Dear all:

I am far more understanding when perception does not match reality.  So, I do understand parents when their expectations of infant behavior does not match the reality of real infant behavior and as a consequence they overreport "irritability".  Remember that James McKenna often presents evidence about how parents do not reliably report their own or their infants sleep.  Nor do adults reliably report their sleep.  Adults who feel that they don't get enough sleep actually sleep as long as adults who do.  The study that Judy refers to did not record actual episodes of irritability, they only recorded parental perceptions.  As we saw with the recent studies on parental sleep, parents get MORE sleep when their babies are exclusively breastfed.

What I don't get however is what my sister, a high school teacher, deals with every single day.  Her high school students naively and hopefully expect her to believe lies so obvious that it is jaw dropping.  Even here I have more empathy with the teenagers who get themselves into trouble when they procrastinate with their schoolwork.  

I have more trouble with adults, particularly those who think that merely because they are often featured on television or the print media that their expertise in one area means that their expertise extends to any opinions that pop into their heads on topics about which they have minimal to no expertise.

I have already discovered that Andrea Peyser of the New York Post in an article MADE UP a quote by the psychiatrist.  I can understand misquotes, but making up a quote?  In her defense of her poorly worded deliberately provocative and untruthful opinion piece Andrea Peyser responded to my sending her Chen and Rogan's article "Breastfeeding and the risk of postneonatal death in the United States.  Pediatrics.  2004:113(5)" by claiming that these peer-reviewed authors were sick. 

www.nypost.com/p/news/item_mDbip2j1fmk3kYYmXTbHcP;jsessionid=FF2824ABD52B61CF08B3EEA7419B2EE0

The latest outing was a bit more troubling in that it was a so-called professional in the field of psychoanalysis, Virginia Klein.  Her piece on Fox News popped up on Facebook and so I track down the original video clip and sent her evidence that a) breastfeeding beyond the eruption of teeth is actually recommended by the AAP and WHO and b) breastfeeding beyond US cultural averages does not cause children to want to cling to their mothers breasts,  children who breastfeed longer are actually more secure and therefore more exploratory.  http://video.foxnews.com/v/3921048/too-old-to-breastfeed/

She denied she had done the piece and insisted it was someone else.  So, I apologized if I was wrong in thinking that a person of her same name had been on Fox News.  She insisted my apology wasn't good enough.  So, I went back and looked at the photo next to her email address on Psychology Today and the Fox News Piece again -- screen saved the pictures and sent them back to her.  At which point she grudgingly admitted that she had done the piece on Fox News, but she then denied that she said anything about teeth and admonished me to look at the clip again.  Which I did.  2:06 minute into the clip she clearly made a comment about teeth being the time when mothers should consider weaning.  Never once did she apologize to me for her all caps attack that I had the wrong Virginia Klein.

I just read something that gave me more insight into the rage filled reaction to the possibility that people's firmly held beliefs about infants might be damaging.  I've been reading more information on attachment theory and found reference to Rene Spitz film "Grief - A Peril in Infancy (1947).  Apparently, people walk out when they see this film because it is too painful to watch.  So painful that the reaction is rage against the filmmaker.  Deniability and transference is a strong coping mechanism.

Best regards, 

Susan E. Burger, MHS, PhD, IBCLC

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