Milkonomics (iv)
some not-so-fun facts and helpful resources
For part iv1, I wanted to share some other learnings we found out about during this period that don’t really fit in the other sections:
Postpartum depression
Using formula
Our best purchases
The resources we referred to for learning
1. Postpartum depression in Taiwan is a widespread and serious issue
Postpartum depression (PPD) is when women experience long-term depression after giving birth, and when I got pregnant, almost every mother I knew in Taiwan told me they got PPD. I decided to look up the stats and it’s much more common than it’s talked about:
That means that almost every other mother in Taiwan could experience depression from having children. It doesn’t surprise me at all that by 2035, Taiwan will have the lowest birth rate of all countries in the world.
One of the biggest reasons for the high PPD rate in Taiwan is due to the lack of support for mothers from both the institutional level and societal values. The government can actually make a difference in helping mothers, for example in Hong Kong, after maternity leave was extended across the country, there was a 22% drop in PPD.
My perspective of Taiwan regarding this is that we still live in a very gender-traditional culture where women have the majority responsibility of doing housework and family care. For example, for almost 20 years, paid paternity leave was only 5 days off, and in 2022, they announced that they had changed the law to offer 7 days off, with the additional 2 days added as a way for the men to accompany their wives during pregnancy checkups rather than helping take care of the baby after birth!
I believe some other reasons for high PPD rates in Taiwan is because there’s pressure for new mothers to return to work soon and also to look slim3, which is actually almost impossible if you’re breastfeeding. Mothers need around 2,000-3,000 calories per day to breastfeed4, almost double the amount of calories needed for the average woman. Breastfeeding rates in Taiwan are lower than most developed countries;
In the US, 72% of babies at 3 months old are still partially breastfed;
In Taiwan, only 17% of babies at 3 months old are partially breastfed.
I empathize with the women who are shamed or feel ashamed of their bodies after giving birth because I have personally been on the receiving end of judgmental looks from strangers while out and about in Taipei. It’s great that when mothers breastfeed early, it helps with PPD for mothers everywhere, including in Taiwan, but it’s counterintuitive to our traditional culture of gender norms because stress (from the depression) severely impacts breast milk production5.
Another potential reason why Taiwanese mothers stop breastfeeding so early is due to the perception that they aren’t producing enough milk for their babies, which is definitely something I’ve experienced many times (and why I have to also use formula). It’s stressful to think about, which then impacts the breast milk, and then it’s just a vicious cycle.
2. Buying and using baby formula
There should be no shame for women who cannot or have difficulty breastfeeding, and turn to formula feeding instead. I have given up breastfeeding many times myself because I was too exhausted. I understand why it’s recommended to breastfeed (not just for nutrition but also the bonding), and we’ve even noticed the weight gain difference between drinking breast milk vs formula with Lyor (breast milk leads to much stronger weight gain based on our experiences). Still, formula is fine and I want to share what we learned about it.
One of the more challenging things about feeding formula is when Lyor needs to drink at night and we have to get up to make it:
Switch on the light in the kitchen6;
Get the hot water ready;
Predict the right amount of formula that Lyor will eat for that feeding;
Cool the bottle before feeding.
One helpful tip we got was to keep a container of water in the fridge so that we can cool the bottle in the container rather than run cold water from the sink over it. We do kind of regret not investing in an expensive milk bottle maker machine just for the overnight feedings.
When Lyor was going through his gassiness problems7, we switched our formula brand from Abbott Similac to Wyeth Illuma, a recommendation from a friend who said this helped her daughter with her gassiness. I think it helped, but obviously we didn’t do any real A/B testing. We chose Abbott at first because it was what our clinic offered, and we know a lot of friends who use Wyeth but it’s definitely more expensive.
Buying formula in Taiwan is much harder than I think is necessary8:
There must be some limitation that’s controlled by the government on the amount of formula a pharmacy can sell, because we’ve gone in person many times to a few stores and they were either out or only had a few cans available.
Online, most Taiwanese e-commerce stores don’t sell formula for children under 1 years old — they need to provide some type of discount so consumers are incentivized to buy online, but discounts are classified as a type of advertisement, and it’s illegal to advertise for baby formula under 1 years old, so they don’t sell it.
We once bought formula in bulk online, only to find out that they had purposefully covered up the age on the website, and when we called to ask for an exchange, they said they cannot give us the same amount of cans for babies under 1 years old, so we just had to go through the trouble of returning everything.
So far, we’ve only been able to buy from Coupang more easily, but they do limit us to 10 cans per month.
Lyor is not a small baby so it can be very frustrating to be constantly hunting for formula!
3. What we bought and would recommend to others
For the items below, I’ll just include what we didn’t think about beforehand and that I found helpful, because there’s a lot of lists out there about how to prepare for the baby, and you should prepare based on your own needs. I think overall, as new parents, we have no experience so we just refer to online lists on what to buy, but some things were definitely not that necessary.
For breastfeeding:
Robes to wear while sleeping and being around the house because I can feed much more easily than using the feeding shirts. It’s also more comfy! It doesn’t have to be the thick bathrobe kinds; I also got short cotton ones for summer months.
For chapped nipples, I definitely recommend using nipple oil for the first layer, nipple cream for the second layer, and adding silver cups9 to prevent further friction. You can buy the first oil and cream at pharmacies and the silver cups I bought from Amazon.
For the breast milk pumping machines, we bought a bigger, fancier one that was recommended on some blogs but it was an unnecessary purchase. When I was at the 月子中心 postpartum center, they had a much smaller Philips one that was more portable, affordable, and in my opinion, more effective, so we ended up buying that as well and only using that one instead of the original one we bought.
We bought portable dimming lamps which are very helpful for when Lyor is sleeping or needs to go to sleep. He’s quite sensitive to light so we need the room as dark as possible, but when we need to get up to feed him through the night, having a portable dim lamp was really useful10.
For baby bottles:
For brands, in Taiwan the most common ones you’ll see are Pigeon and Simba. We recommend Simba because it’s much more durable; we’ve had to replace our Pigeon bottle rubber heads a few times11.
At the 月子中心 postpartum center, they had a bottle sanitizing machine by Simba, which we found useful so we bought one as well. It’s a good purchase and we’re still using it now. It’s not necessary but it does give us peace of mind.
For teething:
We didn’t use a pacifier much in the first few months, but later on when Lyor started teething, it really helps to have a pacifier for when he sleeps and naps to keep him from waking up from the pain. This Philips one is quite popular and we’ve seen many other babies with it.
These are some toys that were more effective for teething for Lyor: rabbit toothbrush ears, fake remote controllers, and high-chair squiqqle toys. Every baby is different but we’ve found that textures and the right width of the toys being able to fit into Lyor’s mouth made a difference.
For crawling and climbing:
We bought jigsaw mats because most apartments in Taiwan have hard floors (marble, wood, etc.) so it’s safer with mats in case Lyor slips or falls. Jigsaw mats are also easier to clean than cloth mattresses.
For Lyor’s bedroom, we repurposed a lot of our old sofa pillows and mattresses to make a “pillow fortress” kind of room since he spends a lot of time in there. It’s a pain to do the laundry for his room though.
We got a small chair with wheels from IKEA so we can carry Lyor more easily around the house while sitting and maneuvering the chair instead of constantly walking around with his weight.
In my previous posts, I mentioned we bought some soft helmets for him in case he falls. He still cries from the shock of falling but it definitely doesn’t injure him as much without one.
Other purchases:
We started using reusable diapers, but we don’t use it all the time. The reason we got it is because we have a Dyson fan in our room, and since it can log the air quality of the room, we noticed that whenever we open a new disposable diaper or when we remove it from Lyor, the air quality alert shoots up. It turns out that for those diapers, they put a specific type of powder in it to soak the pee better. So we bought reusable diapers, which need to be washed every 3 days and soaked in between to prevent bad smells, and it’s quite a hassle to add this on top of the chores we already have12. Also, we use disposable diapers overnight because it’s much easier to deal with them in the middle of the night than the reusable ones.
In my previous posts, I recommended a robot vacuum that can also mop, which is great for chores, and actually it’s also great for Lyor because he loves to chase it but he gets in its way so we usually use it while he’s asleep or when we’re not at home.
There were a lot of recommended purchases that were completely unnecessary, but I want to highlight two that were on the pricier side that we didn’t really use:
We bought a cot but we barely used it. I think we used it for one month while Lyor was still a newborn and we kept him in a baby cocoon bed on the cot, but after he wanted to start rolling over, he couldn’t sleep well in the cot away from us. We started co-sleeping with him and found that to be much more effective for him to fall asleep and stay asleep longer. Naturally, it makes sense that a small, vulnerable baby would need to sleep physically close to their guardians, so we wouldn’t buy a cot again if we knew earlier. We also visited a few friends’ homes and none of them ended up using their cots either, but they all bought one too!
We got a playpen but Lyor got bored of it pretty fast. We did find it helpful to buy one for our parents’ home for a while but Lyor also eventually got bored of being put in there.
4. The best resource for learning is first-hand info from other parents
During these past 6 months, Jack and I looked through lot of online resources13 but they’re not very practical and they all kind of say the same things. Definitely do your own research to prepare, but we found that hearing first-hand from people we actually knew was much more useful.
Online resources will give common advice like “sleep when the baby sleeps”, but have you ever been able to, on command, just fall asleep immediately at any time in the day? And do you think you can take 10+ naps throughout the day, every day for 2-3 months (instead of one long stretch of sleep at night) and feel normal? I’ve laughed about this “advice” with other new moms because we all know it’s wack af.
The most helpful online resource was Reddit14, where other parents validated what a crazy experience they were also having with their newborns. Everyone taking care of babies goes through this difficult period so it’s just a bridge we had to cross. It also helps to chat with other new moms you know; it’s funny how many similarities we have about the painful experiences we all go through.
Overall, it’s a big learning curve and can be extremely hard at times, but I’m learning a lot; about myself, about human nature, about parenthood. It’s also rewarding to see Lyor growing healthier and stronger every month as he hits his milestones.
He also keeps getting cuter and lovelier; that definitely helps a lot 🥰 and now I have a lot more appreciation for mothers everywhere, especially those from previous generations when they didn’t have the internet to help, as well as single mothers. This is by far the hardest, most trying thing I’ve ever done.
There’s a recent study done by a neuroscientist on her own brain during pregnancy and after childbirth, and apparently grey matter gets reduced which affects memory, and I think if I want to have a baby again, I will likely need to forget how painful these past few months have been. I’m actually enjoying it more these days, but the first 6 months were really something else.
Having a baby is a great addition to my life with new layers of meaning. However, I totally understand why people aren’t having babies; it’s such a big commitment, it’s limiting, and it’s exhausting. Have babies if you’re prepared and really want them! And if you do and need some support, hit me up girl, I got you.
In part (i), I write about
Many studies show that the second most common cause of mothers dying after childbirth is from suicide.
I know a few women who prioritized not gaining weight while pregnant so they wouldn’t have to deal with their bigger bodies after giving birth.
I wrote about how stress is a big inhibitor to producing breast milk in part (ii).
I often opted to breastfeed overnight simply because when I switch on the lights, I immediately wake up and find it very hard to go back to sleep. At least when I was breastfeeding, I could keep the lights closed and read my dim-lighted kindle which helped me fall back asleep faster.
I talked about this in more detail in part (iii).
The birth rate decline is not just something Taiwan is experiencing but developed nations across the world are all facing this issue. There’s actually a global view that breastfeeding must be “protected” which is why buying and selling formula can be so difficult, and in my opinion, it’s just another way for institutions to limit the freedom of women’s choices for some unrealistic “standard” of living.
I talked a bit more about the silver cups in part (ii).
We bought our portable dimming lamps from HAY to support our friend who opened up the flagship HAY store in Taiwan.
A smaller reason Simba is also better is that it measures the ml units in 30s, which is divisible by the spoons that come in the baby formula (30ml or 60ml), whereas Pigeon is by 10s.
It’s not that bad to use reusable diapers now that we have the hang of the routine.
Be careful about “Montessori” advice; because Maria Montessori never patented her thinking and methodologies, anyone can claim they are using Montessori practices.
Specifically the r/NewParents and r/newborns communities.