I work in a hospital that passed the certification process to be called Baby-Friendly about 3 years ago. Even after that process, staff are not up to the task of showing mothers that babies can be satiated at the breast before lactogenesis II. Especially if the baby wants to feed all the time, the staff are quick to agree with mothers that they just don't have 'enough' milk yet, because the baby wants to feed again before three hours have passed. Ironically, babies who don't want to feed exactly every three hours are thought to be ill, as evidenced by their failure to feed often enough. If the mother is Asian or African, the staff shrug and say 'none of *them* think they have milk until they are painfully engorged, and we can't convince them otherwise, so we might as well just give them formula when they ask for it because we'll have no peace until we do'. If the mother asking for formula due to 'no milk yet' is Norwegian, they also give the formula but when pressed by me as to why, they have no explanation and they start looking sheepish. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that the culture which views breastfeeding as inadequate as the sole nutrition for a newborn, is hospital culture, rather than being a feature of a particular national background. I heard a Latina mother once tell me she decided to wean to formula because she believed that her milk conveyed her emotional state to the baby in liquid form and she was very sad. She felt she was feeding her baby tears rather than milk and she could not bear the thought of the baby becoming as sad as she felt. I don't work with many Latina women so I don't know if this was ethnic or simply her own personal logic. She felt sad about not breastfeeding too, but she was comforted by knowing that at least she wasn't communicating that sadness to the baby. I thought the whole case was terribly sad. And an obstetrician in Beijing told me in 1991, as if it were a well-documented fact, that Chinese women were so far evolved that they didn't make milk any more. She and apparently her colleagues, too, believed that African women were closer to 'animals' and therefore always had copious milk supplies, while European women were right in the middle between Chinese and African, so some European women produced enough milk and some not. Shockingly racist view, and one which showed me that the speaker had no clue whatsoever about how lactation works. The hospital was where all the foreign diplomats had babies, and they were brought from the nursery to the mothers six times in twenty four hours, for feeding. I didn't understand how anyone could get a massive milk supply in that hospital at all. Rachel Myr Kristiansand, Norway *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html To reach list owners: [log in to unmask] Mail all list management commands to: [log in to unmask] COMMANDS: 1. To temporarily stop your subscription write in the body of an email: set lactnet nomail 2. To start it again: set lactnet mail 3. To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet 4. To get a comprehensive list of rules and directions: get lactnet welcome