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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm less convinced it's generational.  I'm in my late 40's and was born in the mid 1960's. I was fed formula.  My youngest sister, however, was born in the late 1970's and my mom nursed her for several years. She was very supportive of my nursing as well as my SIL's nursing.

[b]It's probably safe to say that if you are having a baby now, you were born in the 1970's when there was a lot more support for breastfeeding[/b]. It wasn't seen as unusual. Yes, babies still had formula, but there was definitely a swing away from a "overly medicalized" birth where the mother was put under (like my mom was) towards the other end where there were planned home births.

If you're hearing comments like that, my guess is that it's also because MIL is insecure in her role.  She probably didn't nurse and wants to step in and control. I imagine that in the next 5 years, there will be fewer posts like this where breastfeeding is an issue between a MIL and DIL.

Of course, there will still be issues between MILs and DILs! [/quote]

No, it wasn't the 70s.  I was born in the 70s and my friends as well.  All FF.  It must have been the 80s that the pendulum started to swing towards BF.  (I think BF is better for a baby, fwiw.)[/quote]

Can you read? I never said that everyone was bf'ing in the 70s. I said that there was "more support" and that "yes, babies still had formula."  And I sincerely hope that you have more sense than to assume that if you and your friends were FF, then that is representative of a trend across an entire decade.

From an article about the resurgence of Breastfeeding at the end of the second millennium:

Recent breastfeeding rates

More than two thirds of mothers breastfed in the early 1900s (Hirschman and Butler 1981). However, both the incidence and duration of breastfeeding declined in successive cohorts, beginning in the first decades of the 1900s (Hirschman and Butler 1981). Initiation rates in the 1911–1915 cohort were nearly 70% of women, and nearly 50% in the 1926–1930 cohort; however, in the 1946–1950 cohort, only 25% initiation rates were noted (Hirschman and Butler 1981). Initiation of breastfeeding reached its nadir in 1972, when only 22% of women breastfed (Eckhardt and Hendershot 1984).

[b]By 1975, however, breastfeeding initiation began to increase, from 33.4% in that year to 54% in 1980,[/b] and subsequently to 59.7% in 1984 (Martinez and Krieger 1985). There was a dip in breastfeeding initiation rates in the late 1980s, followed by a return in the mid-1990s to the high levels observed in the early 1980s (Ryan 1997). Thus, after a dramatic increase in the 1970s, breastfeeding rates remained relatively static from the early 1980s to 1995. As of 1995, 60% of new mothers initiated breastfeeding, with 20% still breast-feeding at 6 mo (Ryan 1997). Unpublished data indicated that in 1997, 62.4% of mothers initiated breastfeeding, and 26% continued to 6 mo; newly reported was a 14.5% breastfeeding rate at 12 mo (personal communication, Ross Mothers’ Survey).[/quote]

You did say that it wasn't unusual, which is what PP was probably responding to.  But with the rates you are reporting for 1975 it looks like it was somewhat unusual in the early 70s, especially since we can probably assume that that 33.4% was not evenly spread thought the country, leaving some places with relatively few BFers.  [/quote]

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