No disagreement about any of those things. I would just add:

It should be easy for women who wish to be with their babies and breast-feed them to do so.

It should also be easy for dads!

BTW, I'm about two weeks out from becoming a father. I only get 2 months paternity leave, but if I were the mother, I'd get 4! This seems unfair to me, but it's certainly better than if the policy were reversed.

It seems like there's just some built-in conflict between an intensely competitive capitalist society and the human needs of a family. I might do something like mandatory 4 years leave (in 1 year chunks) for all people, spread out from 20 to 40. You can spend that being with your kid, doing some sort of civic-project, or serving in the military.

Just spitballing'. Always fun to try to design a utopia. :-)

Congratulations! As someone on the other end of them, those 2 months will go by very fast.

Thanks!

Congrats!

I have 2-month old and before he was born lot of people said to me that "dads can't do much in the first 6 months". I was like ok, we'll see how it goes.

After he was born, I quickly realize dads can absolutely do everything except feed the baby directly from the breast. Breastfeeding itself, depends on the baby and mom, is fairly quick, maybe like takes 15mins every few hours. That leaves about ~22 hours each dad can be part of the activities, like changing diapers, bathing, soothing, having the baby sleep on you, putting the baby to sleep, reading, changing clothes, singing etc.

This "dads can't do much", "there is just this bond with the mom" and "it's biology" seems like bullshit or an easy out from taking responsibility. The bond happens if you just spend time with the baby.

Absolutely! There's a lot that dads can do, and what's more, I think dads are absolutely essential during the first two weeks, when mom is still recovering from having just pooped an entire baby out of their system.

Society is making way too many excuses for men to avoid raising their children, and it really needs to stop.

Thanks! What you say makes a lot of sense to me. (And for my part, I already feel a ridiculous amount of bond/attachment/love, just feeling the little guy/girl squirming around in there!)

As a dad, breastfeeding was a great moment to snuggle with my wife and child and have a few minutes of rest.

Congratulations to you as well! I have a two year old and I had the same realization when I was on paternity leave. You just said it better than I've been able to.

Yes we absolutely should encourage bonding and normalize public breastfeeding. But cut out the other breastfeeding nonsense.

The evidence is not at all overwhelming, and flies in the face of a couple of generations of formula fed people who turned out fine.

All anyone does by repeating that line is make people feel bad when they can’t or don’t want to breastfeed. Especially women.

The generations who were raised in the fumes of leaded gasoline also seemed "fine" but the long term statistics after we switched to unleaded gasoline show that we're way better off now.

An equivalence that does not bear out for baby formula.

Whoever wants to feed their baby breast milk or formula, do what you want. There’s enough anxiety in raising a child, we should be aware of when we might be increasing it in others for no good reason. GP could’ve supplemented their baby’s diet with formula while his wife was gone and everyone would’ve been fine.

Well said. I'm aware of one large-scale randomized control trial of breastfeeding. It found a slight reduction in ear infections and other infections early in life, and no change in IQ in the teenage years. So yes, breastfeeding has benefits, but the amount of pressure people feel to breastfeed is disproportionately high.