I once had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Michel Odent while waiting to
introduce him as a speaker at an ILCA conference. In discussing laboring
behaviors and birthing, he made what I thought was a very insightful comment:
that, we as a civilization, have come so far from our beginnings that we DON"T
KNOW WHAT A NORMAL BIRTH IS ANYMORE. We can make educated guesses and
assumptions about assisting a woman in labor and birth but we can no longer
observe women (and know for sure what normal is) in circumstances untainted by
our own current cultural beliefs (that birth is hazardous, requires medical
support, is painful beyond endurance, etc.). Of course in rethinking this, an
anthropologist could possibly come close to observing normal labors and births
in those few societies that have remained closer to our own roots. But in
general, you get the just of his idea.

With this in mind, I firmly believe that K. Dettwyler's post about thumbsucking
was absolutely on target. There is no substantial evidence that tumbsucking held
(in the past or in other primative groups) such a prominent place in early
childhood behaviors as it does in our own culture, just like there are other
behaviors conspicuously absent from some of these groups (off hand, post partum
depression comes to mind, as well as some other variations of mental
illness).For those persons threatened by the facts, taking these as a personal
inditment of their own mothering behavior, I like to suggest a little
objectivity and latitude in their thinking on this subject. Dettwyler's
suggestion that a child's sucking needs were not satied hence the tumbsucking
behavior, IS NOT saying that the child had inadequate mothering. What it does
suggest is a few things: we, as a culture, have only a limited appreciation for
just how much sucking/mouth stimulation an infant/child needs; our culture
continues to make extraordinary demands on mothers - both those employed outside
the home and those who work in-house only - demands that conflict with an
infant's needs; that in attempting to meet the infant's needs (and using demand
feeding as our guide) we are still only guessing at what is normal and what is
needed; our understanding of the reasons for infant  sucking needs is grossly
limited by what we actually know - there is more that we can guess at and still
more that is beyond our understanding at this point in time; our culture asks
mothers, with only the occasional help of fathers, to meet ALL the needs of all
their children (this is part of the mother myth of our culture); in saying we
breastfeed on demand we think that we do not limit access to the breast - we
haven't begun to understand what cues the infant gets from phoernomes, heart
beat rate/rhythmn, galvanic skin response, or psychic energy, etc. We each are
the best parent we can be at the given time of our parenting - we also must
separate our own personal "parenting report card" from our struggle to
understand on a professional plane what is good, better  and best for
infants/children.

Jeanine Klaus, MS, IBCLC
Oakville, Ontario