Factors affecting the decision to breast-feed and success with breast-feeding.

The purpose of this study was to identify some of the factors associated with a woman's decision to breast feed and those factors associated with a women's decision to bottle feed her newborn infant. The study was conducted in the prenatal-postpartum clinic and the in-patient maternity service of a 277 bed general teaching hospital, in the office of an obstetrician in private practice, and in the in-patient maternity service of a 570 bed general hospital. The sample included 57 women who were interviewed during the third trimester of pregnancy. In this sample 25 women planned to bottle feed their infants, and 32 planned to breast feed. A second part of this study was designed to investigate whether encouragement and support of breast feeding provided to one-half of the breast feeding women by a nurse-midwife would 'increase the frequency of success with breast feeding, as compared to the other one-half of the breast feeding group who did not receive the encouragement and support. Differences between the bottle feeding group and the breast feeding group were identified by means of analysis of variance, The three variables that were found to be statistically significant were: paternal attitude toward method of infant feeding (P=.004), maternal education (P = .01), and the number of children at home (P=.048). The difference in the means of the breast feeding group and the bottle feeding group suggests that a favorable paternal attitude toward breast feeding was found more often in the breast feeding group, that the breast feeding group had a significantly higher level of formal maternal education, and that the bottle feeding group had more than twice as many children at home than the breast feeding group. Success with breast feeding was found to be significantly correlated (P <.01) to age, socio-economic level, and total parental education. Encouragement and support given by the nurse-midwife did not yield statistically significant results in increasing the frequency of breast feeding success.