I am going to weigh in as well with my reactions to the WAB.  Keep in mind
I read it in EARLY 1970! (NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO)  WHAT I GOT WAS THE OLD
SKINNY DARK BLUE VERSION which was not exactly what I was expecting in that
it assumed everyone was married, white, and beautiful! And that all babies
were darling.  I mostly ignored all the stuff that did not apply to me.
But the only other stuff I had access to at the time was Dr. Spock, who
covered everything about breastfeeding ina bout 4 paragraphs and then went
on for 40+ pages to talk about formulas, how to make them, etc.  That is
ONE reason I decided breastfeeding was for me.  I was convinced by Spock
that I would KILL my child if I attmepted any of those
(complicated-sounding) recipes for making formula.  (I knew next to nothing
about the then commercial varieties and since they smelled so vile=- one
friend had a baby and was bottle-feeding--I figured they had to taste as
bad and was not going to force them on MY baby.)

Fortunately, future editions of the WAB recognized that not all women are
married, not all women are whiwte, not all babies are always adorable, and
that not all breastfeeding situations are positive. I went to LLL meetings
and learned what I needed to know and more.  The next thing I read was a
journal monograph by Paul Gyorgy and colleagues on IgA, etc., and went from
there.... Eventually I found Karen Pryor's first edition of Nursing Your
Baby.  That was less cutesy and more realistic (including even mentioning
that doctors and hospitals were not always great sources of information!).
That certainly resonated with me: when I called the local hopsital to
locate a LLL group, they had "never heard of such a thing!"  (I knew they
existed because my childbirth educator told me about them).  I eventually
found the local leader when I happened to mention to my LETTER CARRIER and
she lived in the same small town I did!  So much for networking, right?

Anyway, what works for one person may not always work for someone else.
Some people are overwhelmed by tone or size of book; others skip the parts
that do not apply and dig for the stuff that is helpful.

But (my opinion) no book makes breastfeeding successful.  Only mothers do
that.  Breastfeed.  Only they have the right to call their experience a
success--or not.  (I really hate such qualifiers).

PS I was a lousy bottle-feeder.  My only experience was with orphaned
kittens and they wnet to solids VERY quickly!

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"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly
disguised as impossible situations."
Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Ferndale, WA USA) [log in to unmask]
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