Breastfeeding has benefits but so does formula feeding! People always talk about the mild passive immunity effects of breastmilk but they ignore things like the shared burden of feeding between two parents reducing maternal sleep deprivation, increasing secondary parental bonding, and improving growth rates in underweight babies that formula feeding affords parents and babies.
This! The sleep is major. My wife and I each got 6 hour stretches because we did shifts when our girl was a newborn. And she started sleeping through the night at 2.5 months old. The fact that vitamin d supplements are not needed for formula fed babies and the presence of iron for anemic babies is so rarely even acknowledged as such a huge benefit of formula. But people will bend over backwards on immunity benefits that largely get digested and merely coat surfaces (as opposed to providing actual immune responses).
I’m in Canada and so we do still need to add vit d lol but just one drop a day. Also my kids apparently hate sleep so it took my first until two to sleep through the night, and my now 9 month old is still up once😭 I’m sure it would have been more though if not for formula feeding! People do like to forget that babies will develop immunity in a bunch of other ways as well, breastmilk is just one potential way to do a little bit. It’s not needed though, there are no differences in outcomes!
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u/twisted_memories May 01 '26
Breastfeeding has benefits but so does formula feeding! People always talk about the mild passive immunity effects of breastmilk but they ignore things like the shared burden of feeding between two parents reducing maternal sleep deprivation, increasing secondary parental bonding, and improving growth rates in underweight babies that formula feeding affords parents and babies.