>In a message dated 1/2/02 10:21:35 AM, [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>>Interesting....but most of the Irish who came to the US (say between
>>1830 and 1930) would certainly have breastfed, Lynn.
>I think we might find that feeding behaviour - more than any
>other???? - adapts to the cultural norms of the place you are in at
>the time. <<
>
>Thanks Heather and I would agree but the same is true for Ireland as well.


Yes...I know!

But while I have no real statistics on this, what we already see
happening is that within a culture, formula use follows a similar
pattern,  once the economic and marketing conditions are there. In
most western (or aspirant western) societies, the middle class take
to formula most quickly, leaving the urban poor to follow on behind,
with the rural poor being the last to take up formula...unless, of
course, they are transported (like the Irish immigrants to the US,
and the Bangladeshi immigrants to the UK - all mostly rural/urban
poor) to a society which is further along this axis, and they speed
up their own change to match.

Take a highly developed, economically and communicatively
sophisticated society like the US - formula was already the norm in
most urban centres by the 1920s-1940s. The rural poor would have been
in at the tail end of that change.  In the UK, this normalising did
not happen until the 1940s and beyond. In the mid-40s, a survey of
Northern British women was done by a famous paediatrician - one of
the first paediatricians in the UK - called Sir James Spence. He
found, to his concern, that 'only' something like 85 per cent of
babies were breastfed. He noted that it was the wives of professional
men who gave birth in the hospitals who were less likely to
breastfeed (though the majority of them still did so). More of the
urban working class breastfed.

Ireland did not have a large urban middle class until well into the
20th century, and came to formula relatively late. So the return to
breastfeeding, which begins in most societies in the same way - with
the professional middle class - is likely to take place later.

This return is still happening in the UK and the US, where stats are
more or less the same. There is a return to breastfeeding, yes, but
it has yet to really challenge the cultural norm, which is still to
formula feed, or if to bf, to bf for a short time, and with
supplementary formula from the very early days.

One way of explaining the excellent bf in Scandinavia is that they
never went over to formula the way the rest of the west did - so the
turn back to bf didn't have anything like as far to go. It was like
turning a rowing boat round, rather than an ocean liner.


>That is, all babies were breastfed prior to the advent of formula but what is
>it about the Irish (nationals or not!) that makes them less susceptible to
>the more recent upsurge in breastfeeding!


Class?  I am arguing that in sociological terms, it's not only
ethnicity that impacts on choice, but the class-based  patterns of
behaviour.

This is too simple, really, I know, and it is not meant to absolve
institutional bad practice, either, or lousy medical knowledge and
support....much of which has ended up assisting the use of formula,
and hindering the return to bf.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK

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