Nikki, you are generally a source of wisdom for me.  Nonetheless it
distresses me greatly to read:

<< How many of us drive a car every day, with utterly no knowledge of how
 the engine works or what the parts are called? We know when it isn't working
 though. So with new mothers: they don't need to know what all the parts are
 called, they need to know how to drive.
     It is a waste of time to teach folks about things they don't need to
 know. If she is going to leave our prenatal class with only three ideas, do
 we want "clusters of grapes" and "colostrum" to be 2 of them? >>

I guess I have to take it that you are talking about a population in your
prenatal class that comes in with no ideas at all about breastfeeding, so
that the only three ideas they are going to have at all are the three they
take away from you.

If that's your population -- and I am sure it exists, maybe especially among
very young first-time mothers -- then OK, I guess.  But for the majority, it
seems patronizing to me, and a recipe for them to get into trouble they can't
get out of.

Let me use your car analogy. The radio program Car Talk recently described a
master's thesis someone did where she purposely, herself, loosened the wire
that activates the brake lights in her otherwise-perfect-condition car, then
took the car to ten different garages and asked them to fix whatever was
wrong.   9 out of gave her repairs that would cost upwards of $200 -- some
much more.    Then she asked her boyfriend to take the SAME car to the SAME
garages -- and he got 2 estimates of around $100, and 8 answers that "Oh,
it's just a loose wire -- here, I'll just fix it for you quick."   In other
words, women, who usually don't know how it works and are widely perceived as
ignorant of mechanics, get taken advantage of and suffer for their ignorance.

Do I need to spell this out?  I think not.

I'm not saying that "cluster of grapes" and "colostrum" have to be the two
things they take away, but that's not because they don't need to know how it
works -- it's because they are not the key elements of how it works.

But there are elements of why it works that DO make a difference.   My ad hoc
list, at the moment, leans to:

-- Your breast makes milk all the time, just like your body makes blood and
saliva and urine all the time.   You can pee any time you want to, and
there's milk any time the baby wants to drink, same deal.

-- Supply and demand (you all know how this one goes...)

-- Squeezing over the milk pockets gets the milk out.  The baby needs to use
her jaw to squeeze the right place, and her sucking will make your body
"squeeze" internally to squeeze it out for her too.

But the main point is that if they only know "how to do it" -- "position
baby's mouth over the areola" -- then when it doesn't work (and culture being
what it is, that can happen even due to the smallest little misunderstanding
or insignificant bump in the road), they don't have any tools with which to
critically evaluate the advice of the people helping them.

Teach a mom to fish, you let her feed her baby for a day.   But teach her
where the fish swim and you let her make her own fishing decisions for a
lifetime.

Elisheva Urbas
who spent all summer helping mothers who knew how to latch the baby just fine
but still thought bf was going to fall apart because they had no evaluative
tools.

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html