Dear Friends:
    I have no experience personally with this, but reading Kathleen's lovely
post makes me gnash my teeeth.
    There is nothing wrong with this 3 year old. She is tiny. Period. There
are lots of tiny people on this earth. There are lots of big people. There are
lots of average sized people. So what?
    I worked with a mother once where her OB and the perinatalogist
determined that her baby wasn't growing enough inside. They talked her into an
induction, which failed so this mother who wanted a vaginal birth had a cesarean
section. The baby was small at birth, and perfect.
    Breastfeeding started and got going well. The mother was happy
breastfeeding. The baby did gain weight, but not enough to satisfy the number-happy
pediatrician who scared the mother into at first supplementing, and then weaning.
The baby became completely artificially-fed. She was still small, and grew
slowly. The doctors became very concerned about this small baby, and when last I
saw the mother, she was considering their plan to insert a gastrostomy-tube
into this baby.
    During the whole siege, the baby girl was bright-eyed, developmentally on
target. Her parents were not big people, the mother was light-boned and
slender.
    Why is it so difficult to believe what is in front of one's eyes? A
malnourished baby is lethargic, uninterested in life, dull, and scrawny. One
doesn't need any growth chart to become instantly alarmed at the sight of such a
child!
    Why don't practitioners realize that 3% of the population will be at or
below the 3rd percentile in growth?
    AAAARGH!
    warmly,
Nikki Lee RN, MS, Mother of 2, IBCLC, CCE, CIMI
Maternal-Child Adjunct Faculty Union Institute and University
Film Reviews Editor, Journal of Human Lactation
Support the WHO Code and the Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative

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