Deviant Mothers: Formula-Feeding is the New Neglect?

            When my brother-in-law brought his now wife to meet his family for the first time, she was asked important questions, such as, “Where are you from?” “Where are you going to college?” “What do you like to do for fun?” and “Are you going to breastfeed?” As anyone who has met their in-laws knows, answering these types of questions must be undertaken with a certain amount of finesse, craft, and with a bit of ambiguity. Yet, when it comes to the decision to breastfeed for my in-laws, there is an absolute right and wrong

Breastfeeding is viewed as essential to good mothering by many advocates. Pictures: publicdomainpictures.net

answer. Formula-feeding is a deal breaker, a moral choice akin to neglect and doing illegal drugs.  To them, “loving mothers” breastfeed their infants; women who use bottles and formula can be questioned to their very core: “Are they really mothers? Do they have what it takes to be a good mother?” Breastfeeding highlights how an issue can be made into deviant behavior by attaching a moral imperative.

            As I listened to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law interrogate the family’s newcomer, I looked on with fascination, partly because of concern and partly because I didn’t want to miss a train wreck if there was going to be one—the same way I would watch Nascar. At the same time, I kept to myself, tucked far enough away that I couldn’t be suspected of interlocution, yet close enough to hear. I didn’t want my own childhood, or my mother, to be called into question. Neither my brother or I were breastfed, and my mother’s reason for doing so was less than maternal. Could my brother’s diabetes or my bad eye sight be blamed on my mother’s unwillingness to breastfeed? Maybe—doubtful—but I wasn’t about to call my mother’s love into question over her decision to nurture her family in their infancy with formula. In fact, I had always viewed my mother’s decision to feed with formula as a strongpoint, evidence that she was an empowered mother and able to have children and have a career.

            While I was briefly exposed to the sociological side of the breastfeed vs. formula-feed argument in graduate school, I never thought about it more than its ability

Parents who formula-feed are often feel guilty for not breastfeeding. Picture: Michael Jastremski via Wikipedia.

to bring other issues to the fore (such as policy regarding paid maternity leave for mothers, or discrimination against breastfeeding mothers in public places).  I wondered, “Could it be true that my allergies and acne are attributable to my formula-fed beginnings?” So I did a little web search and … chaos. I looked for sources that were neutral in their argument, and came up relatively shorthanded. One blogger writes, “I’m all for making parenting choices that work for you and not feeling guilty about them….” She then ends her blog with “By the way, if you do formula-feed, you should read this Safe Infant Formula Guide [link].”[1] There was no additional link for breastfeeding mothers that warned against doing illicit drugs, drinking alcohol, mastitis, or the enormous difficulty they could face while managing to breastfeed and work. Obviously “good mothers” who breastfeed would already know all of these things?

            Some breastfeeding militants have proposed policy changes that would make formula available via a prescription from medical doctors only. Advocates for such a policy claim that formula-feeding is unneeded, environmentally unsustainable—a need produced by the companies who make the formula itself.[2] Reading through the comments on a chat feed, some were claiming that formula-feeding mothers were guilty of neglect, and that formula is poison. I thought to myself, “I was poisoned?!”

            Insert voice of reason: surely not. In fact, infant formula provides nourishment to babies much the same way breast milk does, it just lacks some of the immunity building properties of breast milk and takes longer to digest. And there are plenty of people who

Science has reached consensus that babies who are breastfed have some advantages over formula-fed babies. Photo: Anthony Vargas via Flickr.

were never breastfed who turned out to be healthy, happy, well-adjusted children and adults—and there are plenty of children and adults who were breastfed who turned out to be unhealthy, anti-social, and even criminal. No one has yet to document that all school-shooters were formula-fed. For some mothers, infants and families, formula-feeding may be the best option: mothers who could potentially transmit an infectious disease, such as HIV; mothers who have had breast cancer or some other surgery that impacted their ability to produce and deliver milk to an infant; and women who are often away for whatever reason and need other caregivers to help feed their child. And what about the now thousands of gay men and gay couples who want to be parents and have the ability to provide safe, happy, households to wanted children? Breastfeeding is not an option for them—for obvious reasons—but should they be held in contempt of good parenting? That seems unreasonable and untenable.

            Yet, the Mayo Clinic, Group Health Cooperative, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and several other leading health care organizations all claim that breastfeeding should be the first option for mothers and their babies. All of these organizations provide pages of detailed information on breast feeding and problems that breastfeeding mothers encounter. Scientists and physicians are such strong believers in breastfeeding that they listed “increasing breast fed babies” in the “Healthy People 2020” initiative.[3] These organizations point to a broad research based literature that shows that breastfeeding has many benefits over the formula-feeding, some of which are actually more beneficial to the mother than to the baby. These sources point out that recent studies that attempt to debunk the widely held “breastfeeding is better” argument often study individuals well out of infancy (over age four), but ignore other factors, such as the health of a child before their fourth birthday.

            I highlight this issue, breastfeeding versus formula-feeding, because it has a certain moral charge to it (i.e., it makes mothers good or bad). The truth, if we turn to both medical sciences, psychology, and sociology, is that there are pros and cons of each, for

Advocates for breastfeeding and babies point out that there are often no safe spaces for nursing mothers to feed their babies and that federal policy is required to create such spaces. Photo: Newtown graffiti via Flickr.

mother and child. Like so many issues, society has a tendency to isolate this debate from the context in which it exists: women are mainstays in the labor force, fathers are now much more involved in a child’s life, even when they are newborns. Mothers are not always present in every family, for many different reasons. Perhaps this feeding frenzy of a debate would retreat a bit if we could understand the context of mothers in the 21st Century. Perhaps such a cooling of the rhetoric would allow for formula-feeding mothers to not feel guilty and for a more united front to create pro-baby policies for all mothers who want to breastfeed, such as paid maternity leave and safe spaces for breastfeeding in public places.

            This week, your tweeting task is to document two issues like breastfeeding—items for which there is no clear right or wrong, but that different interest groups attach a moral charge. These issues ought to highlight the relative nature of deviance. Take a picture that characterizes the debate well, and caption it so that the reader gets the idea behind the debate. When considering an issue, attempt to understand how many people think it’s deviant. If the issue has a 50/50 split, or near that, it is likely a good fit for this tweeting assignment. Note that you may not use screenshots, retweet, or take pictures of screens. For your reply tweet, comment on how this issue has changed over time (become more or less deviant).

[1] James, Maia. 2014. “Is breast milk not actually superior to formula?” Huffpost Parents 19 May. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maia-james/is-breastmilk-not-actuall_b_4936787.html
[2] Assadourian, Erik. 2014. “Baby formula has no place in a sustainable future.” The Guardian 3 Feb. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/baby-formula-industry-combated-sustainable-future
[3] Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. See: https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/maternal-infant-and-child-health/objectives

Can a Village Change Fast Enough? Applying the Evolutionary Model of Social Change

The dialectic model of social change can be easily applied to the modern debate over climate change: the push and pull between industry, environmentalists, and governments is a daily yarn in newspapers, blogs, and even scientific journals. To understand climate change in light of the evolutionary model, however, is a bit more difficult. To the people of Kivalina, , a small Iñupiat village on the north east coast of Alaska, however, the threat of their village being washed out to sea, is forcing adaptation, or at least the thought of adaptation, to a changing environment. The evolutionary model of social change may help sociologists to better understand how communities respond to climate change when the threat is palpable (rather than an abstract idea forecasted by climatologists).

Kivalina, Alaska, is a small fishing village one the west coast of the Chukchi Sea. About 532 people called the village home, according to the American Community Survey.[i] The village is relatively primitive: residents haul their own garbage and sewage to designated sites away from the village; there is a post office, a school, and a landing strip—the only way in and out of the town. The village was once surrounded by sea ice for about nine months of the year. Villagers harvested the massive bowhead whales from atop

May 4, 2008 — Kivalina, AK, U.S.A. An aerial view of Kivalina, Alaska, at 400 person town on a narrow spit between a lagoon and the ocean. Kivalina is suing 20 oil companies for property damage related to global warming; the ocean pack ice forms later and melts earlier, leaving the town vulnerable to erosive winter storms and endangering their traditional subsistence lifestyle. (Photo by Tim Matsui)

the eight- to ten-foot-thick ice. In addition to providing a solid platform for hunters, the sea ice also protected the village from the ocean washing over them in typhoon like storms. In the last decade and a half, however, the ocean remains exposed for about five months, which leaves the village vulnerable to ocean storms, which mostly occur in the fall, when the ice was previously frozen. Further, the ice is too thin and broken to be useful for whale hunting, which economically isolates the village even further. The Army Corps of Engineers, the Government Accountability Office, and other major sources have written about the fate of Kivalina, as well as other Native fishing villages like it: as sea ice continues to wane, large ocean waves will eventually erode the land in which the village is located entirely, washing its entire infrastructure into the sea.

Kivalina and villages like it have become a talking point in the political fight over climate change. But, politics aside, villagers are left to respond to a real and increasing threat. The president of the village claims that the ocean “came over” the village at least three times already. The Army Corps of Engineers, in an effort to bide time, built a rock wall along a major part of the beach, which, in the last wash over, was likely one of the only things that kept the village safe. But the wall, and other efforts like it, are not lasting solutions. Villagers have voted to move inland about a mile. But the Corps warns that the

Enter a captionThe land where Kivalina is located is not the only thing threatened by fewer months of sea ice, an entire way of life is at stake. Photo: Tikigaq Corporation.

new site will likely face the same fate as the current one in the future. At the same time, the Federal Government and the State of Alaska have attempted to float proposals to relocate the village with little success. The former U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary appropriated 8 million dollars to to address the problem in the village—but costs are estimated around 100 million to move the village.

Relocation aside, Kivalina residents are struggling to adapt to even the idea of relocation. Moving away from the current site also removes them from a way of life, namely, whaling. Relocation is not salvation: what will the people of Kivalina do in their new home? Surely, they will be saved from insurmountable ocean waves, but will they starve instead? In addition to economic woes, villagers also risk losing centuries-old traditions, cultural values that make Iñupiat people, well, Iñupiat. Perhaps more threatening than starvation is the question “who will we be?”

The evolutionary model of social change better helps us to understand how an entire society can change, either in small ways, or in large ways. Underlying the evolutionary model is the fundamental idea of shared values—those values that give rise to norms and regulate social life within a certain society. Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and C. Wright Mills theorized on how values and social change work together to sustain societies; that is, to keep them functioning. Social forces—values—are so strong, these theorists contend, that individuals or groups who do things that are beyond these values are often corrected (i.e., disciplined or cut off). Societies rely on their shared values to remain cohesive, and those who deviate from those values threaten the cohesiveness of the whole. So, then, if change threatens cohesiveness, how do societies “stick together”?

Social change, in the evolutionary model, relies on the collective consciousness of the whole—the shared values, ideals, beliefs, and overall feelings of a society—to change. If you ask an elderly person to send you money via Venmo (a smartphone application that allows for person-to-person money transfers), however, you will certainly realize that the collective conscious when it comes to technology does not permeate the entire society even over the course of several years. The collective conscious, even on what many consider small points, can be difficult to change. Values, beliefs, cultural ideals, etc., change slowly.

Durkheim understood that sometimes societies do not change quickly enough to keep up with environmental change around them. In his classic study Suicide, he claimed that some individuals ended their lives because of a lack of social values and order—when social functioning is dislocated.[ii] This major social upheaval is called anomie.

Kivalina, Alaska in summer.Photo: ShoreZone/flickr/CC by 2.0

Newspapers took photos of individuals jumping from tall buildings to their demise just after the 1929 stock market crash.[iii] Similarly, Hurricane Katrina completely toppled social order in New Orleans. Crime and diagnosis of mental illness increased two fold or more in the aftermath.[iv]

If the current site of Kivalina is washed to sea before the collective conscious can change about what to do, the villagers face the same plight as those who lived through Hurricane Katrina: a dramatic loss to social cohesion and identity. On the other hand, the people of Kivalina could respond to such disaster by reaffirming their values elsewhere. In other words, the social cohesion of the people of Kivalina could be so strong that a disaster could tighten the bonds of the group rather than weaken them. Such bonds were strengthened after September 11th in the United States, when citizens rallied together and reaffirmed their patriotism to the nation. By Durkheimian logic of anomie, those affected by Katrina would have committed suicide. But social cohesion after Katrina also grew, which may have lead to lower suicide rates, even amid drastic increases in mental health diagnoses.

What will happen to the Iñupiat of Kivalina? Will Kivalina exist in five years? Will their tradition of whaling be preserved as sea ice disappears? What will it mean to be an Kivalininan? These questions have answers and they stem from who the Kivilanians are now and who they will choose to become—or they will be defined by their reactions to acute tragedy.

This week, your tweeting task is to capture two incidents of social change at the local level. The first should capture an event that is best explained by the dialectic model. In your caption, attempt to identify the synthesis. For example, a good caption would read, “Dialectic: The town opted to use water from the nearby lake to avert a toxic water crisis.” Your second tweet should capture an event that is best explained by the evolutionary model. In your caption, briefly describe what cause the upheaval and/or what happened. For example, “Due to a high number of traffic accidents, officials lowered speed limits and installed guard rails on Frontage Road.” Your reply tweet should think about the change the author described using the opposite model. For example, if a student wrote that a high school curriculum was changed due to a group of parents who advocated for the change and used the dialectic model, you should give a reason why the evolutionary model could account for change. Note: This is a difficult reply tweet. You can tweet more than once to get your full thought out, but no more than three tweets. On tweets that are extensions of the first tweet, use the hashtag #tmlt as well as #socy16.

 

Author’s Note: Thanks to Chris Mooney of the Washington Post for his reporting on Kivalina, Alaska. You can read the entire article, which I used heavily in this blog, by clicking here.

[i] American Fact Finder. “Age and Sex: 2010-2014 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.” DOA: 11 Apr 2016. Available at: http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_14_5YR_S0101&prodType=table
[ii] Durkheim, Emile. 1897/[1951/1979]. “Suicide.” New York: Free Press. pp. 252.
[iii] Pack, Mark. 2011. “Did brokers really throw themselves out of office windows in the Wall Street crash?” The Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1589,00.html
[iv] Dillon, Michele. 2010. Introduction to Sociological Theory: Theorists, Concepts, and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century. 1st ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers. Pp. 103-104.

Gay Like Who? The Effect of Heteronormativity

On hot summer days at my grandma’s house, we retreated to her shady backyard to run through the hose, drink lemonade, and wait for the jingle of the snow cone cart to come by. On the other side of the fence, partially visible through a thicket of trees, we could see the neighbor on his back deck. He was almost always wearing only his skimpy underwear, seemed to be constantly on the phone, and spoke in a dramatic tone littered with expletives I had only ever heard on TV. Grandma told us, with a bit of disapproval in her voice, that he was nice man, but “different.” Grandpa said, “that one, he beats to his own drum.” A few summers later, we were outside cooling off, but it was quiet; the usual sing-song of the neighbor ranting on the phone had disappeared. After a while, I asked where he had gone. My grandma replied, “He died last winter. He was very sick.” Only years later, while in high school, did I find out that he had died due to AIDS-related illness, and that “different” meant gay. About the same time, I was staring my own sexuality in the face—as all testosterone filled high school boys do—and frightfully realizing that the objects of my affection were more Brad Pitt than Pamela Anderson. I imagined that the neighbor man undoubtedly had steamy dreams of Brad Pitt that may have been similar to

What happens when you Google “gay.”

my own, but that is where our likeness started and ended. His interests, which I gleaned from my years of eavesdropping, were not my own; my manner of speaking was plain and relatively expletive free compared to his, and I certainly did not have AIDS. But grandma’s neighbor was the only example of a gay man I had ever known (aside from my sneak viewing of The Birdcage). Only a few years later did I meet a man, then in his early 60s, who had recently become a widower when he lost his partner of forty years. He spoke as I spoke, liked the things I liked, and was always well-dressed in Brooks Brothers finest.  I thought to myself, “I could be like him.” And so, knowing that my sexual attraction to men did not mean that I had to wear glitter, socialize in underground nightclubs, and that I would not inevitably succumb to HIV/AIDS liberated me in a way that meant I could live as myself, love who I desired, and attempt to create whatever life I imagined, just like straight people have been socialized to believe from their very beginning. Let me be clear, though, before I continue: I did not make out the neighbor man’s manner of speaking or topics of interest to be bad, rather, I just couldn’t identify with them—they weren’t my interests. Indeed, heteronormativity was so well-crafted around me—and so many other LGBTQ people—that imagining any life outside of being straight seemed impossible.

When I get my mail, I see mortgage flyers featuring a happy heterosexual couple in front

Rubens depiction of Adam and Eve. Heterosexuality dominates historical depictions of life.

of their new home. When I turn on the TV, I see heterosexual couples arguing or laughing. When I read the newspapers, I’m hard pressed to find examples of families or partnerships that look like mine. All around me, I am inundated with heterosexuality. “Straightness” is so ubiquitous to our culture that we hardly even notice it, at least not most of the time. Yet, when two men or two women are featured together in any setting, the story automatically shifts to “gayness.” For example, it’s not uncommon to hear of a husband/wife duo who starts a business and build it from the ground up. A news article might talk about the training or experience the couple brought to the business, or how one of them had turned a hobby into a profitable venture; some articles, depending on the news source, may also discuss why their partnership works. On the other hand, if a lesbian couple were to start a business and build it up in a similar way, it’s inevitable that some part of the story would feature their sexuality rather than maintaining a focus on their business. While mainstream culture is improving on the ways in which they incorporate LGBTQ identities into their characters and stories, “gayness” is for the most part still viewed as not only “different,” but also “exotic.”

Although same-sex couples can now marry, the wedding industry, and marriage all-together, are largely modeled on different-sex couples.

Heteronormativity brings along great privilege for straight people, too. Just like non-whites often have to come to terms with being followed in retail stores or pulled over for “driving while black,” non-heterosexual people often have to preface social engagement with questions like, “will I be safe”? “Will I be tokenized?” “Will people at this place talk to me?” Heteronormativity creates social scenarios in which being straight is considered normal, even invisible. Straight-identified people have the privilege of holding their partner’s hand while dining at restaurants, going to theaters, or even walking down the street without giving it a thought. In almost every place across the U.S., even cities that have large LGBTQ populations, non-straight people have to assess the situation before they make outwardly affectionate gestures to their partner. In some places, it remains entirely unsafe to be affectionate with a same-sex partner at all.  And in many situations, a same-sex couple’s hand-holding is viewed as social protest rather than a gesture of mutual affection.

 

Finally, the vast majority of children are raised in households where heterosexuality is

Families headed by same-sex couples are still an anomoly in most places. Photo: Danny Hammontree

considered normal, the mode, and the example. And, for most children, who will be attracted to different-sex partners, there seems to be no problem. For same-sex attracted young people, however, finding examples of individuals who are same-sex partnerships or who also claim same-sex attraction is difficult. A Google image search of “gay,” brings up men who are typically wearing only their underwear and who are hyper-sexualized. For a young person attempting to come to terms with his or her sexuality, these modes of being and expressions of sexuality are rather narrow. Thus, heteronormativity—which operates under the assumption that everyone is straight until they come out—creates challenges for LGBTQ people when it comes to social roles (i.e., what should I do? who should I be like?).

 

Heteronormativity is largely invisible. We walk past images on magazine racks of straight couples and hardly give notice; we drive past a straight couple on a park bench and never think twice about it (if we noticed at all). Yet, heteronormativity inundates our society. Your job this week is to find two examples of heteronormativity—social artifacts, events, places, etc.—that socialize heteronormativity. In your reply tweet, indicate whether or not you’ve ever viewed a similar artifact, event, place, etc. that modeled same-sex partnership or attraction.