I'm pretty sure this isn't good for her baby...

[amygoforth]

birthjunkie's post about frustration w/ mainstream parenting made me think about this...

So this friend (more of an aquaintance, really... she's the daughter of my mom's good friend) has a three-week-old baby. She wanted to breastfeed, but by the babe's second day her dh was feeding him formula out of a bottle because "he wasn't getting enough from the breast." This woman is a nurse! How can she not know about the physiological process of the breast and milk production! I was pretty sure at that point that the baby was going to end up on the bottle w/ formula. And that's what happened.

Now, that's frustrating enough to me, but what I heard last night just baffled my mind. At three weeks old, they are giving him full bottles of formula with cereal added. That doesn't seem at all right to me, and I'm afriad they are going to end up hurting the baby's tummy. I think they are giving him the cereal because he fusses a lot and isn't sleeping and they think he's hungry all the time. How dumb are these people?? First of all, he's a newborn! Newborns cry. A lot. And newborns don't sleep like we want them to. Also, he's prolly crying more because his tummy is upset from all the CRAP they're giving him. :

I don't know them well enough to preach to them, and my mom (bless her grouchy old heart) tried, but they brushed her off. She's just fuming about this and doesn't feel like she can say anything either. Her friend, the baby's grandma, doesn't even seem like she knows how to burp the baby. My mom watched her give him 1/2 a bottle of formula and cereal, then softly pat his butt for a few minutes (no burp), then thought he was squirming because he was still hungry! My mom snapped at her, "If you don't smack that baby on the back and burp him right I'm going to snatch him right out of your arms and do it myself!" (please know, my mom never "smacks" anyone. that's just her country way of talking.) Her friend, of course, ignored her then wondered why the baby was fussy.

[DaryLLL]

Argh, ick, pfff...(reduced to gutteral sounds of disgust and frustration)

[wirewendy]

It is so hard to see...

It is so hard to see situations where you absolutely know that something is wrong. I was doing emergency babysitting for a couple that recently moved here, and I could just tell that these kids aren't from a healthy home. it was a 2 year old and a 4 year old. For some reason I didn't feel safe leaving my 3 month old daugher alone with them for even a second to go in the other room. Finally I decided to go to the bathroom, and the 4 year old boy intentionally went up to my little girl and scratched her cheek. I heard her yell, and barely pulled up my pants to run into the living room. At a birthday party, three people mentioned to my friend that they had seen the parents of this boy treating him roughly. I keep going over and over in my head the talk that I want to have with them. I feel awful that my daughter was intentionally injured. I feel awful that this poor little boy wanted to hurt her. It is so hard.

[perditafoster]

there's a super-8 movie of my dh when he was a newborn and another one of his brother (three years younger) when he was a newborn...in both of the movies, my mil is shoving rice cereal in their mouths!!! the movies were taken the day they got home from the hospital (three years apart, of course), but my mil told me that she "didn't even try to breastfeed--it was disgusting" and that she fed my dh and my bil rice cereal "from day one" because they were both big babies I know, i know, it's not really funny, but sometimes I can't do anything else but laugh at her and her idiotic statements. Anyway, the videos are pretty funny because there's my mil, shoveling cereal into my dh's mouth, and he is just tongue-thrusting it back out as quick as she pushes it in I can't imagine how frustrating it must have been for her...for one thing, she's really wacky and for another, she obviously knew nothing about taking care of a newborn. I mean, she had a bowl and spoon and was feeding him, for crying out loud! He was three days old! My dh has terrible eating habits now and I attribute them all to the way he was parented as an infant...my mil is still one of the most bizarre women on the planet, too

[judybean]

nak

i hear and understand your frustration completely.

a couple at church, wo are quite nice, had their fourth little babe two months ago i think (she's about two months younger than lucy)... i don't know that she's bfing at all, but i do know that she's been getting rice cereal since she was a month (maybe three weeks) old. 'because she's hungry' of course. ugh.

plus, then i get more comments about how skinny lucy is because this other baby is tubby and makes lucy look... scrawny. i know it really means nothing, but it's still frustrating.

[Taedareth]

If I can add my little whine to this thread... I have the opposite experience from Judy. Once in a while someone will say my baby "looks just like the Gerber baby!" and I want to say, "No, my boy's completely breastfed. The Gerber baby is trying to look like a breastfed infant - not the other way around!"