Baby milk dilemma
REGARDING Dr Ellie Cannon’s article on breastfeeding (‘Breast isn’t always best’, MoS Magazine, August 12), my real problem with bottle feeding is not that one or the other is more nourishing or contains antibodies. It is a more simple objection. If you nurse your baby, you have to hold your baby to do so.
But if you bottle feed your baby, there is an unfortunate tendency to leave the bottle with the baby so as to be able to get on with everything that is piling up because of the new baby.
The bonding involved with breast feeding is possible for those bottle feeding IF the mother ALWAYS holds the baby to feed it.
It is the intimacy of feeding and singing (the nursing baby will hum in a way bottle-fed babies cannot because of the shape of the feed-teat).
But the important thing is the bonding.
Do not leave the baby alone to get on with it, cherish these all-too-brief moments.
They grow and change so quickly and you can never get the time back. Lynn Weeks, Caherciveen, Co. Kerry.