>Heather
>
>Thanks for the reality check! Excellent points. Not least that I'm
>becoming - rather desperately - aware that there is some slight
>tension between cultural and biological infant feeding norms in this
>part of the world.
>
>Whether a slow gaining baby might just be physiologically small -
>yes, that's possible if either of the parents or grandparents are
>small too, but it's the exception, and I'd want to be quite sure
>that the baby was really "getting enough" first before putting it
>down to inherited genes.
Thanks for coming back to me on this, Pamela. I wonder if a child can
be physiologically small even without small parents or grandparents -
looking around my own family I see 'aberrations' that deviate from
the family norm, both ways.
Thanks for doing the maths on the WHO charts too :)
>
>
>For girls from 0-3 months, the average rate of gain for the average
>baby (on the green middle line) is just a tad under 28g per day.
>For boys from 0-3 months, the average daily gain is just a whisker
>over 28g per day.
>For the metrically challenged, this would be roughly 1 oz per day.
I note this is average, though....can I send you back to the
calculator and get a *range*? I don't think it is realistic to take
the *average* and use it as a benchmark to judge what a baby 'should'
be gaining. If that was the case, we would wonder about every baby
that weighed less than 7.5 pounds at birth.
> Mothers want their babies to be happy, and will go to great lengths
>to make sure that they will be, although my impression is that the
>cultural pressures here not to breastfeed according to real need are
>enormous.
You're right there :(
> I think it's sad when babies are even a little underweight and
>irritable because they may be just plain hungry, and I don't think
>we do mothers any favours by telling them that it's normal for their
>babies to need less milk than they do.
I agree....but I think here, at least, the most appropriate way to
change this is to educate about normal infant behaviour, and for
mothers to respond to that, rather than the figures on the scale.
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK
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