Fathers appreciate the convenience of breastfeeding in the middle of the night and the increased flexibility that breastfeeding affords.
Many fathers choose to share responsibility for night feedings by bringing the baby to the mother and burping and changing the infant after nursing. Other men choose to sleep through some night feedings, especially at times when their sleep is critical to work-related activities. When the mother is breastfeeding, middle-of-the-night nursings are minimally disruptive to the parents' sleep, since no one has to shuffle to the kitchen to prepare a bottle.

The baby can be fed anywhere without any preparation or fuss, and a breastfed infant can be consoled and quieted in virtually any setting, simply by nursing. When our first son was born, my sailor husband had just returned from being stationed overseas during the Vietnam conflict. We still were getting reacquainted ourselves after enduring a six-month separation when we were suddenly thrust into our new, unfamiliar roles as parents. We had no one with whom we could leave our baby, so Larry was delighted to discover that we easily could take Peter with us and still enjoy an outing together. When our middle child, Tricie, was only a month old, we drove from Denver to California to visit Larry's family. Although Peter and Paige were only three and two, I found the trip to be thoroughly manageable because of the convenience of breastfeeding. I can't imagine trying to travel while having to deal with formula, bottles, a cooler, warmer, and other paraphernalia required for a formula-fed baby.

Fathers welcome the reduced cost of breastfeeding over bottle-feeding.
Despite contemporary changes in traditional sex role stereotypes, most fathers still bear greater responsibility for family financial commitments. With all the additional costs of caring for a new baby, they appreciate not having to spend money on infant formula. Some fathers have calculated the projected savings that breastfeeding will achieve and then suggested ways to use the unspent money-perhaps a vacation together since breastfed babies are so portable!

The father of a breastfed baby can make an important contribution to the success of breastfeeding.
One often hears expectant parents express their desire that fathers share more involvement in their babies' care than in the past generation. Certainly, feeding is one of the most gratifying and visible ways adults give care to newborns. I have even met a few parents who chose to bottle-feed specifically to allow the father to play an equal role in child rearing.

While I believe that babies ideally need and deserve both a mother and a father, I am convinced that the dual parental roles are meant to complement one another, not to compete with one another. The enlightened father doesn't lament, "I feel so left out when she's nursing my son; there's nothing for me to do." Instead, he recognizes his unique role as the principal supporter of the mother, the one who enables her to nurture the baby in an optimal fashion. He views supporting his partner through lactation as a logical continuation of his support role during pregnancy and his coaching role during labor. The enlightened father encourages and compliments his breastfeeding partner every chance he gets, brings a glass of juice to the nursing mother, gives her a back rub, changes the baby's diaper, and helps with household chores. Fathers of breastfed infants soon learn that there are many ways, apart from feeding, that they can bond with their babies, e.g., bathing, massaging, rocking, and playing with their infants.

Fathers benefit from the privilege of experiencing the breasts in their erotic as well as their functional role.
Breastfeeding offers an entirely new dimension to the way a man perceives his partner's body. The breasts that give and receive pleasure between lovers literally give life and nurturance to the newborn they have created. Interestingly, during orgasm, the tiny muscle cells surrounding milk glands contract and squeeze milk into the ducts, causing milk to spray spontaneously from the breasts. This intricate interplay between making milk and making love serves as a beautiful reminder of how delicately intertwined are the sexual and functional roles of the breast. The partner of a breastfeeding woman has the rich opportunity to share in the full reproductive cycle beginning with conception and continuing through pregnancy, labor, delivery, lactation, and weaning. Today, when families tend to be smaller, many fathers will have only one, two, or three opportunities to fully experience the incredible grandeur of nature's magnificent reproductive plan, which includes the unique reciprocal relationship of breastfeeding. Countless fathers, including my own husband, would attest that missing out on the chance to witness their wife or partner breastfeed their babies would represent the loss of a whole dimension of reproduction and family life.

Advantages of Breastfeeding to Siblings.
You may not have given much thought to how your other children will be enhanced by your decision to breastfeed. But even siblings can be recipients of some important benefits of witnessing their mother breastfeed a younger brother or sister.

Siblings of breastfed infants receive valuable, firsthand exposure to the functional role of the breast, which helps equip them to become future breastfeeding mothers or support persons.
Today's children are bombarded with the image of the bottle-feeding baby. Bottles and formula are highly visible in the media, on supermarket shelves, and in public. Dolls come with bottles; bottles appear in children's books and as decorations on baby items. Because few women breastfeed in public, many children have little familiarity with the functional role of the breasts. For example, the sixth-grade son of a woman I know was studying mammals in school. He and a classmate were assigned to explain why humans were mammals. "We could show a baby drinking a bottle of milk," one boy suggested to the other, seemingly unaware that mammals drink their own mother's milk!

Children should not have to grow up believing that bottle-feeding is the societal norm. If they are exposed to breastfeeding as a part of family life, they assume it is the natural way to feed a baby. Perhaps you have observed youngsters who lift their shirts and put their doll or teddy bear to their own breast. These children often are those who were breastfed well into toddlerhood or who witnessed their siblings being nursed. One nursing toddler I know had been exposed to numerous breastfeeding infants among her mother's friends, and she had never seen a baby drink from a bottle. When a bottle-fed baby, Christopher, joined her day care home, the little girl was fascinated by his strange method of taking milk. The next time she saw a woman bottle-feeding at the mall, she turned to her mother and said, "Christopher," believing the only baby who drank from a bottle was Christopher. Another youngster who had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the functional role of the breast inquired why an older woman had breasts since she didn't have any babies to feed. Countless contemporary women of childbearing age wish they had had the privilege of observing breastfeeding as a youth before attempting to nurse their own baby for the first time.