Shalom in the Home

I love that show, and so does Cliff. We try to watch it every Monday night. I was at his website doing some reading and I read a pretty interesting article about breastfeeding and it's affect on a marriage. I found it to be very interesting.

This is taken directly from www.shmuley.com he has lots of good advice on his site!

Should Mothers Breast-Feed if it Disrupts the Marriage
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach - Tuesday, 13 June, 2006

The Science Times, a column in The New York Times science section, has a long report today about breast-feeding and its benefits for children. We always knew that breast-feeding was very important for an infant in helping to reduce the chance of infection and illness, but now they are even saying that breast-feeding is essential to reducing the risk of childhood obesity. I don’t deny any of these benefits of breast-feeding. Having said that, what the report neglects to mention and what I have personally seen is that breast-feeding often gets in the way of the marriage itself.
One of the episodes of Shalom in the Home this year involved a young couple who were madly in love but after having a baby they saw their love life terminate completely and utterly. Even Harvard University published a study years ago which found that in the first year after a child is born a couple’s love life would decreases by about 74%. In this particular case, the mother nursed the baby well into his 11 month and because the baby was always attached to the mother’s hip it gradually alienated the husband.

There are two effects of breast-feeding that we often do not focus on. One is the de-eroticization of a woman’s body, as in her husbands eyes one of the most attractive parts of her body becomes, in effect, a cafeteria, and second it often means that a husband and wife can’t even sleep in the bed because the baby is either in the bed or the baby cries and takes all the mother’s attention.
So why we must always glorify the benefits of breast-feeding, if it begins to disrupt the marriage itself we have to begin to question if the family is better off with a baby on the bottle because no matter what benefits there are to a baby with breast-feeding, these would all be severely undermined if the parents marriage itself began to crumble.