Abstract
This paper begins with a discussion of social research which seeks to critique the emphasis on breastfeeding in infant feeding health promotion. The key themes of this research center on science, risk, and morality but other factors can also shape mothers’ decisions and practices regarding infant feeding, and particularly, breastfeeding. The paper explores a range of research studies which together highlight the wide range of social, cultural, and economic factors implicated in infant feeding decisions and practices. The discussions here demonstrate that social and economic factors, familial and social networks, interactions with health professionals, cultural contexts which sexualize women’s bodies, and experiences of public space, can all play a role in shaping how mothers negotiate infant feeding. This broad conceptualization of the factors that shape infant feeding practices offered by social research poses a challenge to the more simplistic accounts of infant feeding decisions implicit in public health promotion. It also demonstrates the profoundly social quality of infant feeding decisions that women make and the particular contributions that social research can make to our understandings of this area.
Highlights
In recent years some social research on infant feeding has developed a critique of public health agendas based on the promotion of breastfeeding
In terms of infant feeding, this discourse of ‘total motherhood’ means that feeding decisions are understood as constrained by scientific evidence which overstates the riskiness of formula milk in a wider cultural context where mothers are expected to avoid any possible risks to their infants
This study suggests that social interactions, with health professionals in this case, can influence feeding decisions and undermine breastfeeding
Summary
In recent years some social research on infant feeding has developed a critique of public health agendas based on the promotion of breastfeeding. Since the 1990s, the significance of risk in the social construction of parenting and childhood has been a concern of researchers interested in cultures of parenting This is perhaps indicative of the wider hold that ideas of risk and security had on sociological imaginations at this time, following the publication of Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens 1990) and Beck’s Risk society (Beck 1992). Risk has been a salient idea for understanding how women experience infant feeding (for example, (Murphy 1999; Faircloth 2010; Lee 2007a; 2007b)) This is in line with the ‘breast is best’ message rooted in scientific claims that formula milk is more ‘risky’ for infants than breastmilk. Researchers have argued that the promotion of breastmilk as ‘better than’ formula milk has informed a moralized discourse around infant feeding where the ‘good mothers’ are those who breastfeed their infants (Lee 2011b)
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