>
>
>"Nipple confused" and/or "Addicted to the breast, bottle, finger, etc"
>really seems to be composing of one or more the following:
>
>* tongue retraction
>* tongue thrusting
>* mouth insufficiently opened
>* inadequate compression of the breast
>* flow confusion
>* stimuli confused (as in hardness, softness, compressibility of finger,
>nipples, breast)
>
>Help me out here - I'm finding those to be inelegant descriptions of my
>observations.
>
I'm pasting a long passage, because I wanted to point out that one of
the things I've altered my thinking about is the use of nouns rather
than adjectives to describe what we see going on. In the shift towards
"naming the problem" (which has all kinds of empowering possibilities
"What I'm feeling is loneliness" "I hear anger in your voice" "There is
conflict in the room") and away from labelling the person (not to dwell
on "lazy" or "addicted" but even "confused" or "highly sensitive" can
make it easy to over-associate a trait with a person's essential being),
we are focussing on the situation rather than the person, and not
"condemning" the person to cope with a situation permanently or to be
unavoidably associated with the condition. This is why we have moved
from talking about "handicapped" people to "people with disabilities."
As a society, I find this has made an impressive impact on our
parenting; many of us have experienced the liberating effect of thinking
in terms of "challenging behaviour" rather than "bad kids." Situations,
behaviours, even attitudes and definitely environments are easier to
change than traits; conditions are not determinant of personhood;
negative core traits can evolve out of what we sometimes call a
"self-fulfilling prophecy" or "wish-fulfillment" tendency. I call it
"manifesting" but I think that's probably new-age-ish :-).
Most of the suggestions above are great, for two reasons: 1) they are
very precise. Yes, what exactly do we mean when we say a baby is
nipple-confused? We have to know what we mean in order to help the
situation. Even better is to try to be very creative, and still very
precise, about what the situation is. I love the spin on over-active MER
/ over-supply that Rachel Myr's "insufficient baby syndrome" puts on the
way we see the situation.
2) They are nouns that can be used with verbs to make the situation be
even more transient. We focus on what we can *do* to improve the
situation. We can talk about practice / change / learning as positive
possibilities: babies might need to practise opening their mouths wider,
mothers can adjust their position so they can get more comfortable, the
tongue will train itself into protruding. Given half a chance, these
things are all true. If we use the progressive present tense, and say,
"The baby is exhibiting tongue retraction" it is different from saying,
"The baby is suck-confused" which makes it sound like a permanent, a
psycho-anatomical (??) state. After all, would you describe a mother as
being "sore-nippled"? LOL
Jo-Anne Elder-Gomes, word-conjurer / muse /Fury, bringing you today's
grammar lesson since I'm not teaching translation this term :-)
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