Like my title? I just went to the 3-day LATCH conference to learn lots of great things related to breastfeeding. Ryan stayed home with the kids. It was fun to switch roles for a few days, but I'm so thankful that me being outside the home all day is the exception rather than the norm.
I listened to a fascinating lecture about bottle-feeding by Karen Gromada this morning. It is the reality that most babies will be bottle-fed at some point - for supplementation in the early days, when the mother returns to work, or simply because the mother chooses to feed by bottle. Until this morning, I was not as knowledgeable as I should have been about proper bottle-feeding, since you know, I do help moms with that. My babies never received any bottles because 1) they were born healthy, 2) I had good support for breastfeeding, 3) I've never had an emergency necessitating bottle-feeding, and 4) I've never chosen to be separated from my infants for longer than they could go between feedings. In fact, I'd been counseling moms for a couple years before I ever even used a breast pump. Needless to say, I was quite happy to learn more.
One thing I did know - as does everyone who specializes in breastfeeding - is that most babies are fed way too much and way too quickly by bottle. It is solving this problem that is the problem. Karen did a really cool experiment to determine the optimal flow rate of a bottle nipple, and then tested the flow rates of several different bottle nipples. She found - not surprisingly - that most nipples were way too fast and just a couple were too slow. She also showed some great videos of babies displaying distress cues while feeding from a too-fast nipple. She said that this is an issue for ALL babies, even if they are formula fed, because babies are being over-fed. Since they are being over-fed and not able to control the flow rate themselves, they are more at risk for obesity. The first important thing to do - which all the breastfeeding people know - is to feed the baby in an upright position and lean him forward every once in a while to stop the flow. We call that paced bottle-feeding sometimes. However, if the flow rate is too fast, it will still overwhelm the baby, even with this technique. There is no industry standard for flow rate among bottle nipple manufacturers. It's great that Karen and her colleague did all the work to find out which bottle nipples are appropriate, but since manufacturers are constantly changing things, that information quickly becomes obsolete.
After her lecture, I asked Karen if she had access to the manufacturers specifications for the nipple designs. She doesn't, but I said that I will try and get a hold of them and figure out the ideal design for a bottle nipple. Ta-da! Lactation meets engineering. This will be fun, assuming I can get those specs. I can't make the patent website work to look at the patents - something about the software not being available - so I will have to do some digging. Let me know if you have any ideas.
Fascinating, huh?
Another lecture I listened to was on feminism and breastfeeding. Here, I'm just talking about my own opinion. I did take some electives in college on topics that included some history on feminism but I'm no expert. We have feminism to thank for some huge things, like voting, obviously.
However, feminism has had another effect, which may or may not have ever been anyone'e intention, I don't really know. Girls today are raised with very little explicit teaching on mothering and very few opportunities to observe mothering. I certainly never thought about being a mom before I got engaged. I went to school to get into college to get the skills I needed for a career that would make me a good living. I didn't think about combining motherhood and career. I just assumed I'd have a career...and I guess I assumed I would not be a mother.
Honoring motherhood is not part of our culture. Women assume they can go from never even seeing a baby nursing to caring for a newborn full time and alone. We cannot learn mothering overnight.
I really should say that honoring parenthood is not part of our culture, because dads are equally clueless, but they are less affected, biologically speaking.
Somewhere along the way to equal rights and equal opportunities for women, we have consented to sameness. We have almost deleted our female selves. Because we know that we cannot - cannot - run a Fortune 500 company 70 hours a week and actually be present - literally as in have bodily presence - with our babies. We can't mother - nurture, nourish - our babies if we aren't there.
So, we kind of pretend we aren't female. Or aren't mammals. Or something. And girls today are not being taught to value mothering and to choose their career path with that in mind. And boys, too, boys should be taught about parenthood, to be taught to provide for their families.
Ryan and I are teaching our children to value parenthood in general, and to value mothers being physically with their babies specifically. That's not hard to do - it's in our nature. It's interesting to see how our children play when they pretend to be married. Our children are learning that fathers work to provide for their families and mothers manage the care of the children and home. Oh, and the cleaning ladies clean the toilets. It's also pretty ingrained in them that dads are pilots and moms help other moms nurse their babies, but they'll broaden their horizons eventually.
One major thing that really helps in our home is that I have taken the active leadership role in running our household. That is one thing mothers can do really well - be the leaders and keepers of their homes by finding a good rhythm for everyone, and communicating that to dad so he knows what to do when he is home. I'm certainly the CEO at my house. I think this helps our kids learn to be leaders, too, which our world so desperately needs.
Instead of a feminist, I'd like to be a family-ist - focusing on the needs of my whole family and valuing mothering as the thing that makes the world go round.
