Every once in awhile someone does a poll to tell you what you could have already told them — new parents are not having a whole lot of sex.

The latest is from the Web site of the magazine BabyTalk, and after surveying 10,000 respondents (who were representative of the magazine’s readership, in that 96 percent were female) they report:

Your bedroom used to be just that: a bedroom. Now it’s a makeshift nursery, day-care center, storage facility and pump station. But newborns don’t only change ground zero for your sex life. They can change the quality and quantity of sex, the level of intimacy and, perhaps most important, the biology of a woman’s body.

Among their findings: Read more…

As Katie Allison Granju is the first to say, she knows as much as anyone about nursing a newborn. “I wrote a book about breast-feeding (among other things),” she wrote over at Babble.com this week. “And over the past 15 years, I’ve been published pretty widely in all kind of publications on breastfeeding-related topics. I’m even credited in some quarters with having been the first person to use the word “lactivist” in a published piece (I’m pretty sure that’s not true, though).”

Those who share her single-minded dedication to breast-feeding see her as a heroine, while those who see her as too rigid say she makes no allowance for the reality that breast-feeding does not work for every mother. Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls

To breastfeed or not was touchy territory before Kathryn Blundell stepped into it. That is why she stepped in, to represent the side not heard from often: the group that decides not to even try to feed their newborn from anything but a bottle.

Already on explosive ground, she lit the match by using the adjective “creepy” to describe breastfeeding. And she did so in the July issue of the widely read British magazine Mother & Baby, of which she is the deputy editor.

Under the headline “I formula fed. So what?” she wrote:

I wanted my body back. (And some wine)… I also wanted to give my boobs at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach… They’re part of my sexuality, too – not just breasts, but fun bags. And when you have that attitude (and I admit I made no attempt to change it), seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before feels, well, a little creepy.

Read more…

A few thoughts, from this newspaper and others, for you to ponder over the holiday weekend:

Petula Dvorak was brought up in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., which was where Jaycee Lee Dugard lived before she was snatched and held captive for 18 years. Dvorak is now a metro columnist for the Washington Post, and in a column earlier this week she wrote about the chilling effect Dugard’s abduction had on parents in her hometown back then, and on her own parenting today. She wants to give her children freedom, rather than raise them in fear — but how to do that in a world where abductors snatch children from the same streets where she used to ride her banana-seat bike?

“Such names as Jaycee and Adam Walsh and Elizabeth Smart and Polly Klass and Etan Patz are the reason I don’t let my 5-year-old son use the restroom at that very nice gated swimming pool by himself,” she writes. “Or why I nearly have a heart attack whenever my 2-year-old son hides in a forest of hanging pants at Target and I lose sight of him.”

And in a thought-provoking Q&A session with readers, where comments alternate between those who point out that children are not really in more danger nowadays, it’s just reported more, and those who steel themselves against the realities of a changed world, Dvorak says:

One of the lines that I kept wanting to write as I was struggling with this column was this truth in my life: I can read all the Dr. Spock, Dr. Sears, Dr. Brazelton, etc., as I embark on parenting and try to learn how to be a good mother, but the sad truth is, Phil Garrido will end up making many of my parenting decisions for me.

Over in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, columnist Connie Schultz has much to say about a topic that has not gotten nearly as much attention as the Dugard case, and that’s the 5-1 ruling last week by Ohio’s Supreme Court against a nursing mother who was fired because she took unauthorized breaks to pump.

The case was decided on a narrow bit of employment law — that the woman, LaNisa Allen, had not gotten permission from her supervisor to take an unauthorized break. If she had asked and been denied, the court said, then she could have brought a discrimination suit. But given the facts of the case, the court affirmed the lower court ruling which included the conclusion that, “Allen’s condition of lactating was not a condition relating to pregnancy but rather a condition related to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding discrimination does not constitute gender discrimination.”

Schultz takes issue with the ruling, and the state of Ohio’s anti-discrimination laws, yes, but saves some of her fire for the company which dismissed Allen in the first place: “the Totes/Isotoner Corp. in suburban Cincinnati — the same manufacturer that pitches those handy little umbrellas, gloves and slippers to women.”

And finally, on the Happy Days blog in the Opinion pages of The New York Times, Stuart Brown, founder and president of something called the National Institute for Play, makes a plea that summer not be the end of playtime. Children need it year round, he says, and so do adults.

Evidence from around the scientific compass — neuroscience, psychology, exercise physiology, sociology and developmental biology — has revealed the importance of play. Deprive a social mammal like a rat or monkey of its normal rough-and-tumble play and it enters adulthood emotionally fragile, unable to tell friend from foe, poor at handling stress and lacking the skills to mate properly.

Have a playful holiday. Keep your children safe, but independent. No need to ask permission.

Illustration by Barry Falls Breastfeeding

The doll aisle of your local toy store will have a new offering soon — a baby doll that breastfeeds. Called Bebe Gloton (in Spain, where it is manufactured and sold, that translates to Baby Glutton) it is expected to be marketed in the U.S. next year.

There are already dolls that allow children to care for their babies the way Mommy and Daddy do — diapering them when they pee, giving them a bottle when they are hungry, wiping them when they burp.

But this latest is like nothing else out there. The toy comes with the doll and also a brightly colored halter-top with two strategically placed flowers where nipples would be. There is a sensor in the doll and the flower such that bringing the mouth of the doll into position causes the baby to make suckling motions and sounds.

Videos of the doll in use have gone viral in recent days, with parents and experts discussing among themselves whether this is a natural and appropriate way to teach children about something natural and appropriate, or whether it is a step too far.

Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls Breastfeeding

Almost every well intentioned plan has unintended consequences, and that may turn out to be the case with the emphasis lately on breast feeding. Yes, it is good for babies, and yes, it is economical and the best alternative for many women. It is also great that nurses spread the message to post-partum mothers, and hospitals encourage nursing right after birth. But what does all that mean for the mothers who bottle feed?

A review of breastfeeding data by researchers at the University of Cambridge concludes that the increased attention to Breastfeeding Moms – more support and time from midwives and pediatricians, more web advice – means a corresponding lack of information and support for Bottle Feeding Moms. And since the majority of infants (even those who are primarily breastfed) will receive some formula during their first year, it makes medical sense to pay some attention — with information on how often and how much to bottle feed, how to sanitize bottles and prepare formula — to the mechanics of bottle feeding.

Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls Breastfeeding

Here’s a bit of data that manages to simultaneously push two of the hottest buttons parents have: Breast vs Bottle, and Getting Into College.

A study just published in the Journal of Human Capital compared children who were breastfed with their own siblings who were not, and found that the breastfed children got higher grades in school and were more likely to attend college.

By comparing children within the same family it allowed researchers to adjust for variables such as the education level and intelligence of the mother, and the socioeconomic status of the family.

Read more…

You might remember Marc and Amy Vachon, who I have written about, and who have written guest blogs for Motherlode. They live what they call “Equally Shared Parenting” – in which Mom and Dad do every thing down the middle, not as a way “to help Mom out” but as a way to balance a relationship, a household and a life.

After the discussion this morning on how breast-feeding is an obstacle to equality in a relationship, I turned to them for tips on how navigate nursing so that a couple doesn’t fall into the circular dynamic of “Mom spends more time with the baby, so she knows the baby better, so she spends more time with the baby….”

Read more…

Breastfeeding
(Illustration by Barry Falls)

If you have not yet heard the chatter about Hanna Rosin’s article in The Atlantic this month, you will. Called “The Case Against Breast-Feeding,” Rosin examines how nursing became gospel, a measure of committed mothering, and asks whether the science behind the belief that “Breast is Best” is really as definitive as we all seem to believe.

A mother who breast-fed three children (and is still nursing the youngest), Rosin always believed she was protecting her children’s health by feeding them this way. She’d heard that breast-feeding is credited with increasing intelligence and immunity and lowering risk of allergies and obesity. The first time she really questioned that was last year, while nursing her infant in her pediatrician’s waiting room. As she writes:

I noticed a 2001 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association open to an article about breast-feeding: “Conclusions: There are inconsistent associations among breastfeeding, its duration, and the risk of being overweight in young children.” Inconsistent? There I was, sitting half-naked in public for the tenth time that day, the hundredth time that month, the millionth time in my life — and the associations were inconsistent? The seed was planted. That night, I did what any sleep-deprived, slightly paranoid mother of a newborn would do. I called my doctor friend for her password to an online medical library, and then sat up and read dozens of studies examining breast-feeding’s association with allergies, obesity, leukemia, mother-infant bonding, intelligence, and all the Dr. Sears highlights.

Read more…

Driving
(Illustration by Barry Falls)

There’s multitasking, and there’s taking leave of your senses.

Last week, Genine Compton, a mother living outside Dayton, Ohio, drove her children to school. Apparently the youngest — who police believe is a little less than two years old — needed to eat. Right away. Compton is still breastfeeding, so she took the girl on her lap in the driver’s seat, and, without stopping the Honda minivan, gave the girl breakfast.

Oh, and she was reportedly talking on her cellphone, at least part of the time.

The “reportedly” in the above sentence is courtesy of a passing motorist, who called the police. You can listen to the entirety of the call here. He said that when the woman pulled into the parking lot of a school he approached her and suggested that might not be the safest way to drive, or to feed a child.

Read more…

Breastfeeding
(Illustration by Barry Falls)

In all the conversation since yesterday’s announcement that octuplets had been born in southern California yesterday — the talk of ethics, and lingering disabilities, and selective reduction, and cost of care — the part I kept coming back to is that the mother told her doctors she plans to breastfeed.

Figuring that a full-term newborn eats about eight and twelve times a day, taking about two to three ounces per feeding (every baby is different, and these averages are for full-term singletons not preemie octuplets, but let’s work on the assumption that the octuplets will grow quickly.) With 128 ounces to a gallon they would consume that means that together they would need about two gallons a day. Is it physically possible to produce that much breast milk?

Gina Ciagne, a certified lactation counselor, and the director of breastfeeding and consumer relations for Lansinoh Laboratories, which makes such products as breast pumps and nipple cream, believes that it is. But she doesn’t think it will be easy. Nursing is supply and demand, she says, the more demanded of your body, the more it supplies. In other words, a body doesn’t know if it is feeding eight babies or one very, very hungry baby, it just rises to the occasion — or tries to.

To do this, the mother will need to eat, drink, and rest. The rule of thumb is that a nursing mother should eat an extra 500 calories for each child, but an added 4,000 calories a day is neither possible nor necessary, Ciagne says. The goal should be a healthy and plentiful diet.

Equally impossible, it would seem, is feeding all the babies exclusively from the breast. Let’s say each feeding takes 15 minutes on average (a low estimate, I realize, but let’s work with it.) Then assume an average of ten feedings per child per day. That’s four hours per baby, multiplied by all the babies, would require a 32-hour day. You see the problem.

Ciagne says her company plans to send the mother (who has asked to remain anonymous, and does not appear to have signed on with any reality show producers yet) a double electric breast pump and a year’s supply of freezer storage bags and bottles. Since (at least in my experience) you can express more milk in any given 15 minutes than a baby can drink from the breast in the same period of time, that just might work.

But it also might not. No one knows if one mother can feed eight babies without supplementation (and it’s an entirely different question as to whether or not any mother should even try.) These are only the second set of octuplets ever born in the United States, and if they all make it home they will be the first group of octuplets to survive, so this Mom will be the first to test the limits.

Illustration by Barry Falls

In the summer of 2007, Kelli Roman’s Facebook photo disappeared from her profile. It showed her nursing her infant daughter, Ivy, and while Facebook never responded when she wrote to ask why, she assumes it was because someone complained that the photo was obscene. Other mothers, she’s since learned, have received e-mails from Facebook warning they risked being banned from the site if their breastfeeding photos were put back.

Ms. Roman started a Facebook group — Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene — and slowly other women gathered there with similar tales. Over the months, membership grew, and is now 54,000. Facebook’s policies don’t appear to have changed, however, and while not all the group’s members have personally been censored, reports of nursing photos being removed are still coming in.

There is also a collection of such photos on the group’s page — examples of the ones that were removed from personal pages — and there, too, the policy seems random. Some of the pictures posted as examples of what’s being taken down, were themselves taken down, according to Stephanie Knapp Muir, the administrator of the group, while others have been allowed to stay. Oddly, the photo on the group’s homepage is of Roman and her daughter, the one Facebook removed from her page last summer. (You can therefore decide for yourself whether it is obscene.) It has not been removed this second time around.

“We’re really unsure about what specifically triggers action,” says Muir, who is a doula in Ottawa where she lives with her four children, ages five through 25. Based on the stories women tell on the site, the assumption is that the company doesn’t just trawl around looking for pictures of women breastfeeding, but will respond to a complaint by another member.

“There’s mums on the group who’ve had photos removed with no nipples showing, no aereola showing, with less breast visible than you would see in an evening gown or a bathing suit or a beer ad,” Muir says. “Because this is so arbitrary and random it seems as if the objection is to breastfeeding itself.” Her own profile photo shows her nursing her youngest child years ago. It has not been taken down from her page.

On December 27, the group, though an off-shoot called M.I.L.C. (Mothers International Lactation Campaign), will host a virtual nurse-in on Facebook. You don’t have to actually be nursing to participate. You don’t even have to be female. All you are asked to do is change your profile photo for the day, to a picture of a nursing child, and to add the sentence, “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” to your status message.

“It can be your photo, a photo from a friend, an image of a painting, sculpture, any art piece, or any mammal, a sheep, your cat with her kittens,” Muir says. “We really want to convey the message that the act of nursing is not lewd, its not sexually explicit, its and act protected by law in most parts of America.”

So far about 4,000 people have said they would join in. If you want to add your name to the list, go here to RSVP.

I tried to reach Facebook for comment, but did not hear back (if I do I will update). Earlier this week, the Palo Alto Daily News quoted an unnamed Facebook spokesman as saying that the site “does allow breastfeeding photos as long as they don’t show a fully exposed breast” and that the company had no comment on the planned nurse-in.

As promised, the response I received from Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt at about 4:30 EST today:

Illustration by Barry Falls

The woman ahead of me on the security line last night at JFK airport was lugging a laptop case, an oversized purse, and a soft-sided cooler filled with frozen bags of breast milk. She had pumped the bags during a three-day conference, the first time she’d been separated from her six-month-old back home.

Shuffling toward the x-ray machines, she clutched her boarding pass and drivers license in one hand and a print-out from the TSA website in the other. She knew that the rules said she could fly with milk even when she wasn’t flying with a baby, but, she said, you can never be too careful.

No, this is not one of those horror stories that have cropped up over the past few years, ever since breast milk has become a question of national security. Like the time a nursing mother, in order to prove the liquid she was carrying couldn’t be used as an explosive was asked to taste and therefore contaminate three bottles of breast milk at the Austin airport a few years ago (a practice that is now explicitly banned).

What this is instead is a memory, a realization that you never know what you will be nostalgic for. Standing behind this stressed out mother, who was certain that her precious liquid would be confiscated, I remembered a trip I took from Houston to New York back when my oldest was a newborn, years before 9/11. I’d brought my breast pump along on that trip, and back in those olden days the screeners had never seen one before. It embarrassed the heck out of them, and that was enough for them to speed me through with no questions.

Now nothing is embarrassing at the security check. We do an unabashed striptease, shedding shoes and belts and jackets, being wanded and patted. And the stress of travel is multiplied several times over when you travel in parent mode. Stuffed animals and car seats, through the X-ray. Children awoken from naps to be taken out of strollers. Sippy cups have to be empty. Juice boxes are forbidden. Most of the time the screeners try to be kind, but there is nothing fun about traveling with a child.

And it is less fun traveling as a nursing mother with a child at home. (Piece of advice – if you are going to pump in an airplane rest room, pack sterile drapes to cover the wash basin and your lap, and warn a flight attendant that you might be awhile so they don’t call an emergency alert.)

My new friend on the line at JFK swears she will not do this again – leaving conference sessions to find time to pump; requesting three rental fridge/freezers at her hotel before finding one cold enough to do the job; worrying that all the effort will be for naught because someone with a badge will decide her milky liquid poses a threat. (A side note: the rules look like they will change again in 2009.)

As it turns out, she had no problem — at least not at the security point. Per TSA regulations she alerted the screener than she was carrying breast milk, and was taken aside for a separate hand screening.

When she went to board the flight to Chicago, however, the gate attendant briefly objected to the fact that she had three carry on items. When she described what was in the cooler, though, the attendant — who, it turns out, was a new mother herself — waved her through.

Illustration by Barry Falls

So Angelina Jolie is breastfeeding on the cover of the November issue of W Magazine? The La Leche League is calling her a champion of women. Readers on various internet forums are calling her an exhibitionist. Me, I am getting tired of movie stars being held up as parenting role models and making the rest of us feel inadequate.

They lose baby weight faster than the rest of us. They have more resources for nannies and adorable outfits and personal trainers. They have soft lighting and editorial approval at their photo shoots.

I nursed both boys. The first time it went fairly well. We kept it up, he and I, for about a year, and it was the rewarding and bonding experience that La Leche promises. Read more…