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Summer Math, Missing in Action
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According to the New York Times, the campaign compares using formula to smoking during pregnancy, and it has produced a TV commercial showing a pregnant woman being thrown from a mechanical bull during ladies night at a bar. "You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born," the announcer says. "Why start after?"
The in-your-face nature of this campaign is baffling. Sure, breast milk is better than formula (although Slate's Sydney Spiesel argues that breast milk's benefits are overblown), but there are many women for whom nursing simply doesn't work. When did it join the evil ranks of smoking while pregnant?
If the government believes that formula endangers babies' health, then it needs to start paying for minimum hospital stays and nursing coaches to help new mothers learn the tricky art of breast feeding. And it should institute mandatory paid maternity leave to allow mothers to continue nursing for the recommended six months. Those who return to work need mandatory pumping breaks in designated private rooms and top-of-the-line pumps, paid for by medical insurance. All these things stand between too many new mothers and the ability to breast-feed their infants.
The guilt induced by the new "Breast Police," as a Chicago Tribune editorial calls it, could do an equivalent amount of damage to new mothers' levels of guilt and the anxiety they could pass on to their babies.
"Such tactics are a sucker punch to millions of otherwise exemplary mothers who never embraced breast-feeding as a vocation," writes the Tribune. "Formula may be a pale substitute for breast milk, but it's not poison."
Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms
Discussion Transcript: Are Stay-at-Home Moms Making a Mistake?
Hot Tweens
Does your tween have a game under the brutal summer sun this week? Worried he or she will overheat? You're not alone.
Heat exhaustion was the No. 1 among parents of kids age 10-13 in a survey by the National PTA. Of 542 parents, 25 percent said they were extremely or very concerned about their tweens' health this summer, with 35 percent listing heat exhaustion as their top worry.
While younger children get more supervision and older kids have more sense, tweens fall into the gap and are more vulnerable to heat problems, sunburn and too much TV, pediatrician Marianne Neifert told the Associated Press.
