What? You need something besides boobs? How did I ever manage?
Sorry for the cheap shot, I know that information smooths-the-way for many activities, as well as that breastfeeding is not a homeschool-specific topic, but jeez-louise.
- UCLA Center for Healthier Children Breastfeeding Resource Program   Â
The UCLA Breastfeeding Resource Program was established in 1996 and supports CHCFC’s mission of fostering interdisciplinary, collaborative research and service programs focusing on children and family health services and systems, and providing technical assistance to policymakers, community-based health and related service organizations and researchers. The primary goal of the Breastfeeding Resource Program is to increase the numbers of U.S. women who breastfeed their children and to extend the duration of breastfeeding in order to maximize the health, developmental and economic benefits important for all family members and society at large.
I ‘get’ the part about the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of a nursing couple when one half of the couple is at work and the other half is in daycare, and I understand our modern need to have anything and everything scientifically proven one way or the other (mothers having lactated after giving birth since forever not being reason enough), but this is over the top.
Not only is this sort of thing way weird (although with aphrodisiacs advertised on tv — watch out for the four-hour limit! – who’s to judge?), it’s a day late and a dollar short. When I worked at a U.S. Army civilian personnel office in Germany in the mid-1970s, my German co-worker, Ulrike, was given time off to go home and nurse her new son at lunch. This was after six months (if my memory is accurate) of maternity leave. Twenty years later, UCLA figures out breastfeeding is important for the babies of new mothers who are working.
I’m all for nursing babies (and walked the talk — or rather, sat the talk, twins included), but in the midst of researching oversight of children and families — and looking at another document linked from the publications portion of the UCLA National Center for Infant and Early Childhood Health Policy site, Framing Early Childhood Development – this ‘breastfeeding resource program’ just has an awful smell to it.
- Projects of the UCLA Breastfeeding Resource Program are designed to help reach this goal. One such project – the National Breastfeeding Policy Conference held in Washington, D.C in November 1998 developed a national policy agenda and disseminated the reports on national priorities that provided the foundation for the Surgeon General’s Blueprint for Action and the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee’s Strategic Plan for Breastfeeding.
The U.S. Breastfeeding Committee? Ai, yi, yi. (to get to the first La Leche League link, I had to drill down four pages)
Looks like it’s time to break out Gabrielle Palmer’s The Politics of Breastfeeding. You know that a major university and the government didn’t mount this kind of campaign just because tits are for kids.
hornblower said on June 2, 2006
Hmmm. Well, as an IBCLC I have a slightly different perspective on this. The establishment of a nationwide breastfeeding committee is one of the requirements of the 1990 Innocenti Declaration, which was the beginning of a global initiative to promote breastfeeding, called the Baby Friendly Initiative. I sit on a provincial breastfeeding committee myself – obviously not an unbiased person
I think there is a strong need for educational institutions, non-profits, medical associations, and government to be involved in promoting breastfeeding for this one simple reason – we are fighting against a very large, very well organized commercial enterprise designed to undermine breastfeeding by selling artifical breast milk. That’s when it stopped being just about mom, her boob, and her baby – when a corporation put all its weight in trying to undermine subtly or downright blatantly that most women can’t, don’t want to, shouldn’t want to, that it doesn’t really matter, that the artificial stuff made in a lab is just fine….. that’s when there’s a role for governments to mount these campaigns.
Valerie said on June 2, 2006
Hi, Hornblower,
I understand the need to combat the formula industy — such as that commercial with the little hearts or butterflies flying over the baby’s tummy after being given formula in the American television commercial. That’s why I linked to The Politics of Breastfeeding. Too many developing nations have had their infants’ & young childrens’ nutrition (and lives) jeopardized by the introduction of artifical breast milk in areas where the people are poor and don’t have access to clean water. Besides that, it just isn’t necessary (although I understand that some mothers can’t easily nurse their children). I just don’t feel comfortable with a U.S. Breastfeeding Committee in which the La Leche League is given a single URL-link four pages down within the website.
The recommendations at the page:
http://www.who.int/child-adolescent-health/NUTRITION/global_strategy.htm
indicate that there are specific recommendations for lengths of breastfeeding time, and that responsibilities lie with government workers and organizations.
========================================
The strategy calls for action in the following areas:
All governments should develop and implement a comprehensive policy on infant and young child feeding, in the context of national policies for nutrition, child and reproductive health, and poverty reduction.
All mothers should have access to skilled support to initiate and sustain exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months and ensure the timely introduction of adequate and safe complementary foods with continued breastfeeding up to two years or beyond.
—> Health workers should be empowered <— to provide effective feeding counselling, and their services be extended in the community by trained lay or peer counsellors.
Governments should review progress in national implementation of the International Code of Marketing of Breast milk Substitutes, and consider new legislation or additional measures as needed to protect families from adverse commercial influences.
Governments should enact imaginative legislation protecting the breastfeeding rights of working women and establishing means for its enforcement in accordance with international labour standards.
The strategy specifies not only responsibilities of governments, but also of international organisations, non-governmental organisations and other concerned parties. It engages all relevant stakeholders and provides a framework for accelerated action, linking relevant intervention areas and using resources available in a variety of sectors.
========================================
That last paragrph doesn't even mention mothers or babies, but relegates them to being called "other concerned parties" and "relevant stakeholders."
In the US there are already structures in place for mental health screening of mothers and infants. How long before breastfeeding, for specific lengths of time, is mandatory? Will doctors become mandatory reporters of whether or not infants are being breastfed, and for which lengths of time?
To me this reflects more 'expertization' and government oversight of a natural function and relationship. There is a difference between acknowledgment of proven actions, and specific government sponsorship of them.
(apologies requested for significant lapses in logic, spelling or continuity — happy 6 yr. old grandson playing Catch A Mouse while being both 'he' and 'me' and giving me a play-by-play description of who's winning [he is] )