Ann Millard wrote an interesting essay called "The Place of the Clock
in Pediatric Advice: Rationales, Cultural Themes, and Impediments to
Breastfeeding," Social Sciences and Medicine 31.2 (1990): 211-21. In
a chapter of my forthcoming book, I write about Millard's work in the
following way:
Ann Millard argues that in the early part of the twentieth century,
"regular times for feeding were seen as crucial to infant health, and
even survival." Scheduling infant feedings, whether women were
nursing or using the very early formulas, was part of a larger social
view that saw women and infants "as needing discipline and
professional guidance in the form of schedules." Today, however,
medical authorities see a feeding schedule "as physiologically
crucial to the maternal milk supply" and as "an innate characteristic
of normal infants" (218). Millard's research involved examining
medical textbooks concerning infant feeding published from the turn
of the twentieth century to the 1990s. Her discussion reveals that
while there has been in the last twenty years a return to the idea of
demand feeding, where the infant is fed upon specific cues the mother
(or caretaker) learns to interpret as signs of hunger, "the
expectation of a feeding schedule has been maintained" (216). She
writes that most contemporary medical texts assume that "regularity
in the timing of feeding is a normal part of infant behavior" and
argues that "demand feeding is an ambiguous concept necessitating
maternal interpretation of infant demands in order to maintain a
regular sequence of feedings spaced well apart" (217).
In this way, Millard suggests, "pediatric authorities
generally view the nature of the infant as driving the process of
breastfeeding, [such that] their advice [is] no longer opposed to but
congruent with human nature . . . The issue of control has been
disguised as advocacy of what is normal for infants and maternal
lactation. In a sense, the clock has moved from the realm of culture,
including science, training, and discipline, to that of nature and
organic processes--from outside to inside the human body. The absence
of a regular schedule is thus taken as a sign of abnormality on the
part of the infant, the mother, or both" (219) .
I found that infant care advice books replicate this way of thinking
about the baby, implicitly supporting the notion of feeding
schedules. Scheduling babies this way enculturates them into Western
norms--the way the clock rules our lives in a variety of ways. I'll
be speaking more about this topic in my talk at the ILCA conference.
Bernice Hausman
********************************************************
Bernice L. Hausman
Associate Professor
English Dept. (0112)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061
540-231-5076 (office)
540-231-5692 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
http://athena.english.vt.edu/~hausman/hausman.html
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