Laurie-

No, you're not being too picky! (At least IMHO). Haven't seen this issue of
American Baby, but a couple of years ago, while evaluating ed. materials for
WIC I checked out what they had to say about BFing and found pretty much the
same kind of thing. I wrote letters to Am. Baby and to others of the mags
that new moms frequently get from their childbirth classes, HCP's office,
maternity clothing stores, etc., critiquing the articles (gently, because
there was some positive stuff too). No response, BTW.

It seems a lot like the BF "information" the formula companies put out - it
may look supportive of BF, but there are so many subtly undermining
messages, exactly as Laurie points out. I think the intent is to be kind of
friendly and real-life mom-ish (i.e. NOT to come off as BF ideologues or
idealists), but it doesn't seem to translate well to print. It's much harder
to get the tone right in the written word than in conversation, as I learned
when I was writing low-literacy educational materials for WIC. When you're
person-to-person, you can convey support and understanding, and acknowledge
difficulties a woman might be having without making the whole business seem
laborious and fraught with perils. But SO many women read those things, and
it's so easy to see how they could think that BF wasn't worth all the bother
and "problems". The articles on ABM fdg. never make it sound troublesome -
in fact, how many articles do you ever see about "getting artificial feeding
right for you"?. At WIC, we had dozens of pamphlets about various BFing
"problems", but only one on formula fdg, and it was about weaning from the
bottle.

Cathy Bargar, RN, IBCLC