This is the second of two posts {see Part 1 here} regarding a magazine I picked up for FREE at the reception desk of my OBGYN last week. If you don't like soap boxes or get offended easily, the little X is located at the top right corner!
I never stressed about what bottle to use for my baby when I walked down the Babys R Us aisle with the registry gun or whether or not my child would get a disease from microwaving his milk...however, magazines such as Fit Pregnancy presents Mom & Baby's Fall 2009/Winter 2010 edition, would like you to think about such things and then stress over them, among other things! I just used the bottles that were given to me, they worked for Anastasia, her kids were still living, growing and just fine! I'm pretty sure that my mom never sanitized a thing we owned and I didn't even know what antibacterial was til college.
My soap box for this part of my series on this magazine comes from one particular 4-page section of the magazine titled: news to use: Your Health-Your Family-Baby Care-Breastfeeding-Style & Stuff. Besides the fact that these excerpts are absurd, I think they tend to make parents stress more about their kids development. I was literally raised on the farm running cows, working in the barn with my daddy and watching Murder She Wrote with my momma at night, can't remember ever owning a single book until the 1st grade and I like to think I turned out just peachy!
I'll start with their leading news-{TV time won't make your baby smarter} I think we all know this, it's common sense. But the article goes on to say {a study of TV habits from birth to age 2 found that watching the boob tube didn't improve babies' language and visual motor skills, no matter how good the programming} First of all, what in the world is a boob tube? And second, I beg to differ, a little. I used to babysit a little girl who, at 18 months old, could sign every letter of the alphabet, more than 20 animals and count to 20 using sign language that she learned from Baby Signs videos her mother rented from the library. Then it goes on to say {a previous study found that for each hour of TV babies under 16 months watched daily, they learned six to eight fewer words than those who had no screen time at all} Apparently, they have never met Taylor! I'm not defending TV at all...just sayin' is all! But the most absurd comment was {What made the most difference in accelerated learning were the mothers' age, education and household income. This was a predictale finding because older moms and those with more means and schooling tend to interact more with their babies} OH MY WORD.... now stop me if I am wrong here, but is this saying that my child's visual and language skills are affected by my age, education level and the fact my husband isn't a millionaire? Or is it saying that because my sister who only has a high school diploma, became a mother at 18 and whose husband is currently unemployed is going to interact less with her child than does the Master's lobbing, workaholic who brings in 6 figures? I'm just saying...
Oh ya'll, it just gets better...
The excerpt on the next page is titled {Fast food negates breast-milk benefits} basically the article reads that fast food is partly to blame for the increase in childhood asthma! Yah, it really says that. It was contributed by Carol Potera, Clinical and Experimental Allergy. Remember that next time you drive through Chik-Fil-A!
and better...
This one made Jim's jaw drop-titled Post-Baby Harmony, contributed by the Council of Contemporary Families. It's about how relationships tend to be more rocky after the baby comes...It's a very short excerpt, but the majority of it says this about the lack of happiness between couples {Another contributor to poor marital quality: backsliding into traditional gender roles after baby is born. On a more reassuring note, couples who learned to resolve their differences were happier in their marriages, and their children did better socially and academically} here it comes...OH MY WORD! So, let's see here, because I have backslidden and take the more traditional role as a MOTHER, the nurturer, nurser--all of the above, and my husband- um let's see, works to support our family, provides a roof over our heads and is the spiritual leader among us, my children are going to lack socially and academically.....All I gotta say is, they've obviously never kept the 3-year old extended session at our church.
can we say propaganda?....
This one takes the cake, really! It's the Book Beat. They have reviewed a $27 book, Finding our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of Language. It starts out: How moms invented civilization. It says that the baby talk we have with our infants, motherease, laid the foundation for human development. {Author Dean Falk explains that the need for verbal interaction between mom and baby arose once our ancestors started walking upright and mothers needed to put their babies down as they gathered food. The babies undoubtedly fussed, she writes, "and busy prehistoric moms would have tried to soothe them."} {Without "motherease," Falk contends, "our species' intellectual and artistic talents would not have blossomed."} Fit Pregnancy gave it 5 out of 5 stars. I don't think I even have to say anything about this, it speaks for itself.
I wanted to throw the magazine when I got to this one at the bottom of that page...
The American Anthropological Association (say that 3 times fast!) contributed this excerpt titled Why we are so many. Basically it compares us humans to primates, monkeys. Well, their exact words were, {such as chimpanzees} Basically it is distinguishing the reasons why humans tend to bear more offspring than do nonhuman primates. They bring it all down to the fact that monkeys, if you will, can't trust others to be kind to their babies, like us humans do.....and did you know...that us humans recover more quickly from pregnancy and lactation than do our nonhuman primates.....food for thought, huh! I'm so glad they could draw this comparison for me, I have been wondering about this for a while now. First of all, I'm not a monkey. I'm a human. A full blooded homosapien...right?
This last one just adds unnecessary stress...
The National Literary Trust believes that infants who ride in strollers where they face their caretaker {have a developmental advantage over babies who ride facing forward...they also noted that babies who faced forward seemed to exhibit more stress.} Can you see the trend in these -News to Use- excerpts in the Fit Pregnancy magazine....they want you to believe that because your child sits forward facing he will be more stressed and if they watch more TV than Sally Sue next door then he will be short a few words. And don't you dare take them to McDonald's, or that full year of nursing you did will be down the drain...
In conclusion...
You may believe this stuff, but I don't buy a bit of it. It's sad, however, that this magazine was in a stack of free magazines being offered at my OBGYN office. Some poor pregnant girl is going to pick up what she thinks is going to be a great read, encouraging, and helpful, just as I did. Instead she is going to be blasted with constant worries of her weight and body mass index, about the dangers of not choosing the right bottle or not exercising the minute she is wheeled out of the delivery room or that if she lets her child sit forward facing in a stroller or watch too much TV that they won't develop as well as that child who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Or even worse, that if she and her husband take the traditional family approach, letting him be the head and leader of the household, that her soon to be arriving son or daughter will suffer socially and academically.
Okay, I'm done. I'll get off the soap box, for now....I think a little bit of Jim is rubbing off on me!
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