Two great NIP videos

The first being a great guide for beginners at NIP:

Yet another CIO study which shows no deleterious effects on infants

Some of the main critiques of the current research on CIO by APers which shows no adverse effects is that the infant populations studied contain relatively few children under the age of a year, the studies themselves are rather small, and there is a relatively short follow-up period. Some APers suggest that this lack of absolute evidence is sufficient to recommend against using behavioral methods, and CIO in particular, in children under a year old. I disagree with this position, as I find there is no evidence whatsoever that suggests CIO might be harmful in the first place (despite some rather blatant scare tactics by APers who compare the practice to child abuse/neglect), and that assuming a priori that the practice may be harmful merely because it’s unpleasant for the parents is not a logical approach. A new study on the subject is in last month’s Pediatrics which addresses these issues and – not surprisingly to me, at least – helps confirm this.

Skeptical Parent Crossing Blog Carnival #1 is up!

Over at Blake, the Domestic Father. I’m participating with my entry analyzing Dr. William Sears’ anti-CIO handout here, and there are great contributions from many new bloggers I’d never read before.

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Are you a BPE?

I found a lot to giggle about over at bestparentever.com . The blogger (and the posters over at the forums) strike just the right satiric note about those “perfect parents” you meet online…

Where, oh where were these peeps when I was raising babies?

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To hell with it, we’re BOTH parents

Around the time I was getting ready to go back to work with my eldest, my husband lost his job. In the following 7-8 months while he was unemployed, we pared my son’s daycare hours to a minimum (which was ~25 hours/week), and my husband spent considerably more time with him, and provided considerably more childcare, than I did. Not surprisingly, Abba soon became Eldest’s favorite parent – a situation that lasted well into toddlerhood. It’s not like I was entirely chopped liver, but I didn’t stand a chance if Daddy was nearby. I admit to being unhappy and more than a little jealous – after all, I was The Mommy. It seemed that all those early nursing and bonding sessions didn’t make one whit of difference regarding my darling son’s current affections.

Not quite science fiction: Fathering at the breast?

Australian filmmaker Peter Templeman directed this somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘documentary’ in 2004 about a man breastfeeding (or at least, attempting to breastfeed) his baby:

EpiWonk’s unpleasant brush with measles

Dr. John Lawrence Kiely (aka EpiWonk) has shattered his incognito status to share his first-hand account of falling ill with measles in 1959.

His educated opinion, bolstered by this experience: Measles not worth the risk.

It’s 1959. I’m in second grade. I’d caught the measles, just like my brothers and sisters and friends. Except unlike them, my measles didn’t go away. It got worse and turned into something I’d never heard of: pneumonia. I spent a month in the hospital, survived, and spent a few more months recovering at home. But more than four million children got measles in the United States in that year and 385 died.

Most Americans don’t remember those days. Why? Because four years after I got sick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began a mass measles immunization program. By 2000, the number of reported cases of measles had decreased to 86 and the number of deaths to one.

Go read it all.

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Cool news regarding SIDS prevention

Using a fan may prevent SIDS.

I can’t access the full-text article, and I think this should be replicated by other research teams, but certainly, putting a fan in your/your baby’s room can’t hurt, right?

Unless it’s 20 below, of course 🙂 .

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The post in which I am revealed as a humor-challenged hag, but…

Does anyone else see a really glaring contradiction between the effort by lactivists/lactofanatics to portray breastfeeding as the biological norm, and the phrase I keep seeing on messageboard blinkies and shirts (such as the tank top below)?

Rooming Out can be friendly, too

In 1991, UNICEF and the WHO conceived of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative as a way to facilitate breastfeeding from the baby’s very first moments. Among the “Ten steps to successful breastfeeding” is a requirement for mothers to practice rooming-in, i.e, the baby should be by her mother’s side, in her room, day and night. While this may indeed be ‘baby-friendly’, in this country (which, to remind you, has breastfeeding initiation rates higher than the US), some women see this particular step as being decidedly mother-unfriendly…which is probably why there are no hospitals in this country without nurseries*. And yet, this is not necessarily an obstacle to successful initiation of breastfeeding.