Translation: He/she who wants the world to remain as it is, doesn’t want the world to remain at all.

My regular readers will know that I have a lot to say about misleading, inappropriate, unethical and sneaky claims by infant formula companies.  While we need to continue to put pressure on formula companies to change their business practices, the most effective way to ensure a change is to have legislation passed and enforced that protects babies.

If you are an American, this is your opportunity to tell your Senator that you have had enough. The Child Nutrition Act is being debated and renewed by Congress and MomsRising is encouraging Americans to write to their senators. Whether you are concerned about moms being misled by hyped up claims or a taxpayer that is concerned about your tax dollars paying for these hyped up ingredients through the WIC program, this is your opportunity to have your voice heard.

See the MomsRising.org page for more information and for a sample letter to send to your Senator.

Stop Empty Hype and Keep Babies Healthy!

While you’re at it, you can also urge your senator to protect kids from BPA.

There are some really bad kids toys out there. Jaw droppingly bad. And when I saw this one on Finding Summer’s Anti-Consumerism Link Farm post, my jaw did drop.

I could see this being useful for budding documentary film producers putting on a home re-make of Supersize Me, but otherwise I wouldn’t be welcoming my children to pretend to be McDonald’s employees or McDonald’s consumers.

At home, we have some play food. It is a mix of some Melissa and Doug stuff (oh, wait…that disappeared when it was recalled), non-branded plastic whole food items (e.g. vegetables, breads, meats, etc.), and some branded packaged foods (e.g. can of soup, cake mix, box of cereal) that are not all that fabulous but that rounded out the play cupboards (made for me by my dad when I was a kid) for about $10 at Canadian Tire. We also love going “grocery shopping” at the play market at the Children’s Museum in Gatineau. The kids love picking up a shopping bag and picking out eggplants, croissants, and a whole variety of fun foods on their shopping trip.

But if I was going to start-over, or if I decide to add to the collection at some point, I think the ideal would be a mix of:

• Felt food
• Wooden food
• Real dry organic packaged whole foods: We saw some great mini-packages of brown rice, red lentils, and other foods at the local organic grocery store in Berlin that were designed as kids toys.

How about you? When your children play food do you want them playing McDonald’s or Farmer’s Market? How does their food related play reflect or influence their real life relationship to food?

Photo credit: crazytales562 on flickr

It seems like just yesterday, I was announcing our upcoming trip to Berlin with my post From Bacon to Bratwurst (and a vegan cafe). Now, 3 months after we arrived in Berlin, we are getting ready to go back home. Having lived in Germany previously, I thought I was well prepared for our visit and figured Berlin would be similar to what I already knew, just bigger. I was wrong. Berlin is not Germany. Berlin is Berlin. Different in so many ways. I’m ready to go home, but I’ll miss it too.

What I’ll miss about Berlin

• Fresh buns in morning: If there is one thing, other than beer, that the Germans know how to do well, it is bread. They are not masters of white bread, like the French, but their darker breads with all kinds of seeds on them and their pretzel breads (for lack of a better term for Laugenweck) are amazing. Not only are they amazing, but they are available so close by that it is easy to grab fresh buns for breakfast each morning. At home, we’ll be back to popping frozen bagels into the toaster.

• So many restaurants nearby: Within a block of our house, I can count at least 20 restaurants. Some fast food. Some sit down. Some German. Most not German. There are so many that we didn’t even get to give them all a try. Never mind doing a culinary tour of Berlin. We didn’t even complete a culinary tour of our block.

• Convenience: Forgetting something at the store is rarely a problem. Having a late night craving is not really an issue. There are fully stocked grocery stores within a few blocks of our place that are open from early morning to about 10pm Monday to Saturday. There are convenience stores that sell basic groceries and beer and wine that are open 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  Other than the convenience stores, most things are closed on Sundays, except at the train stations where everything is open even on Sundays (including several major grocery stores, pharmacies, etc.). Even on Sundays when most things are closed, the things that are open are closer to us than the closest grocery store is to our house in Canada.

• Public transportation: Public transportation wasn’t just an option for us in Berlin. It was our only way of getting around. We didn’t have bicycles here (although if we had been staying any longer, I think it would have been worthwhile) and we didn’t have a car (except for rentals when we went out of Berlin for weekends or longer). So each day, as we considered our plans, we took out the U-Bahn (subway), S-Bahn (light rail), Strassenbahn (Tram/Streetcar), and bus schedules to figure out how to get where we were going. Julian knew them like the back of his hand fairly quickly and would often debate with me which would be the fastest (or most interesting) route home.

• Playgrounds: They have amazing playgrounds in Berlin. Fun ones. Challenging ones. Interesting ones. Not plastic, padded, super-safe boring ones. We designated several days as playground tour days. We would take public transportation to a playground and then walk from playground to playground all the way back home or to another subway station. There are enough playgrounds around that you can cover a couple of large adventure style playgrounds and several smaller playgrounds easily in a day with a picnic lunch along the way when doing a tour like that. Our favourite playground by far was the one at the Berlin Zoo.

What I won’t miss about Berlin

• Dog shit: The second we open the door to our apartment building, we have to be on high alert. There is dog shit everywhere. As I wrote previously, the dogs here are pretty free range and a lot of them just do their business whenever and wherever they want and there is no one there to poop and scoop. Even if there is someone with them, they do not poop and scoop. In our four months here, I only saw one owner pick up after her dog. The rest…left on the sidewalk until the next rain washes it away.

• Graffiti: There is a lot of great graffiti in Berlin. Extremely artistic and extremely creative. There are also lots of idiots with spray paint that seem to spray random garbage onto whatever surface they can find. Everything has graffiti on it and it starts to grate on the eyes after a while. I was amazed when we visited the neighbouring city of Potsdam how stark the contrast was between Berlin and Potsdam. Everything was clean in Potsdam. In Berlin, everything is tagged.

• No friends for my kids: We didn’t have much success in finding playmates for our kids in Berlin. All of the children our kids ages are in day care (“Kita”) until around 4pm every day, which is about the time that we are usually getting ready to go home. We did find kids to play with here and there, but no sustained friendships to speak of. That was quite difficult for me, because it mean that I was their sole source of entertainment all week long. I can’t wait for them to have other kids to play with again.

• The noise: We live in a very noisy area. We are on a main street, right next to a main subway line, right next to many, many, many restaurants and bars.  There is noise at all times, but especially at night, when the sirens, screams, blaring music, singing drunks, and so on keep us from being able to sleep properly. On top of that, the past couple of weeks they have been completely ripping out and renovating the apartments below us, so every morning starting at 7:30pm, the jackhammers start and they don’t stop until about 4:30pm. We’ve been sick the past few days, so we’ve been pretty much stuck in the apartment, up at night a lot with sick kids, and it is impossible to nap during the day because of the jack hammer. I can’t wait to get back to the peace and quiet of the lake, where the loudest sounds are the frogs at night or a neighbour mowing the lawn during the day.

• People treating me like a dumb tourist: If I didn’t have my kids with me, I might be able to pass as a German most of the time. But people see me with my kids and hear us speaking English and assume that we must be tourists. People have no qualms about speaking about us, right next to us, just assuming that we don’t speak their language. When I try to order food or ask a question in German, I often have people answer me in English because they heard me speaking English with my children. I know a lot of people who have chosen to raise their children bilingual. I wonder if all people, around the world, who chose to speak the non-native language with their children get the dumb tourist treatment or if that is just reserved for English speakers in Berlin. On the upside, for people who truly do not speak German, I do have to say that Berlin is an extremely easy place to get by.

What I’m looking forward to in Canada

• Quiet: I think I went over this one above. I just want silence at some point within a 24 hour period.

• Air conditioning when appropriate: North Americans completely overdo air conditioning. The second the heat is turned off, the A/C is turned on. Germans, on the other hand, don’t seem to know what air conditioning is. While we froze in May, most of June and July has been sweltering hot and there is next to no air conditioning in Berlin.  Not in our apartment. Not in stores. Not at the hair stylist. Not in restaurants and bars. Not in the subway. Nowhere. You just sweat along with everyone else. Well, okay, not nowhere. But it is hard to find and hanging out at the mall all day with kids is not really a great option.  All that said, I’m looking forward to being able to keep cool in a few more places in Canada.

• Being back in my own home, with my own kitchen, my own bed, more space: We’ve been living in a small furnished apartment, which did help with keeping our life simple, but also came with its frustrations. The bed is not as comfortable as the one I have at home. I never did get the hang of cooking on a gas stove without having to either use way too much butter/oil or have everything stick to the pan, and I always felt like we were tripping over each other and tripping over our stuff (and the owner’s stuff).

• Comfortable office chair: In Canada, at both work and at home, I have comfortable office chairs. I spend a lot of time in those chairs. Here in Berlin, I’ve had to use one of the kitchen chairs for 4 months. My bum is sore. My back is sore. My legs are sore.

• Exercise that raises your heart rate: I have definitely been more active, generally, in Berlin than I am in Canada. I am out walking around most of the day, almost every day, with the kids. Sometimes I’m even carrying one of them. But I haven’t really had the time or opportunity to do any exercise that gets my heart rate up. I’m looking forward to getting back into basketball and back on my treadmill when I get back to Canada.

What I’m not looking forward to in Canada

• Less time with the kids: I’ve spent a lot of time with the kids this summer, which has been great, but also exhausting. I am looking forward to having a bit of a break from that, but I think once we get back into the regular routine of work and school and other activities, I will miss having the opportunity to hang out with them more frequently and to ask “what do you want to do today?” in the morning.

• More expensive: Europe is usually expensive. Berlin, however, is very economical. From food to transportation to the hair stylist to restaurants, everything we buy here seems to be very reasonably priced and much less expensive than in Canada. Once we get back, I expect we’ll see our food bills and transportation bills in particular rising substantially.

• Driving everywhere, long commutes: I am not looking forward to my long drives to work everyday and to the long drives to go just about anywhere. I will miss the convenience of having everything right outside my door in Berlin. Does anyone have a nice townhouse or condo for sale for cheap in the Byward Market?

Good and bad, like or not, we’re heading back home. I expect I’ll have a few more Berlin posts as I put a cap on our time here, but after that it is back to the realities of everyday Canada. Thank you for joining us on our journey. I hope you’ll come along again next time (maybe…).

I’m sure you’ve all heard of white privilege and male privilege before. But have you heard of adult privilege? Children are, generally, an oppressed group. They are not treated as equal human beings and are generally not afforded the same rights, respect or consideration as an adult. This is true, I think, pretty much anywhere in the world. However, could this problem be exacerbated when children truly are a small minority?

In Germany, the politicians say more children are needed. They have fairly generous parental leave and financial benefits for parents. But despite that, the birth rate remains extremely low at 1.4 births per woman and people aged 19 and under make up less than 1/5 of the population. There could be any number of reasons why people aren’t having more children in Germany, but as the current title story in the German magazine Stern points out, one reason may be that children simply are not welcome. In the article Störfaktor Kind (Disruptive Child), the authors Uli Hauser and Frankziska Reich describe numerous situations where children are unwelcome in Germany. People complain about the noise children make at day cares, schools, playgrounds, in their own homes, and more. It is more and more difficult for people with families, especially large families, to find an apartment or home to rent because no one wants to have children as neighbours. It is difficult to get space for day cares and playgrounds allocated in development plans.  Even where those spaces exist, neighbours complain and the time that kids have to run around and make noise ends up being curtailed to very specific hours of the day where they won’t be disturbing a quiet breakfast, afternoon nap, afternoon coffee and cake, after work drink the garden, etc. According to the Stern article, UNICEF says that a large portion of 15 year olds in Germany feel like outsiders, uncomfortable, unwelcome or alone. This is no wonder when children and youth truly are in the minority, not only within their homes but also in the community.

In contrast, in South Asia, everyone has children. Lots and lots of children. In Pakistan, for example, the birth rate is 3.3 births per woman and almost half of the population is age 19 or under. A childfree German journalist who frequently travels in South Asia wrote an article called “Wie, Sie haben keine Kinder?!” (“What do you mean, you don’t have children?”) for the German news magazine Spiegel. He says that taxi drivers, vegetable sellers, security guards, and just about any stranger you come into contact with will ask you how many children you have. If you are married and have no children, they will ask prying questions to try to figure out what on earth is wrong (he advises people to lie and say that they have 6 children). The idea that someone may not want children or may be waiting to have children is unheard of and considered bizarre. This is because children are normal in Pakistan. People get married and they have children. It isn’t generally considered a choice. Children are part of a marriage and part of society. As a result of being considered normal and being so numerous, my guess would be that children in those countries are not looked at as a disturbance like they are in many highly populated, low birth rate countries.

In Canada, where the birth rate is not much higher than Germany at 1.6 births per woman, I think we escape some of what Germany is going through and yet feel some other parts of it more heavily. I think because we have so much open space, there is room for children to run, play and be noisy in most parts of the country without disturbing others. That said, because those open (out of sight, out of hearing range, out of mind) spaces exist, I think there is a stronger tendency to want to have separate child spaces and to keep children out of adult spaces. This is seen, for example, in restaurants where children are not welcome or at family events where children are not included or are put at a separate kids table in a separate room. Adults do not want children to disrupt their adult fun and our society provides plenty of opportunity through day care, schools, babysitters, and more for children to be “put in their place.”

Can’t we all just get along?

There are certain segments of the adult population that I find loud and annoying. There are segments of the adult population that ask stupid questions and make ignorant remarks. There are segments of the adult population that create a ruckus and make a mess. There are segments of the adult population that do not act appropriately in public places. Yet these people are often “welcome”, while children are not.  Children certainly are loud at times, but so are adults. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that if I am being kept awake at a time when I should be sleeping, it is most likely a drunken adult and not a playing child who is keeping me up. I don’t think it is possible to teach children how to act appropriately in public unless they are allowed to be in public. If we always shove them off into noise proof child spaces, they may have the very important opportunity to “just be kids”, but they will not have the opportunity to learn through observation how people act in public and may just take their noisiness directly from the playgrounds right into the bars (as they come of age) and then out onto the streets, thereby disrupting my sleep and everyone else’s with their shouts and music.

Let’s let kids be kids, enjoy them being kids in an age-appropriate fashion, and invite them into our adult world where we can teach and model respect for others. They will not immediately act like adults, but if they have the opportunity to be in adult company at adult events, they will eventually learn. Once children are welcome in society, maybe people in countries like Germany that need young people badly to pay for the retirement and health care costs of the older segments of the population, will consider having more children.

Image credit: c@rljones on flickr

Data source: Birth rates and population pyramids from U.S. Census Bureau International Database.

Read more on this topic:

• Raising my Boychick: Dancing between tables: on the personhood of children
• Noble Savage: On child hate and feminism

…or Pippi Longstocking for you English speakers!

It seems the discussion of parenting and mothering has shifted from last year’s discussion about bad mothers to this year’s discussion of unhappy mothers. Is parenting all drudgery and do we just have to live up to our responsibilities and grin and bear it? Or is there a way to find happiness and have a family?

Image credit:  Kevin N. Murphy on flickr

The pressure cooker

Margaret Wente, whom I frequently disagree with, wrote an article called Motherhood: the new oppression. Although I do not feel oppressed (most days) and I think she makes some broad generalizations (as usual), I do think that what she says rings true to some extent:

Once upon a time, the conveniences of modern life (processed foods, Lysol spray, disposable diapers, clothes dryers, polyester sheets) liberated women like my mother from their chains. But now, their granddaughters are clamouring to clap the shackles on again. Someone’s got to mash the organic applesauce, hang the diapers out to dry, and breastfeed the kid. No matter how enlightened the parental units, that someone will generally be Mom.

It seems to me that if you had deliberately devised a plot to oppress women, it couldn’t get more diabolical than this. Highly educated, progressive and enlightened mothers don’t need men to oppress them. They’re perfectly capable of oppressing themselves!

I would like to say she was completely wrong about mothers being oppressed, but then I read articles like Mother-Toddler Separation (by Dr. George Wootan, M.D.) and I know that the attempt to oppress mothers is very real [emphasis mine]:

Babies and toddlers, up to about the age of three, have little concept of time. To them, there are only two times: now and never. Telling a toddler that Mommy will be back in an hour, or at 5:00, is essentially the same thing as telling her that Mommy is gone forever, because she has no idea what those times mean.

Let me submit to you that the need for mother is as strong in a toddler as the need for food, and that there is no substitute for mother. When he’s tired, hurt, or upset, he needs his mother for comfort and security. True, he doesn’t need Mommy all the time, but when he does, he needs her now. If he scrapes his knee, or gets his feelings hurt, he can’t put his need on hold for two hours until Mommy is home, and the babysitter – or even Daddy – just won’t do as well as if Mommy was there.

So, yes, this is what I’m saying: A mother shouldn’t leave her child until about the age of three, when he has developed some concept of time. You’ll know this has begun to happen when he understands what “yesterday,” “tomorrow,” and “this afternoon” mean, and when your child voluntarily begins to spend more time away from you on his own accord.

If I read between the lines in Wootan’s article (the whole thing and not just this excerpt), I can agree with his basic premise. Babies and young children will feel insecure if they are not with someone that they have a strong bond with. However, assuming that can only be the mother is an attempt to oppress mothers and does a disservice to fathers, grandparents and others who do or would like to develop a strong bond with a new baby.

Is it irresponsible for a mother to leave her young child? No.

If anything, I would say that:

• It is irresponsible for a mother to deny her young children the opportunity to bond with other adults
  • The child benefits from having several close relationships.
  • If the mother has an emergency and needs to be away, the child will have other loved ones to stay with, instead of being doubly traumatized by “something happened to my mother” and “who is this strange person I have to stay with?”.
    

• It is irresponsible of the mother to deny herself a sanity break
  • I doubt there are very many people who can withstand being “on duty” all the time for several years, without breaking herself and/or taking it out on the kids.

Big important tasks like raising a child are best shared. Other adults can initially bond with a baby or young child while the mother is still present. Whether that is the father wearing the baby down for a nap while the mother makes lunch, the grandmother playing peek-a-boo and pat-a-cake with a young toddler while the mom does some laundry, or a neighbour holding the baby while chatting with the mom. If other adults are given consistent and frequent opportunity to bond with an infant, there will come a time (usually before 3 years of age) when it is okay for the mom to go alone to the bathroom, to have a nap, to grab the mail from the mailbox, to go to the store, to have coffee with a friend, or even to go to work. I know that the bond between an infant and its mother is extremely important and I know that mothers are very important for small children, but I do not think that infants and toddlers will be emotionally scarred by being separated briefly from their mother if they are left in the care of other adults that they have a strong bond with.  Small children may not understand time, but they can understand routine (e.g. first we have lunch, then go for a walk, then have a nap, then have a snack, then mommy comes home). Developing a bond and a routine should be done gradually and with care (not abruptly), but to say that a mother has to be with her children 24/7/365 x 3 years is unreasonable and ridiculous.

Arwyn from Raising my Boychick wrote a response to Wootan’s article that hits the nail on the head. In, No, less-than-threes do not need their moms 24/7/365, she starts off her stellar post (which you must read in its entirety) with:

What infants and toddlers and preschoolers need is attachment — loving, responsive care from people they know and trust, preferably have known for most or all of their lives but at least with whom they have built a relationship. They need to have older people — adults, yes, but also teens, older children — who know them and love them and who they know and love, accessible to them when needed. The placement of that responsibility exclusively on the mother makes it not a joy, a task of life easily fulfilled, but a burden, under which so many of us are breaking.

A lot of moms are breaking. Some break just a little bit and are no longer capable of providing the type of loving care that their children deserve. They end up lashing out at them verbally or physically or end up ignoring some of the child’s emotional or physical needs. Some end up depressed as a result of their feelings of isolation and hopelessness. Some just can’t take it anymore and have to leave.

Jennifer Van Laanen, whom I wrote about in my post on intersecting needs and interdependence, was a big natural parenting and attachment parenting advocate when her children were young. She was probably, in the eyes of Wootan, the perfect mother.  But she broke. In her post, The Perfect Mother, she reflected on her experience many years after she had a nervous breakdown and left her family:

I poured all of me into my children from day one. I went all out to be super-mom… home birthed, breast feeding, no babysitters, sling carrying, home schooling, wooden toys, home-cooked organic meals, arts and crafts, no TV… the whole continuum concept-attachment parenting- granola thing. My children were my best friends and I devoted myself to them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week… for nine years.

…

I was sad and lonely, I was bitter and resentful, I was empty. I was good at pretending I was ok.

It was my decision to devote myself so thoroughly to my children. In retrospect I can see how that contributed to my breakdown and to the damage of my marriage. I never once complained or asked for help. After nine years of being self-less and super responsible, I found that I needed to nurture and feed, pour more back into me. I was an empty shell and I needed some life other than being mom.

Jennifer’s story is a sad story about what happens when mothers oppress themselves (whether willingly or necessarily) or when they are oppressed by others. But are all mothers as unhappy as she was?

The unhappy mother

New York Magazine published an article, All Joy and No Fun – Why parents hate parenting, by Jennifer Senior. The article is full of stories about women who chose to have children, but who find themselves sad or stressed by the daily grind of being a mother. I can understand those stories. I nod my head when I read them. Having just spent several months as a stay-at-home parent to two children who have no friends nearby and almost no activities that they participate in, I know how hard it can be sometimes.  I know that I was often stressed. I know that I did not always have a smile on my face.

While the stories in the article are interesting and confirmed by my own experience, I find this quote about the academic studies behind parenting and happiness to be telling:

As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns.

Basically, what this summary shows, is that the more alone a mother is and the more that is piled on top of her, the less happy she is. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

The other side of the coin is that the breadwinner dad or non-custodial parent isn’t necessarily happier either as a result of not having to care for the kids. For example, with regards to fathers the article says:

Fathers, it turns out, feel like they’ve made some serious compromises too, though of a different sort. They feel like they don’t see their kids enough. “In our studies, it’s the men, by a long shot, who have more work-life conflict than women,” says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. “They don’t want to be stick figures in their children’s lives.”

So mothers are sad that they have to do it all. Fathers are sad that they are not involved enough in their children’s lives. Besides the gender stereotyping in the studies and the article, what is wrong with this picture?

What is wrong is that parents in general and mothers in particular are taking more and more on their own shoulders. As Margaret Wente said, there are so many things that you “have to do” as a parent these days. But in addition to there being more on the parent’s plate, there is also no longer a village there to help raise the child.  So when we sit in our single family homes where we don’t know our neighbours and live thousands of miles from our relatives, it is no wonder that parents are unhappy. They are doing everything themselves. Possibly the mother is doing everything herself.

How can parents be happier?

I think that Equally Shared Parenting, which authors and co-parents Marc and Amy Vachon describe as half the work…all the fun, provides a partial answer to this dilemma. I also think that bringing the village back into our communities is essential. What is not helpful, however, is a working dad telling all moms that they should never leave their child’s side until the age of three, especially since it further isolates the mother and exacerbates the stresses and sadness she may face.

Should having children make you happy?

If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands…

Before I had children, I was happy. I was in a great relationship. I had great friends. I was involved in enjoyable activities. I went on great vacations. I had a rewarding (but sometimes stressful) job. When we decided to have children, it was because we wanted to and it felt like the time was right. We did it because we had a desire to be parents, not because we were unhappy or trying to fill a void in our lives. I think that people who have children as a “solution” to their own unhappiness are likely to be sorely disappointed.

As Karen from The Kids are Alright said in her post Happiness Runs in a Circular Motion, in response to the New York magazine article:

But really, back to the gist of the thing, the thing that got my sensible white cotton panties in a knot (because everybody knows that sexy undies are only for the childless): the idea that our children are supposed to make us happy at all.

I am a complex person. There isn’t one person or a group of people that are responsible for my happiness (or my unhappiness). I think that is a lot of responsibility and also pressure to place on the shoulders of someone else. I am responsible for my happiness and I am responsible for telling others that impact my happiness what I need.  I don’t think that having children makes you happy and I don’t think that not having children makes you happy. Children, certainly, can contribute to or take away from the things that make you happy. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that most children will do both, regularly (the exception of course may be mothers who are suffering from postpartum depression or parents who are otherwise depressed).

For me, being happy means:

• That my daily activities and interactions are, on the whole, rewarding and interesting
• That I am not too stressed out
• That I’m getting enough sleep, exercise and good nutrition
• That I get to interact with people who care about me and people whom I find interesting

What does it mean to you?

Finding your route to happy

As parents, we all have things that are important to us. For us, for example, it was important to not leave our children to be babysat by people that they were not comfortable with. That meant that we took our children a lot of places that other people didn’t. That meant that we ensured they developed strong bonds from birth with a few key people (their father, their grandmother) and not just me, so that I could have a break and go to work. That also meant that we opted out of events when there was no other option. We have been criticized for this and had people tell us that we are letting our children run our lives. But it was important to us.

We each have the right, as parents, to determine what is important to our own family. We are best able to read our children’s needs and readiness. We are the ones who get to decide what type of relationship we want to build with our children. We are the ones who get to decide how much we let parenting define our lives.

My point is that in finding the balance between fostering attachment, meeting your baby’s needs, and doing the (other) things that make you happy:

1) You shouldn’t be letting others tell you how that is done (you know your child best and you choose your parenting style)

2) You may need to take responsibility for finding and fostering that balance (e.g. by inviting others to bond with your child)

Is it easy to block out voices that are telling you that you are a bad mother if you do not do XYZ? No. Is it easy to let go enough to allow others to form a bond with your child? No. But it is important, at least to me, in finding my route to happiness. I need breaks from my children. It is important to my happiness. It is important to my ability to be a good mother. So I need to make it happen. It doesn’t mean that I always get a break when I need one, but it means that on the whole, I get enough breaks so that I don’t break and so that I am happy.

Do you take charge of your own happiness as a parent? Or do you just grin and bear it?

Recently a DJ from an Orlando, Florida, radio station interviewed a midwife about nursing in public. The DJ would prefer that women not nurse in public, and his questions to the midwife were very anti-breastfeeding in nature. At one point he said something to the effect of, “Well, if women are allowed to breastfeed anywhere, then smokers should be allowed to smoke anywhere they want.”

Today’s piece is part of a collaborative effort that seeks to demonstrate why smoking in public is not an appropriate analogy for nursing in public (N.I.P.). Please visit the other writers’ sites to learn more as links post throughout the week. The schedule of posts is as follows:

• Monday, July 19: Lauren at Hobo Mama gives suggestions on how to deal as the observer with either smoking in public or N.I.P.
• Tuesday, July 20: Annie at PhD in Parenting writes about the public health aspects of smoking and breastfeeding.
• Wednesday, July 21: Dionna at Code Name: Mama compares legislation on both smoking and breastfeeding.
• Thursday, July 22: Paige at Baby Dust Diaries discusses the impact on bystanders of smoking versus breastfeeding.
  
• Friday, July 23: Our posts will be posted as a whole at NursingFreedom.org, where they serve as a complete resource anytime smoking in public is compared to nursing in public.

Individual Rights and Public Health

We all pay for other people’s poor health decisions. Whether through private insurance or public health care, when other people make bad decisions about their health or when they do things that have a negative impact on the health of others, it costs us money. I reluctantly accept the idea that people have the right to make poor decisions about their own health and that our health care system (be that private insurance or public health care) should still take care of them. But, I also think that our governments and insurance companies have a role to play in promoting healthier alternatives, ensuring those alternatives are accessible to everyone, taxing bad choices, and protecting people from being directly affected by the poor health decisions of others.

Smoking is bad for you. Smoking around other people is bad for them. There are countless studies and stories that point out the negative health implications of tobacco smoke.  According to the World Health Organization:

Tobacco is the second major cause of death in the world. It is currently responsible for the death of one in ten adults worldwide (about 5 million deaths each year). If current smoking patterns continue, it will cause some 10 million deaths each year by 2020. Half the people that smoke today -that is about 650 million people- will eventually be killed by tobacco.

In addition to direct exposure to cigarette smoke, secondhand smoke is a significant problem. The Society of Actuaries in the United States determined in its 2005 research report Economic Effects of Environmental Tobacco Smoke that exposure to secondhand smoke costs the United States about $10 billion annually (out of a total of $150 billion annually for all smoking related health costs). This amount has decreased by $5 billion in recent years due to a reduction in the percentage of smokers among the population and also a reduction in exposure to smoke, showing that efforts to promote public health in this regards are having some level of success.

Breastfeeding, on the other hand, is good for you. It is good for the mother and good for the child. According to the World Health Organization:

The protection, promotion and support of breastfeeding rank among the most effective interventions to improve child survival. It is estimated that high coverage of optimal breastfeeding practices could avert 13% of the 10.6 million deaths of children under five years occurring globally every year. Exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life is particularly beneficial, and infants who are not breastfed in the first month of life may be as much as 25 times more likely to die than infants who are exclusively breastfed.

An economic study by Melissa Bartick et al called The Burden of Suboptimal Breastfeeding in the United States: A Pediatric Cost Analysis and published in the Pediatrics journal found that if 90% of US families could comply with medical recommendations to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States would save $13 billion per year. If women feel uncomfortable or are made to feel uncomfortable nursing in public, there is a greater chance that they will wean earlier and be unable to meet those targets. It is inconvenient to have to always find a private place or private way to nurse and I can understand how feeling that you need to do so would lead moms to switch to formula. In addition, in order to increase breastfeeding rates, we need more women to be breastfeeding in public and being open about doing so. Only when our society sees nursing as the normal way to feed a baby, will it become the default way of feeding a baby.

So from a public health perspective, in order to improve the health of our population and cut down on medical costs, we need to continue to tell people that smoking is bad for you and ensure that people are not exposed to second hand smoke against their will. We also need to promote breastfeeding and ensure that women are encouraged to breastfeed whenever and wherever.  Also, from a humanitarian point of view, we need to protect people from having their health threatened by others and also protect their right to do what is best for their family’s health.

Interestingly, one of the linkages between the tobacco issue and the infant feeding issue is that poverty is a significant factor in both. People who are poor are more likely to smoke and to spend a significant amount of their limited budget on tobacco. People who are poor are also more likely to formula feed, which can also be costly (although it is often subsidized for low income families). From a public health perspective, I think one of the priorities needs to be on ensuring that low income families have the resources that they need and the role models that they need to be able to breastfeed successfully and to give up tobacco successfully. A part of that, to me, means ensuring that women are not ridiculed for breastfeeding in public by some jerk who is blowing smoke in their faces.

Please visit the other bloggers when they post this week.

As I promised back in my BlogHer Accountability Post, I am making charitable donations in the amount of $600. That is the full cost of a BlogHer ’10 ticket, if it were not covered by sponsors. This year’s BlogHer sponsor list includes a number of companies that I am not enamored with, including most notably two Nestle brands (Butterfinger and Stouffer’s). As an anti-Nestle advocate, I am not comfortable with the idea of BlogHer being sponsored by one of the most boycotted companies in the world. I am not comfortable with BlogHer being sponsored by a company whose unethical business practices are in direct competition with the advocacy work that I do on this blog, as it relates to infant feeding, family nutrition, human rights and the environment.

As I wrote in my previous post:

There are 2400 attendees at BlogHer this year. Attendee registration fees generally cover about 1/3 of the true cost of attending BlogHer. The other 2/3 is covered by sponsors. According to e-mails exchanged with Blogher, the true cost of attending BlogHer this year is $600. That means that approximately $400 per person is being paid for by sponsors, for a total of around $960,000 in sponsorship funds. In my case, as a speaker, the full $600 of the cost of my attendance is being paid for by sponsors. There are currently 37 sponsors listed on the BlogHer ’10 sponsor page. Although I do not have the exact figure that Stouffer’s and Butterfinger paid, based on where Stouffer’s is listed on the page (Bronze sponsor) and what I know about the extent of their sponsorship, I would say they are probably in the middle of the pack when it comes to the dollar value of their sponsorship. I also assume that, like Butterfinger, there are probably a few more sponsors still to be added to the site. So, if we assume there are about 40 sponsors and that Stouffer’s and Butterfinger are both “average” sponsors, that would mean that they each account for 1/40 (or 2/40 together) of the sponsorship funds. That means that they spent about $24,000 each or $48,000 total to sponsor the BlogHer event. It also means that Nestle brands are contributing about $20 towards the attendance of each BlogHer attendee (or $30 for me as a speaker).

So what am I going to do? I plan to make a series of charitable donations totaling $600 (the full cost of my attendance at the conference) to organizations that are focused on breastfeeding, children’s nutrition and family nutrition.

I thought long and hard about which charities to donate to. I took in all of your suggestions, considered them, talked to some organizations that I support, and so on. While I debated splitting up my donation into small pieces and supporting a bunch of different organizations, in the end I decided that I would probably still make my usual annual contributions to organizations like food banks and poverty related charities. However, for this contra-Nestle donation, I wanted to focus on what I thought would make the biggest difference within the North American context to battle the damage that Nestle and other formula companies do here.

I’m really bothered by infant formula advertising. There is too much of it, it is too prominent, it is often found all over breastfeeding and other baby related articles in newspapers and magazines, and it is deceptive. The formula companies will do anything at all to convince mothers to give their products a try and to plant a seed of doubt in their minds about their ability to breastfeed. I do not think this is okay. One of the big problems with this is that breastfeeding advocacy organizations never have large enough budgets to run their own campaigns. Although we can argue that the “breast is best” message has been hammered in enough (and even that it is not the right message), that isn’t the message that is most needed right now. What mothers need is messages that will empower them to breastfeed (not just guilt them into it). They need imagery and information that will help them overcome the challenges that so many mothers face. If moms want to meet their own breastfeeding goals, challenges should be met with good quality support, not with a can of formula.

From that perspective, I have decided to make two donations to breastfeeding campaigns that have the potential to make a big difference, one Canadian and one American.

La Leche League Canada Campaign- $400

Today I received an e-mail via Ann Douglas informing me about a new campaign that La Leche League Canada is trying to raise money for.  The e-mail said:

La Leche League Canada Awareness Campaign 2010 Needs YOU!

I’m thrilled to be able to share some news about our plans for a special LLLC awareness campaign, coming to a television or computer near you in 2010!

Canadian actor Sitara Hewitt, currently starring in the hit television show Little Mosque on the Prairie, has offered to help LLLC create a media campaign to let more moms know about how LLLC volunteers can help them. Our plans are coming together very well and we hope to bring Sitara to Toronto in September to appear in the film and photography part of the materials.

We’ve received some very generous contributions to help us make this campaign happen — in fact we’ve received a pledge for $10,000 towards the total project budget of $25,000. But we have a way to go yet.

That’s where you come in. There are two ways you can help.

We need your help to share this link to the Canada Helps Giving Page that has been set up to collect donations for this campaign:
http://www.canadahelps.org/GivingPages/GivingPage.aspx?gpID=8622

We need your help to spread the word that we need air miles donations to cover the airfare for Sitara and her son to come to Toronto. I will have an update about the air miles donation plans very shortly.

Stay tuned!

Pat Millar
National Fundraising Coordinator
La Leche League Canada

I had planned to include La Leche League in my donation already, but hearing about the need for funds for this new campaign including a celebrity of Muslim descent from a television show that I love, sealed the deal for me. I made a donation of $400, making me the first donor recorded on the Canada Helps Giving Page, towards the goal of $15,000 that is needed.

Here is my receipt:

Here is a screen capture of the Canada Helps Giving Page for the campaign, after I made my inaugural donation (the image is also linked to the giving page).

For my fellow Canadians who are attending BlogHer ’10 and who wish to participate in this small protest against Nestle sponsoring part of our BlogHer ticket price, I would encourage you (if you are able) to also make a donation towards this campaign. Or, even if you are not attending BlogHer ’10 and support the great work that La Leche League Canada does, please help them raise the necessary funds for this campaign. I would love to be able to keep track of donations made by readers of this blog. If you do decide to donate and are comfortable letting me know how much, I would love to know. You can either e-mail me or leave a comment below (I’ll accept anonymous comments too if you want your donation to be captured for the purposes of the tally, but do not wish to share your name).  I won’t share your name/blog (unless you willingly do so in a comment here), but I would like to be able to share the total dollar figure.

Click here to make a donation to La Leche League Canada’s campaign via Canada Helps (provides receipt for income tax purposes).

Best for Babes – $200

I’ve written numerous times on this blog about the great work that Best for Babes is doing to give breastfeeding a makeover and to help moms battle the booby traps that keep them from meeting their own breastfeeding goals. I wrote most recently about my reasons for supporting Best for Babes when I asked you all to vote for them in the Chase Community Giving campaign. I would like to thank everyone who brought out the vote and I am happy to announce that Best for Babes was one of the recipients of a $20,000 donation. This is a significant sum of money that will help them to spread their current ad campaign further and to do other important work. They are asking people on their facebook page how they think the money should be spent. While that money is certainly useful to them, I know that with more funds they can do even more. That is why I have decided to make a donation of $200 to Best for Babes, which I am thrilled to be able to hand to Bettina Forbes in person at BlogHer ’10 in New York next month.

If you are located in the United States and attending BlogHer ’10 and wish to support this contra-Nestle protest action or wish to support breastfeeding advocacy in general, I would encourage you to make a donation to Best for Babes.  Or, if you are unable to make a financial contribution, Best for Babes Get Involved or Donate page also includes information on other ways that you can support their work, including by running their public service announcement ad on your blog.

As with my above comment on La Leche League Canada, I would love to know if you do decide to make a contribution to Best for Babes as a result of this post (e-mails or comments welcome, including anonymous comments).

Click here to donate to or support Best for Babes.

Will you join me? $20 or other?

I hope you will join me in supporting these organizations or in supporting other organizations that work to counteract the unethical business practices of companies like Nestle. Whether you donate the approximately $20 that Nestle has contributed to the price of your BlogHer ’10 ticket, donate some other amount, or provide support by raising awareness of these great causes and issues (on your blog, facebook page, twitter, etc.), I thank you for your support and assistance in battling deceptive infant formula advertising.

My children do not have a religion. We do not believe that it is our place to give them one. That said, we encourage them to explore their beliefs and their identity.

At the moment, both of them seem to believe in reincarnation and often talk about what they might come back as in their next life. Emma says she wants to go to a church one day and sing songs. Here in Berlin, we live in Kreuzberg, a neighbourhood with a very large Turkish population.  Today, Emma started asking about the hijabs that a lot of the women wear. She asked why they wear them. She said they are beautiful and commented several times on the aspects of specific hijabs that she liked (beautiful sparkles, butterflies, nice colours, etc.). She asked when she could wear one.

So when we got home from the pool, we took out one of my scarves and she had the opportunity to try it out. Despite the 30 degree heat, she liked it and said she would like to wear one all the time. She eventually took it off (as she normally does with anything in her hair, whether a hat, barrette, hair elastic, hairband or other), but I do wonder what I would have said if she had wanted to wear it out for dinner. I wouldn’t have had a problem with it, but I would have been concerned about the reaction of Muslim families in the neighbourhood. How would they have perceived it?

At some point, we will teach our children more about the significance of different religions, cultures and customs and she will learn that the hijab is more than just a fashion statement. But at the moment, I’m glad that she expresses an interest and a desire to explore other identities, rather than being fearful of differences or arrogant about her own culture’s superiority. An open mind is a wonderful thing.