Jennifer you wrote, "I am not convinced that clicking as a sign of compensatory behaviour is something to ignore, even though the mother is experiencing no pain and the baby is growing well. (Some of these babies also seem to grow too well, and in light of the recent literature on rapid weight gain infancy and obesity, I wonder if this is a good thing)." I am not exactly sure what you mean by this comment. I would like to add another idea to this discussion. We have no studies that I know of that show that "exclusive" breastfeeding contributes to a rapid weight gain in infancy that causes obesity. In fact I would say that the evidence points directly away from "exclusive" breastfeeding as a link to obesity. Most women in the US do not exclusive breastfeed their infants, thus I suspect that obesity has more of a relationship between formula feeding or mothers that do both formula feeding and breastfeeding. It also has a relationship to foods that are introduced to babies (how quickly and how much). A personal example is my middle child, who was exclusively breastfeed, clicked all the time nursing--even as a toddler nursing. She gained weight rapidly as an infant. I had people tell me to put her on a diet. I don't know how you put an exclusively breastfed infant on a diet. She is now close to 6 foot tall and not fat and certainly not obese. I know other exclusively breastfeed infant who were quite rolly-polly as infants but are now slender young adults or teens. We have no research that shows us that exclusively breastfed infants become obese. The problem is that in the USA most infants are either bottlefed or given mixed feedings.(breast and bottle) Thus infants are not determining their own feeds and thus can easily be overfed. Valerie W. McClain, IBCLC *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html