ThirdOfFive |
05-27-2022 07:43 AM |
Time for a little perspective here...
Just what is this "shortage". Well, it is a shortage of a product that is there in very large part for one thing. Convenience.
Growing up back in the day, most of the mothers NURSED their infants. We'd see it a lot and nobody gave it a second thought. Many of the mothers would place a cloth over the infant and breast for modesty's sake but many did not. Mama Nature provides. Our culture however favors giving our infants second-best.
Okay. I get the fact that a lot of women these days work away from home. I also get the fact that for some small percentage of women and children, physical issues prevent maternal nursing. But we seem to be bemoaning a "problem" that exists largely in our minds; a problem for which answers OTHER than infant formula are available.
1. BREAST MILK. Even back in my day, some women would pump milk from their own breasts and have it on hand to feed L'il Bubba from a bottle when circumstances made breast-feeding difficult. Even in my daughter's generation, women would do this and drop the bottle(s) off with Bubba at daycare. Too obvious to be considered, I guess.
2: LACTATION-FRIENDLY SPACES: You see 'em all over. They're not just for nursing, but also for pumping milk from the mother's breasts for feeding later. I'm not sure but I think many states and municipalities mandate them for public areas. I know that some Courthouses up north have them. There are even forward-thinking work places that have them. A large agency that I used to use for client placement had an infant daycare on-site along with the lactation room, so female employees who were also nursing mothers could go there to feed their infant, or to pump milk to be kept for later feedings by the workers.
3: FORMULA SUBSTITUTES. Mom used to make her own baby formula from Karo syrup, canned condensed milk and a couple of other ingredients. She nursed all of us (5) when very young but substituted her home-made formula for later times. We all grew up healthy as horses so it didn't do us any harm. I haven't checked but I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such formula recipes available online.
The formula crisis exists largely in our minds. Creativity and planning ahead--along with being less concerned with convenience and outward appearances, and a greater concern for the health and well-being of the infant--could take care of most of it.
We've gone too far away from our roots. Previous generations knew how to handle such things and solve such problems. We, apparently, do not.
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