Breast feeding can have its stressful side while you and the baby are learning the techniques, but once these have been mastered, it can be a uniquely close and soothing experience, in marked contrast in its natural simplicity with the paraphernalia of bottle feeding. However, bottle feeding has its advantages too, you should not allow yourself to get stressed or upset if for any reason you are unable to breast feed your baby: again a flexible outlook is your best course.
Breast feeding contributes very importantly to the bonding process which is now widely acknowledged to play such an important part in human development. Certainly, the importance of bonding can be appreciated when the act of birth is considered from the baby’s point of view. Leaving the warmth, darkness and silence of the womb, and at the same time immediately transferring from one system of breathing to another, makes birth the greatest of all the life changes, and as such highly stressful in itself.
Immediate bonding between mother and child can do much to reduce the ‘distress’ of birth: if the mother and child can do much to her immediately it is born, this will do much to provide the best possible start to life with minimum stress.