The worlds of daytime TV and infant feeding collided recently, in a controversy involving chatshow-host Vanessa Feltz, fashion designer Karen Millen, and a video of an American TikTok influencer, Madison Simpson, who recently wound up her journey with extended breastfeeding.
Feltz invited Millen and others to comment on a video posted by Simpson that shows her nursing her three-year-old daughter. It’s hard to know why Millen felt a need to comment on this woman’s breastfeeding (calling it “selfish”, “weird” and questioning whether it was good for the child), or how she felt confident enough to declare that there was “no benefit”. But it’s also hard to understand some of the reaction to her remarks, which might have been more appropriate if Millen was some kind of surgeon general gone rogue.
Soon after – and following considerable backlash – Millen delivered a prostrated apology, in which she explained that her views were restricted to the specific question of breastfeeding a three-year-old, not breastfeeding writ large, and in an act of sacrificial allegiance, she describes her challenges breastfeeding her own three children, including recurring mastitis and suffering with “cracked and sore nipples”. She then declares “breast is best” and finishes by saying she respects women’s choices. A sombre-looking Feltz then reads from the World Health Organisation’s infant feeding guidelines.
Leaving aside the issue of why anyone would look to clothing expert Millen for enlightened opinions on health decision-making, it is somewhat depressing to witness Millen’s apology shift from one position of censure (extended breastfeeding is selfish) to another judgmental position in saying: “I [breastfed] because I knew it was the best thing for them” and “breast milk is the best”. There is something about this issue that seems to compel people to speak in normative and captious terms.
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[ It’s time for a little more realism and empathy on breastfeedingOpens in new window ]
Perhaps public health rhetoric plays a role. The HSE breastfeeding guidance, for example, can be dogmatic: “Your breast milk contains essential enzymes, hormones and antibodies. These are vital for your baby’s normal growth, development and good health.” It’s easy to understand how someone reading this might infer that those who don’t breastfeed are doing something pretty bad if they willingly deprive babies of something that is vital for normal growth and good health. I suppose I just have to be grateful I can manage to type this with my own abnormally grown fingers.
But the controversy struck me as interesting for another reason. As the first generation of social media parents, my cohort really have to grapple with the boundaries around children’s digital privacy. Of course, feeding our children (however we do it) is one of the main things we do in their early years, so it’s not surprising it ends up online. However, I understand people reacting strongly to the inclusion of small children in content that is posted as part of trying to build a career online. Kids need to be protected from the online world, but they also need to be protected from our engagement with it. For younger ones, it’ll be a while until they can tell us how they feel about their likenesses being shared. It’s a good exercise to think about how their adolescent selves might feel about the images we post. .
A perfect storm of social media companies encouraging us to “share” idealised versions of parenting and overblown institutional rhetoric that frames the main drivers of children’s welfare outcomes in individualistic terms have contributed to this strange environment in which a woman feeding her child becomes the subject of a daytime TV storm.. Nothing, it seems, is more scrutinised than decision-making about children. I’ve experienced this reflexive meanness writing for this newspaper, with people commenting “some are just not made to be mums” beneath a social media post about an article about letting my daughter take little walks along our terrace. Similarly, the discourse around both ends of infant feeding has become totally unnecessarily hostile: breastfeed “too long” and they’ll call you a creep; choose formula and they’ll say you don’t love your child enough.
[ Stop framing breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding as a question of mothers at warOpens in new window ]
I spent most of this week in London at a British Academy conference on the Ethics of Health Communication, where I spoke about the toxic state of infant feeding rhetoric and the complex state of the research. My presentation featured images of the poisonous commentary directed at both formula use and extended breastfeeding – two sides of the same miserable coin and examples of the rhetorical poison that flows through the motherhood discourse online.
We have a long way to go to ensure pregnancy and early parenthood are better supported. One thing experts agree on is that more robust continuity of care across maternity services would help us feel more empowered in our reproductive and early parenting decisions. Equally, it would be good to have public health guidance that is clearer about the possibility of normally grown formula-fed babies, and acknowledges that poverty and inequality are the real threats to children’s good health, whatever way you feed them.
Breastfeeding can be challenging and (far from being selfish) is a selfless thing to do for a child – those who do it for longer should be given a lot of grace in how and when they decide to wean. Whether it’s giving a three-month-old formula or a three-year-old breastmilk, we will all benefit from a little less mutual recrimination and maternal excoriation.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a postdoctoral researcher working at Trinity Research in Social Sciences in Trinity College Dublin
