Daily Mail 13th August 2007:
Current child growth charts should be scrapped 'to encourage breast feeding'
Child growth charts used for 30 years in the UK should be ripped up and replaced with a new World Health Organisation guide, according to a new report.
The joint report, by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), says WHO Growth Standards should be applied to children aged between two weeks and 24 months.
Current UK growth charts are based principally on formula fed babies and reflect "how babies are growing" in the UK. However, because breast fed babies grow at a slower rate than those on formula milk many breast feeding mothers have been concerned their babies were developing too slowly.
The new WHO charts prescribe "how babies should grow" on an exclusive breastmilk diet. The new standards can be used for assessing and monitoring growth of all babies and encourage mothers to breastfeed for the first six months of a baby's life.
So here’s what I don’t get. These ‘standards’ will still be made up of an average (presumably the mean) of the weights of hundreds of babies at different ages. How is this supposed to give me any guide to my individual baby’s healthy weight? Babies aren’t convenient numbers, they are individual human beings.
I’m lucky, in that I am a physio and so I know not to take the words of a midwife, doctor or other health professional as gospel. My breastfed baby went from 8lb 3ozs at birth to 11lb 2 ozs in two weeks. ‘He’s too heavy’ said the midwife. I ignored her. He was constantly hungry by 16 weeks, so I introduced solids. The new WHO guidelines to only begin solids at 6 months would have had me worried, stupid as I am that way, but he weighed 20lb 5 ozs and was constantly hungry, and the guidelines in those days were to allow solids at four months. The midwife still thought he was too heavy. I ignored her. At 10 months he stopped breastfeeding of his own accord, and shot up in height. By a year, the midwife was really worried. ‘He’s underweight.’ I ignored her.
What no growth chart can possibly show is how individual children grow in fits and starts. My child was breastfed and was theoretically overweight all that time. In fact, by looking at his body I could see he wasn’t fat: he was just chunky. That’s not a euphemism, he genuinely had no rolls of flesh, he was firm.
Dawn Primarolo, Public Health Minister said: "We welcome this report from the Expert Group on Growth Standards. We are committed to promoting breastfeeding and these new standards will help alleviate mothers' concerns regarding the difference in growth patterns often observed between breastfed and formula-fed babies."
Presumably if you are reckless enough to bottle feed, you won’t be concerned about your baby looking ‘fat’ on these new scales?
Breast milk is the best source of nutrition for babies and the Department of Health recommends exclusive breastfeeding up to the age of six months. Recent evidence suggests that breast fed babies which develop more slowly have a lower risk of obesity later in life.
Professor Peter Aggett at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said: "The recommendations to adopt the WHO Standards for early life are an important means to support the exclusive breast feeding of babies in the first six months of life and the development of early growth patterns that could reduce the risk of these children becoming overweight and developing life threatening diseases in later life."
The Department is working with the RCPCH to pilot the new standards
I strongly believe in breastfeeding, but I don’t believe in ‘experts’ telling us what is right for our babies. It’s disempowering and de-skilling.
Watching Channel 5 at the weekend I was horrified to see all these people bigging up Gina Ford like it was a good thing to send your baby to bootcamp. Her ‘Contented Little Baby’ book contains routines that are total and utter madness. Parents and children up at 6.45 whether they feel like it or not. There are even half hour periods specifically set aside for ‘kicking’.
Don’t get me wrong, the book isn’t worthless, and some of the advice (like blackout curtains, swaddling, and ‘teaching’ baby the difference between day and night) was useful. But how can someone possibly say that my baby won’t be contented if I don’t get it up at 6.45? Even the book that I loved and found most helpful (Tracey Hogg's 'Baby Whisperer') had to be adapted to suit my baby, who liked to feed as soon as he woke.
Yet Gina Ford gives the impression that if you don’t follow her ‘correctly’ and your baby ‘fails’ then you are a bad parent. Why does it not cross her mind (or the minds of her flock of followers) that her method is pants? That if it works in your case, that’s pure luck, not a miracle method?
As a first time parent I was looking for guidance and help and jumped on anything that might have helped give me a few hours uninterrupted sleep. Prescriptive books like Gina Ford’s that offer a ‘guaranteed’ fix are exploitation of that natural tendency. Growth charts are presumably there to reassure parents, but like these books they can in fact be setting parents up to fail, and can undermine the fragile confidence of new parents. Second time around, does anyone give a damn about them?
A 5 year old girl I know recently transferred from another local school to ours, as she had been becoming increasingly distressed and had been frightened of her teacher. When her mother spoke to the head about this, he said, ‘I don’t know what you are worrying about: we all have to conform eventually (baaaaaaaaaa!).’
Surely even he would think that birth is a little too early to start?
