Attachment Parenting - Breast or Bottle?

There are so many decisions to make about your baby, feeding him should be one of the choices that is a little easier than the rest of them.  The choice of whether to breast feed or bottle feed your baby is a personal choice that only you can make.  Either way, you will feed your child with love and attention, giving them security, consideration and caring. 

 

For those who adhere to the attachment parenting method, breast feeding is usually the choice that is made.  However, there is no reason that you cannot be an attachment parent and bottle feed your baby at the same time.  The most critical element of the attachment parent’s feeding rituals are love, attention and baby-led feeding intervals.

 

The love and the attention are self explanatory.  Attachment parenting is all about love and attention.  You cannot spoil a baby by picking it up hen it cries.  I cannot stress enough that a baby cries for a reason.  A baby cries because it is communicating to its parent’s in the only method it has.  If the parent ignores the baby’s cries (attempting to get the baby to self-soothe) what the parent is really teaching baby is that he is on his own, and his cries will not be answered on a regular basis.  Attachment parenting is all about responsiveness to your baby’s cries, pure and simple.

 

Whether you decide to breast feed or bottle feed your baby, when you are feeding your infant, you need to look him in the eye and hold him close.  Breast feeding lends itself naturally to skin to skin contact.  Bottle feeding may not necessarily, but parents who choose to bottle feed their babies can certainly hold their baby close and securely, laying her against their skin on their chest or tummy to feed so that the baby benefits from the skin to skin contact the same as a breast fed baby.  The advantage of bottle feeding over breast feeding is that Daddy can participate in feeding times as well.  If breast feeding, after a month or two, once your breast feeding is securely established, try pumping some milk into a bottle and letting Daddy take a go at it to get that extra bonding time with baby.  If that does not work (my son would have starved before taking a bottle) try giving Daddy a special chore with baby that is just his own, like bath time or bed time, where he can get some extra snuggling in with your bundle of joy.

 

Aside from the attention during feeding time, the next most important thing in attachment parenting when it comes to feeding baby is that baby needs to tell you when she is ready to eat.  I know several parents who think they have their baby on a feeding schedule.  “Oh, at 1:00 he will be hungry!”  That is just plain silly.  If baby gets hungry at 12:30, instead of feeding him, she will attempt to sooth him with a pacifier or by other means until it is “time to eat”.  Or if baby is not hungry at 1:00, he gets fed anyway. 

 

These schedules, again, teach baby not to rely on his own systems, internal clocks and bodily cues.  When baby is hungry, he will let his caregivers know.  From the first moment of life, hunger is an uncomfortable feeling for baby - survival instincts dictate that food must be had.  Follow your baby’s cues when he is hungry - feed him.  Likewise - when your baby needs held, hold him.  And if instinct leads you to,  like it does for so many of us, it is also ok to sleep with your baby if you want to. 

 

 

 

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