Not every mother can breast-feed her baby, and some do not want to. That’s fine provided you realise that it is a compromise and there will be a few untidy loose ends. Here is how to recognise them, why they occur and what to do.
Doctor Truby King pioneered hygienic feeding for babies in New Zealand in the early part of this century, and his methods quickly became world famous. He based his teachings on breast feeding up to nine months (Leaflet M04) and slow weaning to "humanized milk"from that age, but he is now best remembered for developing safe methods of artificial feeding. He would not have approved of the predominance of artificial feeding from birth that we have now: 87% of the babies under his care were breast fed for nine months, and no infant deaths occurred for years — long before antibiotics (Leaflet P11) were invented!
To start bottle feeding from birth undoubtedly deprives your baby of many advantages — natural immunization, especially against infectious diarrhoea; perfect food not just for humans but for him personally; a healthy and sweet digestive climate in his intestines. Feeding from a bottle rarely causes infectious diarrhoea nowadays but cannot really make up for these other more fundamental drawbacks. And yet despite all this, it can be very successful. Human beings are very adaptable, much more so than other animals — calves cannot survive at all on a diet of human milk!
Milk formulas for infant feeding are almost all prepared from cow’s milk and are adapted, principally to bring their protein and sugar content more in line with human milk. There is however nothing that can be done to alter the kind of protein it contains, which is very different from human milk. It’s like having equal weights of metal in two bunches of keys, but the keys in each bunch are designed to open the doors in two different buildings: you may not be aware of the differences until you try to use them in the wrong doors. So milk which looks very similar to yours can react very differently on your baby. He can tell straight away that it is different from the food he used to get through your blood, and his first reaction may be to reject it out of hand. As a result he is more likely to regurgitate or vomit bottle milk, will more often get colic on it, and will grow a different range of germs in his intestines that make his bowels sour and on the sluggish side. He is more prone to thrush (Leaflet P91) and is, we suspect, more likely to get the rash called roseola (Leaflets M06, P36).
Because cow’s milk nourishes infants a bit less efficiently, they tend to consume more of it and become rather chubby. There is nothing sensible you can do about this until your baby begins to take an interest in solid food from your family table, when you can use this to counteract the fattening tendency of the milk. Manufactured baby foods only add to the problem and are best avoided altogether except for convenience on journeys. It is perfectly possible (and much cheaper) to rear a large family without ever buying a single tin, jar or packet (Leaflet M08).
What to do
1. Prepare the powdered milk exactly as described by the manufacturer. Use the scoop they provide, and measure quantities carefully. Keep the unused powder dry and clean, and use fresh clean water. You can filter tap-water to clean it (Leaflet S06), use bottled spring water, or boil tap-water to soften and sterilize it and use that straight from the kettle after it has been cooled.
2. Use the table on the packet to decide how much milk to make up for your first feed, but after that be guided by your baby’s appetite. If he drains a bottle you cannot tell how much more he would have drunk, and he may tire or go to sleep while you prepare some more; so err on the generous side in the first place. You will quickly get expert in judging how much to make up, wasting only a few dregs in each bottle that he does not want.
3. If you give him enough milk in the first place he is less likely to get constipated (Leaflet P25) or to give the impression that the milk is not satisfying him. Then you will be less tempted to add other foods early on. Avoid these completely if you can: they only make worse a situation that is already complicated for him.
4. If he gets thrush, ask your doctor for suitable treatment; drops that he swallows from a dropper, or in his milk, are best, since there will be thrush in his intestine too.
5. After a few weeks all babies (whether breast- or bottle-fed) tend to be very hungry in the evening, and their parents seem to get no peace from one feed to the next. This is a pretty sure sign that he will soon sleep right through the night, which is something to look forward to. The more patiently you tank him up, the sooner that can happen.
6. Evening colic (three month colic) seems to happen only in bottle-fed babies, or babies breast-fed by mothers who are themselves eating food from the cow. It occurs in the evening because the baby gets especially hungry then, tanking up to get right through the night. The best way to cure it is to change the milk to something entirely different — Cow and Gate Formula S, Wysoy, or fresh goats milk.
7. Goats milk has a bad reputation among public health doctors and health visitors because their expert advisers say it has too much salt. That advice dates from the days when goats had to be given salt licks intended for cows. In practice goats provide milk much more like human milk and many infants have thrived on it. It has the special value that they can, after perhaps the first few weeks, drink it fresh and unboiled, which means it is proper live food like your milk would have been. Dilute milk from Nubian-type goats with one part of water to four parts of milk, since it is rather creamy; milk from other breeds can be fed whole and undiluted. Be careful to avoid warming it in the car on the way home — it will go off more easily being unpasteurized. You can buy it frozen and store it that way until the day you mean to use it, as an alternative to boiling it.