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]>