It is hard now to comprehend how it could be that the medical experts who advised my mother’s generation were quite clear that babies should be fed only once every four hours, & that if they cried in between feeds they should be left to themselves to get on with it.
It is equally hard to believe that my generation would be asked if they intended to breast feed or if they wished to be given the appropriate hormone to stop their milk coming in at all – this in an age when mothers spent the first ten days in hospital with their baby where all the necessary help could be given. The breast fed babies were weighed before & after each four–hourly feed & if they were deemed not to be getting enough might be moved on to three-hourly feeds or given a supplementary bottle.
It is an obvious nonsense to say that all babies should be fed exclusively on breast milk for six months. Even if it were true that there were some underlying scientific law which dictates this, it is a statistical law applicable only to the standard (mean) baby; real babies vary. The idea that English mothers should follow this rule because it is right for poor women in countries without adequate hygiene is as daft as the exhortation to eat up all your dinner for the sake of the poor children in Africa.
But for some reason it seems to be a law of human nature that these rules must change with every generation.
Perhaps it’s a way of keeping your mother, & especially your interfering mother-in-law, off your back.
Or even a grandmother-in-law. Great Grandma the bakers wife had no compunction at all about ordering my mother to pick up a crying baby; as a true empiricist she knew whereof she spoke, because she had “had 11 and reared 8.”
