Jane:

I hesitate to make more formal education the way to proceed in stiffening
IBCLE exam-sitting requirements.  As it is, women without college
degrees, but with extensive personal breastfeeding experience and years
of experience counseling with highly respected lay breastfeeding support
groups are forced to wait a decade or more before they are allowed to sit
for the exam, while a nurse with little personal experience and interest
in breastfeeding can sit much sooner just because she works with babies
in the hospital--and may not be offering good breastfeeding support at
all.  Perhaps more formal education would help these latter sorts, but I
doubt it.  After all, they've already experienced formal nursing training
and sat through the continuing education and *that* didn't do it.

Frankly, I think that personal breastfeeding experience be given *some*
weight.  Male examinants could be considered to have personal
breastfeeding experience as fathers of breastfed babies.  I think the
idea of internships with practicing LCs is good.  I also think that lay
breastfeeding counselors should be accorded a little more respect in the
certification process, if they are counselors with approved organizations
having verifable standards.

As the Wife of Bath says in the Prologue to her Tale (Geoffrey Chaucer,
_The Canterbury Tales_, "Experience, though noon auctoritee/Were in this
world, is right ynogh for me."  (In other words, "I got to be a smart old
broad through experience, not reading lots of authoritative, i.e.,
male-written, books").


Penny Piercy, LLLL, MOM (Patrick 4/6/93), and a few other acronyms
     from Bloomington, IN  ***  <[log in to unmask]>