I have been very interested to read everyone's comments about the issue of growth rates, all emphasizing the importance of looking at the child and not a chart, and also of looking at the child's overall health history. I hope a way is found to convince the family's insurance company to cover this healthy, but small, baby. I always wonder how many parents have their self-confidence shaken by this kind of tunnel vision concerning a child's weight. My daughter, Julia, was a full-term baby, born to fairly large parents, but with a diaphragmatic hernia. Although the hernia repair went extremely well, she did not grow and develop. She was a classic FTT. After having lay in a hospital bed for her first four months of life, with parents who barely looked at her (having emotionally withdrawn from her, when they learned, at the end of the second trimester, that she would be born with a potentially fatal condition), being fed through a gastrostomy, she was barely seven pounds. When I finally got her, at six months, she was just over nine pounds. Five weeks later, I took her to our AFB peditrician, who freaked out over the fact that she was not quite 12 pounds, chastized me for not bringing her to him sooner, and was threatening to hospitalize her and put her on parenteral nutrition. After repeating myself several times, I finally got it through to him that she had gained two and a half pounds in the five weeks I'd had her. Julia was my fourth baby and I was quite confident in my ability to raise babies by this time. However, this doc's attitude shook me up, despite my confidence in my mothering abilities and satisfaction with Julia's progress. The scarey part, I think, is that a young, inexperienced, timid, mother could have been very shaken up by this kind of thing. In fact, Julia's young birth parents' lack of confidence in their abilities to care for her adequately was the reason that she was placed for adoption. They were married and it was a planned pregnancy. I am sure that there aren't many situations where it goes so far as a child being placed for adoption, but I think there are many where inappropriate concern over weight gain is hard on parent's self-confidence, which certainly does no favors for the child. Darillyn Starr _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html