Yes, I've stopped in to visit Lactnet again, even though I'm still nomail. I just noticed the interesting thread on skin-to-skin and instincts and felt compelled to add a few comments.
I think that a mother's experience of learning through experience (and I don't mean that redundantly, I'm talk about a "meta" concept here) depends very much on where she is cognitively/developmentally/culturally. Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule (1986) were the first that I know of to explore this issue in their qualitative research that revealed what they called "women's ways of knowing." They built on the work of others like Gilligan (1983) who explored women's moral development. They found, among other things, that women whose social/family environments during childhood provided them little to no opportunity for play and conversation, for the development of symbolic thinking, for learning by experience and developing their own knowing, etc., develop different ways of knowing ("silence") than women who have had such opportunities. "Instinct" may be a concept (and experience) that is grossly unfamiliar to women whose way of knowing is that of silence. This is not to say that women "of silence" cannot benefit from the opportunity to learn experientially (e.g., through skin to skin contact with their baby, etc.). In fact, they need to be shown what to do, rather than be told what to do. Their need to be shown what to do still does not mean that they will be able to make that knowledge their own--but they can learn to copy the behavior that they were shown.
If that doesn't make sense, but you'd like it to, try reading Belenky et al.'s work. I recommend it highly to anyone working in our field. I use it as an example of one of several models of context in my presentation, "The Woman Behind the Breasts: Understanding the Context of Infant Feeding Issues." I think this general topic is extremely important because we cannot effectively assist women if we do not understand where they are "coming from," including their ways of knowing and learning.
Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., and Tarule, J. Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Gilligan, C. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Warmly and back to work on a different presentation,
Cynthia
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Cynthia Good Mojab, MS clinical psychology, IBCLC, RLC, CATSM
Ammawell
Website: http://home.comcast.net/~ammawell
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