Check out Rolling Stone's latest political news and features covering today's hottest political topics and Matt Taibbi's take. Culture Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility 1 We Seek Excellence Our culture focuses on helping us achieve excellence 2 Seven Aspects of. The Case Against Breast- Feeding - The Atlantic. Image. credit: Jose Luis Pelaez/Getty Images. One afternoon at the playground last summer, shortly after the birth of my third child, I made the mistake of idly musing about breast- feeding to a group of new mothers I. This time around, I said, I was considering cutting it off after a month or so. At this remark, the air of insta- friendship we had established cooled into an icy politeness, and the mothers shortly wandered away to chase little Emma or Liam onto the slide. Just to be perverse, over the next few weeks I tried this experiment again several more times. The reaction was always the same: circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed- up Chicken Mc. Nuggets. In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast- feeding is the real ticket into the club. My mother friends love to exchange stories about subversive ways they used to sneak frozen breast milk through airline security (it. When Angelina Jolie wanted to secure her status as America. Alt- rocker Pete Wentz recently admitted that he tasted his wife, Ashlee Simpson. Many of the stories are accompanied by suggestions from the ubiquitous parenting guru Dr. William Sears, whose Web site hosts a comprehensive list of the benefits of mother. Then it adds, for good measure, stool with a . Indeed, the article opens with a promisingly realistic vignette, featuring a theoretical . The root of the problem is not the sudden realization that your ideal of an equal marriage, with two parents happily taking turns working and raising children, now seems like a farce. It turns out to be quite simple: You just haven. I remember the midwife coming to my hospital bed and shifting my arm here, and the baby. But after three children and 2. Sears is selling me too hard. I may have put in fewer parenting years than he has, but I do have some perspective. And when I look around my daughter. By trying to make their good marriage better, Elizabeth Weil and Daniel Duane tested it. Credit Dewey Nicks for The New York Times. Read political news commentary and analysis from today's most popular conservative columnists and bloggers including Ann Coulter, Thomas Sowell, Michael Barone, Hugh. As our workshop leader handed each of us a selfie stick, she acknowledged that all of us have body parts we don't like, and that it can be scary to look at ourselves. Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been. What dim eyes she has. And already sprouting acne! I have experienced what the Babytalk story calls breast- feeding- induced . Being stuck at home breast- feeding as he walked out the door for work just made me unreasonably furious, at him and everyone else. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears. Still, despite my stint as the postpartum playground crank, I could not bring myself to stop breast- feeding. So I was left feeling trapped, like many women before me, in the middle- class mother. One day, while nursing my baby in my pediatrician? There I was, sitting half- naked in public for the tenth time that day, the hundredth time that month, the millionth time in my life? That night, I did what any sleep- deprived, slightly paranoid mother of a newborn would do. Goretti Nyabenda of Burundi transformed her life with a $2 microloan that allowed her to build a small business. Credit Katy Grannan for The New York Times. Life & Culture Newsletter. Latest news and features on arts & entertainment, sports, travel, food & wine and more. The 2016 presidential election is more like the Brexit vote in many ways than it is like prior presidential elections. Dear TIME Reader, As a regular visitor to TIME.com, we are sure you enjoy all the great journalism created by our editors and reporters. I called my doctor friend for her password to an online medical library, and then sat up and read dozens of studies examining breast- feeding. After a couple of hours, the basic pattern became obvious: the medical literature looks nothing like the popular literature. It shows that breast- feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls. A couple of studies will show fewer allergies, and then the next one will turn up no difference. Same with mother- infant bonding, IQ, leukemia, cholesterol, diabetes. Even where consensus is mounting, the meta studies. So how is it that every mother I know has become a breast- feeding fascist? My parents were working- class Israelis, living in Tel Aviv in the . In the U. S., people were already souring on formula and passing out No Nestl. My mother had already ditched her fussy Turkish coffee for Nescaf. Transforming soft, sandy grains from solid to magic liquid must have seemed like the forward thing to do. Plus, my mom believed her pediatrician when he said that it was important to precisely measure a baby. Pediatrics was then a newly minted profession, and for the next century, the men who dominated it would constantly try to get mothers to welcome . But now and again, mothers would fight back. In the U. S., the rebellion against formula began in the late . They were Catholic mothers, influenced by the Christian Family Movement, who spoke of breast- feeding as . They took their league. In their photos, the women of La Leche wear practical pumps and high- neck housewife dresses, buttoned to the top. They saw themselves as a group of women who were . Instead, they aimed to . Over time the group adopted a feminist edge. A 1. 97. 2 publication rallies mothers to have ! I want to be free to be a woman! The authors were more groovy types than the La Leche League moms; they wore slouchy jeans, clogs, and bandanas holding back waist- length hair. But the two movements had something in common; Our Bodies also grew out of . Breasts were not things for men to whistle and wink at; they were made for women to feed their babies in a way that was . The mothers, it turned out, were using contaminated water or rationing formula because it was so expensive. Still, in the U. S., the whole episode turned breast- feeding advocates and formula makers into Crips and Bloods, and introduced the take- no- prisoners turf war between them that continues to this day. Even many doctors believe that breast milk is full of maternal antibodies that get absorbed into the baby. That is how it works for most mammals. But in humans, the process is more pedestrian, and less powerful. A human baby is born with antibodies already in place, having absorbed them from the placenta. Breast milk dumps another layer of antibodies, primarily secretory Ig. A, directly into the baby. As the baby is nursing, these extra antibodies provide some added protection against infection, but they never get into the blood. Could the oligosaccharides in milk prevent diarrhea? Do the fatty acids boost brain development? The past few decades have turned up many promising leads, hypotheses, and theories, all suggestive and nifty but never confirmed in the lab. Instead, most of the claims about breast- feeding. Thousands of such studies have been published, linking breast- feeding with healthier, happier, smarter children. But they all share one glaring flaw. But researchers cannot ethically tell mothers what to feed their babies. Instead they have to settle for . These simply look for differences in two populations, one breast- fed and one not. The problem is, breast- fed infants are typically brought up in very different families from those raised on the bottle. In the U. S., breast- feeding is on the rise. But the numbers are much higher among women who are white, older, and educated; a woman who attended college, for instance, is roughly twice as likely to nurse for six months. Researchers try to factor out all these . A reasonable person would be cautious about every new amazing discovery. Some studies have found a link between nursing and slimmer kids, but they haven. This study surveyed 2,6. After adjusting for race, parental education, maternal smoking, and other factors. Instead, the strongest predictor of the child. Whether obese mothers nursed or used formula, their children were more likely to be heavy. The breast- feeding advocates. One 2. 00. 5 paper focused on 5. The economists Eirik Evenhouse and Siobhan Reilly compared rates of diabetes, asthma, and allergies; childhood weight; various measures of mother- child bonding; and levels of intelligence. Almost all the differences turned out to be statistically insignificant. For the most part, the . Kramer followed 1. Belarus throughout their childhoods. He came up with a clever way to randomize his study, at least somewhat, without doing anything unethical. He took mothers who had already started nursing, and then subjected half of them to an intervention strongly encouraging them to nurse exclusively for several months. The intervention worked: many women nursed longer as a result. And extended breast- feeding did reduce the risk of a gastrointestinal infection by 4. This result seems to be consistent with the protection that s. Ig. A provides; in real life, it adds up to about four out of 1. Kramer also noted some reduction in infant rashes. Otherwise, his studies found very few significant differences: none, for instance, in weight, blood pressure, ear infections, or allergies. But intelligence is tricky to measure, because it. Other recent studies, particularly those that have factored out the mother. Even sibling studies can. With her first child, for instance, a mother may be extra cautious, keeping the neighbor. By her third child, she may no longer breast- feed. Maybe she is now using day care, exposing the baby to more illnesses. Surely she is not noticing that kid No. She is also not staring lovingly into the baby. On paper, the three siblings are equivalent, but their experiences are not. We have clear indications that breast- feeding helps prevent an extra incident of gastrointestinal illness in some kids. We have murky correlations with a whole bunch of long- term conditions. The evidence on IQs is intriguing but not all that compelling, and at best suggests a small advantage, perhaps five points; an individual kid. If a child is disadvantaged in other ways, this bump might make a difference. But for the kids in my playground set, the ones whose mothers obsess about breast- feeding, it gets lost in a wash of Baby Einstein videos, piano lessons, and the rest. And in any case, if a breast- feeding mother is miserable, or stressed out, or alienated by nursing, as many women are, if her marriage is under stress and breast- feeding is making things worse, surely that can have a greater effect on a kid. But not so much better that formula deserves the label of . Given what we know so far, it seems reasonable to put breast- feeding.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |