The link between baby formula and fathers.

When my wife and I put a bottle of baby formula to ourson'slipsfor the first time, it felt like a great defeat. My wife had been struggling day and night to get her breast milk flowing. While we supplemented with formula in the first few days, we hoped it would be a rare occurrence. We turned our house into a milk-making laboratory and invited in consultants who showed us how to encourage our son's sucking with a strange contraption that involved tubes and a syringe. When my wife wasn't trying to feed the baby, she was hooked up to a pumping machine. We were all miserable, and at a certain point it became clear that the breast milk would not be enough.

But would switching to artificial milk consign our son to years of earaches and, eventually, diabetes and asthma?What about all those health benefits we'd been hearing about for years in the arguments about why 'breast is best'? Our turn to formula, though, ended up being one of those unanticipated twists of parenthood that I look back on with the most gratitude. Those blue plastic boxes of white powder, which at first seemed like a sinful corporate invasion of our sacred family space, introduced an equality and a peace in our home that seemed impossible in those first hellish weeks.

Even more unexpectedly, it gave my relationship to my son a depth that I, as a father, would have otherwise missed out on, and that has continued long after he stopped drinking from a bottle. I can still remember the calm that came over him when I finally gave him that first bottle and he began sucking, and then kept going. He lay there, nestled in my forearm, and let me gaze at him. For a baby who had been constantly hungry and fussy, this moment was a wonderful gift. At the same time,I couldn'tstop thinking about how much harm we were doing. So my wife and I dug into the facts on breastfeeding. I was shocked by how little scientific consensus there was to support my assumption that breast milk was some sort of miracle health tonic.

This gave me a sense of agency and confidence as a parent that I became particularly aware of when friends, who were fathers of breast-fed children, looked nervously...