Breastfeeding Often Sucks (Literally) But It’s Ridiculously Good For You

And we are not making NEARLY enough allowances for it

This was supposed to be part 2 of my deep-dive on why households with children are sick more than half of the year, but then I realized: We can’t talk about childhood illness and children’s immune systems without talking about breastfeeding, and breastfeeding is such a huge topic, and such a controversial topic, that maybe it needs its own newsletter. So this newsletter is all about breastfeeding, i.e. the ultimate inconvenient truth about mammalian motherhood.

This is not going to be yet another “breast is best, so WTF are you even doing, you terrible mothers who decide to stop?” article, nor is it going to be a “do whatever works best for your family because the data says it won’t make your kids smarter (and as an Ivy League economics professor that’s really all I care about)” article.

On closer scrutiny, neither of these positions holds water. The truth is that, from a purely scientific perspective, breast IS best. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. Have certain claims about the benefits of breastfeeding been overblown? Absolutely (especially those related to intelligence, it seems), but the claims that have not been overblown, those that are consistently supported by high-quality, rigorous, replicated studies are those related to the health of the mother and baby. And really, at the end of the day, is there anything more important than health?

Photo from @doulaverket on Instagram

The fact that breastfeeding is so good for everyone involved should not surprise us. After all, we are mammals. Worse, we are mammals who give birth to stupendously immature offspring, who take longer to mature than just about any other known animal, and this requires a very extreme level of maternal investment in the form of frequent and extended breastfeeding (as well as other forms of care). We might not like it, but this is just one of the biological realities of being human, and it's a biological reality that has been millions of years in the making. When you mess with things that are millions of years in the making, there are side effects.

And yet we are still all constantly looking for shortcuts around this “issue,” which is, in my opinion, at the core of all gender-related inequities in contemporary society. We will do anything but simply acknowledge the fact that women evolved to spend the majority of their adult lives breastfeeding, and that breastfeeding is a time-consuming (but also critical and highly valuable) activity that ties us to our babies more than society would like to allow for.

In hunter-gatherer societies, breastfeeding is both frequent and extended. According to anthropoligical research, hunter-gatherer mothers breastfeed their babies once every 13 minutes for two minutes at a time, on average, over the course of the baby’s first year of life. Although supplementation with solid foods often begins around six months of age, most mothers will continue breastfeeding until they become pregnant with their next child, usually when the child is about three years old. As such, most women in hunter-gatherer societies (and by extension, all women before agriculture) would have spent the vast majority of their adult lives actively breastfeeding, and often intensively so. This is one of the major reasons why birth spacing is so much longer in hunter-gatherer societies (typically 3-4 years), why hunter-gatherer women probably only had about 150 periods in their lives (as opposed to 450 for most Western women these days), and why hunter-gatherer women have no menopause symptoms (because they are actively breastfeeding when reproduction stops, they don’t even notice the transition).

I think it’s no exaggeration to say that, for the vast majority of human history, breastfeeding was the major, defining aspect of womanhood: The thing that undeniably set us apart from men and that structured the organization of many aspects of Paleolithic society.

On the other hand, breastfeeding is ridiculously exhausting, time-consuming, frustrating, calorically-expensive, confining, uncomfortable, and for many mothers, downright painful. When breastfeeding advocates say stupid shit like, “breastfeeding is cheaper than formula,” they are failing to take into account the very real cost of a woman’s time. It has been suggested that a conservative estimate of the amount of time required to breastfeed a baby for a year is somewhere around 1,800 hours which is barely shy of the 1,960 hours required by a standard, full-time job with three weeks of annual vacation. I have seen this number parroted all over social media, but the truth is that it’s not exactly based on rigorous scientific study (just a Forbes contributing journalist’s back-of-the-envelope math), and I think accuracy does matter here, because if we say breastfeeding is a full-time job, then that means women who breastfeed can’t do anything else, which is absolutely not true. Melvin Konner’s more scientific estimate of !Kung breastfeeding patterns implies that a woman with a child under one should spend about one-sixth of her waking hours nursing, meaning she is perfectly capable of foraging, socializing, and resting. Still, one-sixth of a woman’s waking hours (and we are not counting night feeds here), at 365 days per year (babies don’t give you weekends or holidays off), is still 1460 hours of work, which is a LOT.

In other words, if I were to bill my babies for breastfeeding at the same rate that I bill my clients for consulting work, I would be rich as fuck.

In addition to admitting that breastfeeding is exhausting and time-consuming, we also need to face up to the fact that it is painful and/or seriously impractical for many mothers. I have spoken to many, many women who feel that the militant pro-breastfeeding agenda so common in crunchy-mom circles these days did them a real disservice. I am talking about women who had so much pain that they feel legitimately traumatized by their breastfeeding experience, or women who had birth complications leading to low supply, such that they had to spend hours pumping in between actual breastfeeding sessions simply in order to have enough milk to nourish the baby, or moms whose postpartum depression was so severe that without the option to hand the baby off to their partner and sleep in longer intervals, they might not have made it through in one piece. I have other friends who are the primary breadwinners in their families and whose workplace culture makes it virtually impossible for them to find time to pump. Then there are other women who, like me, simply decided at nine months that enough was enough. I hated breast pumps, was sick of clogged ducts, and wanted longer intervals of time away from my babies to work, socialize and just live my life.

These are all legitimate reasons. But weaning early also has costs, many of which new mothers are simply unaware of, and some of which we may not even fully understand as of yet.

My view on this issue, having now done thousands of hours of research on how this works in traditional societies, is that contemporary Western society does not make NEARLY enough allowances for breastfeeding mothers, and that any real feminist agenda (which is to say, one that truly has the best interests of women at heart) should include time, space, and permission to breastfeed at the top of its list. I will also say that, knowing what I know now, if I ever have another child, I will do everything in my power to breastfeed as often and for as long as possible, even if it means radically restructuring my life and showing my boobs to lots and lots of offended strangers, because it is just so damn good for you and your baby.

So this newsletter is dedicated to unpacking the science behind breastfeeding. How are we actually supposed to breastfeed? How do hunter-gatherer mothers breastfeed and how is this different from the way we breastfeed in the contemporary West? What are the consequences? What are the real benefits of breastfeeding for mothers and babies (the ones that are actually backed by high-quality studies) and what claims don’t hold up so well? And finally, what would society look like if we truly valued breastfeeding (because it is, in strict financial terms, highly valuable)?

I am pay-walling this article because I have put so much time into the research, but as always, if you need a comp, just ask.

Ready? Let’s dive in.