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Breastfeeding in Modern Environments

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

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Synonyms

Nursing in modern environments

Definition

The practice of a woman providing breast milk to her own or another woman’s child in modern industrialized societies

Introduction

Breastfeeding was long the only viable way of securing infant survival. With that in mind, it is surprising that breastfeeding has evolved to be a somewhat error-prone and complicated process, especially in humans, with reported failure rates of up to 33% due to problems with breastfeeding technique (“Breast-Feeding”). Historically, wet-nursing (“Wet-Nursing”) became a common practice (Golden 1996) and can be traced back at least to ancient Roman and Egyptian cultures (“Breast-Feeding” and “Wet-Nursing”). In contemporary Western developed countries like the USA or the UK, however, wet-nursing has become socially unacceptable (see Groskop 2007). And since the invention of artificial formula, it is also less of a necessity.

Despite known health benefits of breastfeeding for mother and infant (see below), we...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

    Sebastian Schnettler

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  1. Sebastian Schnettler
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Correspondence to Sebastian Schnettler .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  2. Rochester, MI, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nipissing University, North Bay, ON, Canada

    Steven Arnocky

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Schnettler, S. (2020). Breastfeeding in Modern Environments. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_821-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_821-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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