The hard work of feeding the baby: breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China

Amy Hanser,Jialin Li

doi:10.1186/s40711-017-0065-2

Abstract

Drawing upon the concept of culture as a “tool kit” from which social actors draw pragmatically, this paper explores the relationship between cultural definitions of good mothering and breastfeeding among middle-class, urban Chinese women. We argue that an emerging culture of “intensive mothering” that focuses on infant feeding is taking shape among privileged urban women. Based upon interviews with new mothers in urban Shanghai, we describe the intense efforts and commitment by these women to provide their babies with breast milk, and we consider the complexities of their attempts to put mothering ideals into practice. We suggest that the linkage between breastfeeding and motherhood represents a “gendered burden” for Chinese women and that infant feeding has become important, early terrain on which new mothers grapple with their own and others’ expectations about mothering and caring for a child. We show that intensive, demanding forms of parenting now extend into the earliest years of a child’s life, a period largely neglected in sociological studies of parenting in China.

Highlights

When Zhang Fei’s son was born premature, at just 33 weeks gestation, breastfeeding was immediately a challenge.1. She used a breast pump to bring in her milk supply while her son was in hospital for the first 10 days of his life, and she continued relying upon her own, pumped breast milk to feed her baby for the 10 months
While ideas about good motherhood and infant feeding practices are hardly singular—they are marked by contradictions, divergent opinions, and difficult combinations—the decision to breastfeed has gained enormous significance for new mothers
The original goal of the interviews was to understand if and how middle-class mothers purchase infant formula in China, the interviews were organized around the simple question of “How have you fed your baby, since the child was born until now?” The second set of interviews was conducted between September 2014 and August 2015 with 25 women and is drawn from a larger project conducted by the second author on pregnancy, infant feeding, and perceptions of risk among both middle-class and rural migrant women in Shanghai

Summary

Introduction

When Zhang Fei’s (interviewee 9a) son was born premature, at just 33 weeks gestation, breastfeeding was immediately a challenge. She used a breast pump to bring in her milk supply while her son was in hospital for the first 10 days of his life, and she continued relying upon her own, pumped breast milk to feed her baby for the 10 months. When Zhang Fei’s (interviewee 9a) son was born premature, at just 33 weeks gestation, breastfeeding was immediately a challenge.. When Zhang Fei’s (interviewee 9a) son was born premature, at just 33 weeks gestation, breastfeeding was immediately a challenge.1 She used a breast pump to bring in her milk supply while her son was in hospital for the first 10 days of his life, and she continued relying upon her own, pumped breast milk to feed her baby for the 10 months. She returned to work when her son was 2-months old, she maintained her milk supply by pumping twice a day in a washroom at work, a practice she described as common at her workplace. Providing her son with breast milk was certainly less convenient for her, her conviction that breast milk is the best food for babies meant that she was willing to xinku yi dian, to suffer a little hardship

Methods

Findings

Conclusion