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2 Is Breast Best?
- Baylor University Press
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45 The push to parent with intensity begins before kids actually make the scene. In the celebrated movie Juno, for example, a young affluent couple played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman overzealously overprepare—at least Vanessa, Garner’s character, does— as the teenaged Juno, played by Oscar nominee Ellen Page, carries the child Vanessa will adopt after splitting up with Mark (Bateman), who belatedly confesses that he isn’t ready to be a father. As Mark and Juno dissect horror movies and discuss the musical merits of Iggy Pop and a Sonic Youth interpretation of a Carpenters song and Mark broods about a career in rock music that Vanessa won’t let him pursue, Vanessa reads stacks of baby books, quotes liberally from them, and shops incessantly for things the books assure her the baby will need. In one key scene, Vanessa invites Mark to ponder which of two shades of yellow sampled in rectangles on a wall in the baby’s room will create the most nurturing atmosphere. Bateman’s character , already cooling to the idea of adopting Juno’s baby, brusquely concludes, “[I]t’s too soon to paint.”1 This excerpt is an example of the “preferred reading” of parenting offered up by the media—and not just the articles demanding that parents stop using television as a babysitter, or that they pull their kids away from the Internet once in a while and cajole them into reading a daily newspaper so they might become well-rounded citizens. What do the media suggest we bring to the table as parents? iS BreaST BeST? Two 46 — More — What should we do and how should we act before and after we become parents? What role should parents play in their children’s lives? How long should they play that role? Let’s start, as all of us do, in infancy. Even without the media’s help, new mothers are inundated with information from medical professionals about the benefits to their infants of breast-feeding. And the benefits are many; the World Health Organization asserts breast-feeding infants for the first six months of their life helps them “achieve optimal growth, development, and health.”2 But in hospitals operated by the New York Health and Hospitals Corporation, news accounts noted in 2007, they have to clear an extra hurdle to get their hands on formula. The city’s public hospitals no longer include baby formula samples in the gift bags given to new mothers . Mothers in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Texas who want to weigh their feeding options also have to request formula. New York’s new moms do get a breast milk cooler and a T-shirt on which are faux crayoned the words “I Eat at Mom’s,” an item that likens a mother’s breast to a fast-food drive-through window, where, ironically, patrons also have to make special requests for items at variance with the menu. For an enterprise that runs on free samples, it is disingenuous for New York Health and Hospitals Corporation’s CEO to dismiss the formula samples as merely “a marketing ploy that are intended to sway you to one brand or another.”3 Breast-feeding endorsements come at mothers from all directions . In a 2005 policy statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics asserts new mothers should breast-feed for at least six months after the birth of a child, citing its “health, nutritional, immunologic , developmental, psychological, social, economic, and environmental benefits.”4 La Leche League, the best-known breast-feeding advocacy organization, on its website informs mothers that breast milk is “superior” to formula and that breast-feeding “is the most natural and effective way of understanding and satisfying the needs of the baby.” Babies seek desperately to be near their mothers, whose “alert and active participation” in childbirth will get “breastfeeding off to a good start.”5 The group’s educational efforts seem to be working. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2008 that nearly three-quarters of the babies born in the United States are breast-fed during some portion of their early lives.6 Breastfeeding advocates aren’t satisfied with this figure; a study published [54.198.45.0] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:20 GMT) — iS BreaST BeST? — 47 in Pediatrics and reported extensively by the news media in April 2010 concluded that because not every woman in the United States breast-feeds her child, more than nine hundred children die...