Breastfeeding: True or False? (Test Yourself)
Jean Mercer, Ph.D.
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
The important human function of breastfeeding is the subject of many myths and misunderstandings. A fascinating meld of biological and behavioral events, it’s worth the attention of everyone interested in early development, even those who will not be participating at the adult end. Test your knowledge of breastfeeding by reading these “true or false?” questions.
1. Breastfeeding helps the baby resist infectious diseases. True or false?
Very true! Although babies are born with a supply of antibodies they got from their mothers’ immune systems, those antibodies can only protect against diseases the mother had already been exposed to, not exposure to new diseases after the birth. In addition, those antibodies will have diminished by the time the baby is about 8 months old, a point at which infants do not yet do a good job of making their own antibodies. The nursing mother acts as an “auxiliary immune system” to her infant. She supplies more of the antibodies she already had, and if the nursing pair are exposed to a new disease, the mother’s efficient immune system goes to work to produce antibodies and pass them on to the baby in her milk. What if the baby is exposed to something, and the mother not exposed to it? Don’t worry, she will be exposed quickly, because the physical intimacy of nursing (and other infant care) means she will come into contact with the baby’s mucus, urine, and feces.
Do note that the baby can still use this kind of help toward the end of the first year. Babies who live in clean conditions, with modern food supplies and access to modern medicine, are less affected by a lack of breastfeeding, but those living in primitive conditions may die of infections that could have been prevented by breastfeeding.
2. Nursing mothers need to eat a lot more than usual. True or false?
It depends on the conditions. If the mother was well nourished during the pregnancy, she has laid down extra fat and extra calcium in her bones, and these will be used to support lactation, so she needs little if any extra food. If the mother is living at a subsistence level, she will need extra calories to compensate for those consumed by the baby. An ounce of human milk has about 20 calories on the average, so you can do the math, considering the amount of milk consumed by babies of different sizes and ages.
The nursing mother does need to drink a lot more fluid than when she is not breastfeeding. Every ounce of fluid the baby takes needs to be replaced. Many nursing mothers automatically go to drink a glass of water before they pick up the baby to nurse, or have a cup of tea while breastfeeding. Traditionally, nursing mothers drank dark beers like porter, which supplied extra fluid and a hefty dose of B vitamins, and gave everyone a nice nap too--nowadays we tend to frown on this, and certainly this practice would have its dangers if it occurred more than once in a while.
3. You can’t breastfeed a baby once he or she gets teeth. True or false?
False. Babies can easily be taught not to bite the nipple, if the mother is vigilant (and believe me, after one bite she WILL be vigilant). Biting and sucking take different jaw movements, and an attentive mother can see when a sucking baby re-adjusts its jaw position in preparation for a chomp. The mother then gently inserts her finger between the baby’s jaws, toward the back of the mouth. This breaks the suction, so the baby cannot get any milk, and if he or she bites down, there’s not much satisfaction, because those itchy teething gums are in the front. Within 24 hours, the baby will have learned that although you can bite lots of things, you can’t bite that nipple--it just doesn’t work.
Nursing mothers really have to teach biting babies not to bite, or their nipples can actually be damaged, and the baby will have to be weaned from the breast.
4. Nursing babies don’t like the milk that’s flavored by strong-tasting foods their mothers have eaten. True or false?
This is mainly false, with some possible individual exceptions. The taste researchers Menella and Beauchamp fed a group of nursing mothers an all-garlic-flavored lunch, waited a couple of hours, and then timed how long the babies nursed. When they compared this to nursing time after a bland lunch, they found that the babies actually nursed longer when the milk had a garlic flavor.
There may be some individual differences, with particular babies possibly disliking certain flavors. One important point is that when a nursing mother has had a mild breast infection, the milk on that side seems to be a little saltier than usual, and babies may not care for it--to the mother’s frustration, as frequent thorough nursing is a help in clearing up these problems.
How Can We Help to Prevent Child Abuse or Neglect?
Diane E. Ristaino
Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey
On January 1, 2009, New Jersey citizens rang in the New Year with headlines that shocked us with stories of child abuse. On New Year’s Day, we read of a woman accused of hitting a 10-week-old child in the head with a cell phone as she argued with her husband. Just over a week later, a 3-year-old was hospitalized in critical condition after the toddler suffered internal bleeding, lacerations to his liver and stomach and bruising to his forehead, arms and trunk.
I am haunted by these reports. It is difficult to imagine the amount of rage and incoherence one would have to feel to strike a newborn child or toddler. However, New Jersey’s children have long been vulnerable victims to intentional harm. In 2007, the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services substantiated 9,900 child abuse and neglect incidents. Twenty-three children died as a result of abuse or neglect in 2006.
While there is never an excuse for hurting a child, the causes of abuse and neglect are known, varied and often preventable. Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and a parent’s own childhood experience can lead to abusive behaviors. However, there are also far more common life circumstances that can exponentially increase the risk of abuse. Isolation, teen pregnancy, inexperience with children, low self-esteem, joblessness, lack of education, poverty, homelessness, insufficient access to healthcare, an unexpected or difficult pregnancy, and post-partum depression are some of the stressors that may contribute to abuse and neglect. As the presence of these factors increases, so does the substantial risk for abuse. The prevalence of family conflict and domestic abuse always rises during the holiday season. And, the incidence of these factors is increasing among New Jersey’s families as a direct result of the recent downturn in the economy.
While we may never know whether any specific incident of reported abuse was avoidable, we can all make a resolution to support families and reduce some of the burdens that lead to abuse and neglect. For example,
• Introduce yourself to a family who may be new to your neighborhood and make them feel welcome. Families feel safer and less stressed when they know support is nearby.
• Check-in with a new parent a few weeks after their new baby arrives. Families often go from receiving a lot of support when a baby is born only to be left on their own months later. Ask how they are doing, offer to run an errand or baby-sit long enough for them to take a shower or do laundry.
• If you see a parent and young child in conflict, smile and say something nice to either of them. Your interruption may just offer the time or space they need to “de-escalate.”
• Publically congratulate a parent for doing a good job – praising a parent can raise their self-esteem, reinforce their positive skills, and make them feel good about their commitment to family.
• And, as always, if you suspect child abuse or neglect, call 1-800-792-8610 or 911 immediately.
There are many parenting services available to families through Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey’s home visitation, parent involvement, parenting education workshops and teen parenting programs. Education and training for professionals is also available. Our prevention programs help reduce risk factors and build resiliency in families to prevent abuse from ever occurring. Learn more about how you can help by visiting www.preventchildabusenj.org or calling 1-800-CHILDREN.
It’s your turn to make a difference – what will you do to help prevent child abuse?
Upcoming Conference
XVIIth Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies
Baltimore, Maryland, March 10-14, 2010
New Blog by Our Very Own!
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/child-myths
Jean Mercer, Ph.D.
Jean Mercer received her Ph.D. in general experimental psychology from Brandeis University. She taught developmental psychology at Richard Stockton College for many years. For some time the president of the New Jersey Association for Infant Mental Health, she is the author of a textbook on infant development and of Understanding Attachment, a general-interest book about early emotional development. Her interest in pseudoscience and folk beliefs about children led to the publication of the co-authored book Attachment Therapy on Trial her 2009 supplementary textbook, Child Development: Myths and Misunderstandings. She has been instructed about child development by two sons and two stepsons, and two grandsons are continuing her education.
Translating Research into Action: Supporting Sensitive Caregiving from Birth
Cynthia A. Frosch, PhD & Margaret Tresch Owen, PhD
We have all heard the importance of sensitive caregiving for young children’s development. But what does sensitive caregiving really mean? What does sensitive caregiving actually look like? And how can we support parents and caregivers in becoming more sensitive in their interactions with young children?
Whether parent or childcare provider, sensitive care – care that is responsive and in-tune to the child’s needs -- consistently predicts more secure attachment relationships and better social and emotional outcomes for young children. For example, in a longitudinal study of over 1,000 children, the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network reported that maternal sensitivity was the strongest predictor of secure attachment in infants and preschoolers (NICHD ECCRN, 1997; 2001), and children who received more responsive and stimulating care from their mothers had higher scores on cognitive, language, social-emotional, and peer outcomes at all ages from 15 to 54 months of age (NICHD ECCRN, 2006). Quality of care in other settings also contributes to children’s development. For example, findings from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care indicate that in addition to sensitive parenting, quality of non-parental care, comprising the components of sensitive caregiving, relates to more positive cognitive, language, and social skills (NICHD ECCRN, 1998; 2000; 2006).
The literature on caregiver sensitivity indicates that children who experience more sensitive care are more capable of regulating their impulses and better able to control and modulate their attention (Gilliom, Shaw, Beck, Schonberg, & Lukon, 2002; NICHD ECCRN, 2005). With these skills, they are better able to develop good work habits in school, and become more self-reliant learners. Consequently, they show better school achievement and are more likely to experience success in school (e.g., NICHD ECCRN, 2008). Thus, the quality of caregiving that children experience is a critical factor for understanding their development.
Given the importance of providing sensitive care, how can parents and caregivers come to understand their own behavior and increase their sensitivity when interacting with young children? For example, it may be difficult for some parents or caregivers to imagine what a sensitive response would look like in a particular situation. Faced with a crying or fearful baby, should the parent try to comfort the child or let the child work it out alone? What if a baby looks away during face-to-face play with a caregiver? Should the caregiver try harder to regain the child’s attention or allow the child to take a break before continuing on with play? What if a child clearly signals “no” to a game that the caregiver really wants the child to play? Should the caregiver follow the child’s lead or persist with her own agenda because after all, she is the adult?
These are just a few of the everyday situations we address with The READY Method – a visual guide to interacting with young children. Our goal in developing The READY Method was to create a tool that showed parents, caregivers, and educators what sensitive caregiving really looks like and also, what it does not look like. For us, the experience of coding or scoring hundreds of parent-child interactions over the years, and training and supervising others to observe and code (or score) parent-child and caregiver-child interactions has been very powerful in shaping the ways we think about early parent-child and caregiver-child relationships. We wanted to translate the research and what we had learned into an accessible, visual tool for parents, caregivers, and educators. Thus, the core of the Method is a “training tape” that illustrates 5 components of sensitive caregiving: Respond, Engage, Acknowledge, Develop, and Yield. READY caregiving is responsive, engaging behavior, that acknowledges the child’s perspective, supports the child’s development, and yields when possible in order to meet the child’s needs in a sensitive manner.
The READY Method DVD features 37 vignettes of parent-child interaction with their young children who range in age from 5 months to 3 years. We filmed mothers and fathers interacting with their children and then used snippets from the sessions to illustrate interactions that are sensitive (what we call “high examples”) and insensitive (what we call “low examples”) for each of the 5 READY Method dimensions. For the purposes of filming the “low” examples, we asked parents to respond in two ways that were not sensitive. First, we asked parents to become overly directive, controlling, or intrusive. Second, we asked parents to act in an emotionally detached, distracted, and distant way from their child’s signals and needs.
In this way, across the READY Method dimensions, we have captured the two different pathways to insensitivity that we have coded in our observational research. The first form, intrusiveness, reflects a parent’s tendency to control the interaction, enforce his or her agenda on the child, regardless of the child’s response, and interfere with the child’s autonomous strivings. Intrusiveness is often linked with parental hostility and anger with the child, when the child does not comply or becomes frustrated or overwhelmed by the parent’s barrage of directives. The second form of insensitivity, detachment, reflects a lack of a supportive physical and emotional presence for the child.
Although we asked parents to act in less positive ways for the purposes of filming the low examples, we could not control the child’s response in each of the vignettes included on the DVD. The child’s behavior was spontaneous and unscripted. What we found interesting was that, when faced with a parent who was emotionally unavailable, several children demonstrated signs of distress. When faced with a parent who was controlling and intrusive, many of the children withdrew emotionally or sometimes physically by turning away or walking away. In contrast, when the parent was responsive to the child’s cues, interactions were marked by shared smiling and mutual engagement. These contrasts in child and parent behavior clearly illustrate the difference that sensitive and responsive caregiving can make in relationships.
And while the participants in the DVD were parents, the concepts illustrated with The READY Method are equally applicable to all those who care for and interact with young children – from parents to grandparents to childcare providers. When creating the Method, we also wanted to support parents in reflecting on what they bring to their interactions with young children and also what the child brings to the interaction. Toward this end, we created a companion book with exercises to support the parent or caregiver in understanding themselves and their children better.
When parents and caregivers begin to incorporate The READY Method into their relationships with young children, they may find it helpful to choose one or two dimensions to focus on initially. As they experience increased awareness and success with their first one or two dimensions, they may find it easier to incorporate the other dimensions. Increasing sensitive behavior is possible and intervention studies designed to increase sensitivity via video feedback with both parents and child care providers have proven promising (e.g., Juffer, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007). And we suggest that the experience of seeing sensitive parenting in action and reflecting on the characteristics that parents and children bring to their relationships can be a powerful tool for supporting sensitive caregiving and ultimately, the development of strong parent-child relationships.
References and Suggested Reading:
Gilliom, M., Shaw, D., Beck, J., Schonberg, M., & Lukon, J. (2002). Anger regulation in disadvantaged preschool boys: Strategies, antecedents, and the development of self-control. Developmental Psychology, 38, 222-235.
Juffer, F., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). Promoting positive parenting: An attachment-based intervention. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group/Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (1997). The effects of infant child care on infant-mother attachment security: Results of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. Child Development, 68, 860-879.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (1998). Early child care and self-control, compliance, and problem behavior at 24 and 36 months. Child Development, 69, 1145-1170.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2000). Early child care and children’s cognitive and linguistic development over the first three years. Child Development, 71, 958-978.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2001). Child care and family predictors of preschool attachment and stability from infancy. Developmental Psychology, 37, 847-862.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2005). Predicting individual differences in attention, memory, and planning in first graders from experiences at home, child care, and school. Developmental Psychology, 41, 99-114.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2006). Child-care effect sizes for the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. American Psychologist, 61, 99-116.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2008). Mothers' and fathers' support for child autonomy and early school achievement. Developmental Psychology, 44, 895-907.
Cynthia A. Frosch, PhD is a child and family development consultant and the Community Liaison for the Center for Children and Families at the University of Texas at Dallas. Margaret Tresch Owen, PhD is Professor of Psychology and Program Head for Human Development and Early Childhood Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas. To learn more about the Center for Children and Families, please visit: http://ccf.utdallas.edu. To read more about The READY Method, please visit: www.ReadyMethod.com.
New!!!
Post Graduate Certificate Program in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
The primary focus of Infant Mental Health is the connection between infants (0-3) and their parents, the unique contributions each member of the pair makes to this dynamic, yet vulnerable process and problems or failures in attachment that sometimes occur.
Infant Mental Health is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the optimal physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of an infant, within the context of their primary caring relationships. The infant is viewed within primary caregiving relationships. This pair or
“dyad” is the focus of assessment and interventions when needed. Development continues during the preschool years (3-6), with growth in play, cognition, emotion, communication, and self-regulation linked to the nature of the child’s relationships. In our training and clinical services,
we honor the traditions established by the late Selma Fraiberg and Thea Bry.
The curriculum emphasizes the following areas:
• Normal development in infants and preschool age children, the nature of human attachment
and disorders of attachment.
• Multi-disciplinary diagnostic assessments of caregiver-child dyads, along multiple
developmental lines.
• Infant-Parent (dyadic) psychotherapy and group psychotherapy.
• Unique needs of special populations, including teenage pregnancy, early separations, foster care, and adoptions.
• Training in methods of research and clinical case study.
Who is this certificate program for?
The post-graduate certificate program is designed for practitioners in the fields of psychology,
counseling, social work, education, pediatrics, nursing and other allied disciplines whose careers in their area of licensure would benefit from specialized training and supervisory experience in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.
The certificate program will afford participants an opportunity to:
• Acquire essential family/dyadic assessment and intervention skills.
• Learn techniques for integrating infant and preschool mental health principles and practices into clinical, child care, educational and community settings.
• Build skills needed to educate others about the needs of infants, toddlers, preschool children and their families, as well as the skills required to influence policies that impact the mental health of children.
The curriculum encourages candidates to develop applications for use within the scope of their professional licensure and practice. Accordingly, the curriculum and certificate do not permit the graduate to engage in professional activities outside the scope of their professional license or credential.
What are the Certificate Requirements?
Didactic Requirements (10 credits)
The three required courses are:
• Conceptual Foundations of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Theory and Clinical
Practice (3 credits)
• Infant and Preschool Mental Health: Clinical Assessment and Research (4 credits)
• Couple and Family Dynamics: Systemic Perspectives (3 credits)
Supervised Practicum - Minimum 20 hours
Each post-graduate student will independently arrange his/her practicum under the supervision
of faculty. The practicum may include infant parent assessments, interventions and
experiences with preschool-age children in individual, family and group modalities.
For non-clinical candidates, supervision will address the ways in which infant mental health
principles, relationship-based services and reflective practices can be integrated into work
within their professional field.
Integrated Case Report or Project
All clinical students will be required to complete an integrated case report based upon a child/
family case from their practicum. Non-clinical candidates will develop a final project that
involves a comprehensive program in which an infant mental health perspective is integrated
into a training, service or policy program.
For further information, fee schedule and
application, contact:
THE YCS INSTITUTE
for Infant and Preschool Mental Health
60 Evergreen Place – 10th Floor
East Orange, New Jersey 07018
dsquadron@ycs.org
973-395-5500 Ext. 309
www.ycs.org
No comments:
Post a Comment