Advice regarding a Child’s Healthy Foundation
My advice to mothers is this: Listen to your hearts. Love your babies; hold your babies; read to your babies; sing to your babies; be there for them.
Ignore the advice of society’s control freaks. Nurse your baby frequently. Nurse your baby to sleep. Nurse your baby all through the night in your bed with all the proper precautions and recommendations set by the experts. Take your baby with you to meetings or shopping and to church. Take the baby with you to weddings.
Be one with your baby. Stay attached. Remember that breastfeeding is a continuation of pregnancy. There are many similarities between breastfeeding and pregnancy, but the most important one is the oneness a mother has with her baby. Society needs to protect this oneness. Our churches need to promote and protect this oneness. Our husbands need to appreciate its value.
It is encouraging to see a psychiatrist like Dr. Elliott Barker teaching the importance of breastfeeding to society at large as well as to the individual mother with her baby. May we renew our efforts to do what we can to promote breastfeeding and to help nursing moms and their families. Let’s give our children that healthy foundation!
(This series has ended. Adapted from a luncheon talk given at the LLL Eastern Pennsylvania Area Conference, October 2000)
Sheila Kippley