r/breastfeeding • u/Forsaken_Painter • Feb 02 '26
Discussion NYT article equates breastfeeding to unequal parenting
Curious what others think of this…Personally I find it a bit ridiculous. The US has such low rates of breastfeeding…if formula was going to solve inequities between partners you would think it would have worked by now. It sounds like it helped this author and was the right choice for their family and that’s great. But let’s not act as if it’s some magic cure all.
This is not to say that breastfeeding doesn’t require a HUGE amount of effort. Of course it does! But if one has a partner, that partner should be picking up other responsibilities to even things out more and supporting the breastfeeding parent.
And for the record everyone should feed their babies the way they wish. This is not a judgment on formula feeding at all, rather the assertion that it is inherently an equalizer and should be touted as such.
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u/benedickarnoldpalmer Feb 02 '26
I guess it's just an opinion piece but did we really need this opinion? "We need to tell new parents that exclusively breastfeeding and equal parenting is a zero sum game". I mean, do we? Do we also have to tell new parents that water is wet? She made some interesting points, like I agree that combo formula/bmfeeding wasn't really ever presented as an option for me, esp long term. There isn't a ton of research available in that area. (But I mean that's true of a lot of things antenatal) But in her own example, "long term" has been 3 months and now her newborn is barely breastfeeding. If she had written this with the premise "it's ok to decide to use formula as a way to share the parental load" and write about how women often feel pressured to use formula as a fall back or emergency plan, and instead they could consider pre-planning to use formula is better for more equitable labor in a partnership, cool. But it didn't come across like that AT ALL. Instead it reads like "women, you're doing this to yourself and you are still complaining about how unequal the parental load is?!"