Aaron and I practice attachment parenting and natural family living. The only baby book we ever had in our house was by William and Martha Sears, and we found that, for our family, doing things like babywearing, co-sleeping in a family bed, and using non-coercive child guidance (rather than discipline) worked best most of the time.
One of the main manifestations that our approach to parenting and living with Wyatt has taken was breastfeeding. He weaned himself (with a bit of encouragement from mom and dad) when he was 3 1/2 years old.
Quite simply, breast is best! When it is possible for a mom to nurse her baby, both receive tremendous benefits: increased immunity and optimal nutrition for baby, relaxing hormones and often accelerated weight loss for mom, bonding for both. There are potentially no bottles to sterilize, and no cost of buying formula (wow, that saves a ton of money).
If a mom and baby share sleep and nurse on demand through the night, both tend to get better sleep. And, if a mom and baby nurse on an airplane, especially during take-off and landing, the suckling motion actually stops baby's ears from popping, resulting in a happier (quieter!) baby.
So it disturbs me that flight attendants on Allegiant air recently made such a fuss over a mom's attempts to satisfy her baby's hunger.
When a baby is hungry and a mom can satisfy that hunger in the most nutritious, affordable, and comfortable way possible, why on earth would someone want to stop them? This isn't just a "mom" issue, either -- it is a feminist issue. Women's breasts have been objectified by the media for so long and in so many ways that the simple act of feeding a child makes others uncomfortable, seems obscene, might even be taken as erotic. As women reclaim our bodies from objectification, lets reclaim our ability to feed our children, to sate their hungers.
I would love to boycott Allegiant, but don't plan to fly with them anyway, so my boycott is rather meaningless. Instead, I'm going to write to their corporate headquarters in Las Vegas, and demand (calmly and politely) that Allegiant create a family-friendly policy that comports with most state laws and grants women the right to nurse in any public or private place where they are otherwise welcome and permitted.
Maybe you'll join me in this little bit of lactivism?
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1 comment:
Well, thanks for commenting. I'm amazed that you'd put eating/feeding in the same universe as urinating - socially we treat them as completely different, don't we? We often eat in public; seldom pee in public. And I've never met a person who prefers to eat dinner in a bathroom. They aren't the same thing - even though both are natural and necessary parts of life.
In fact, you make my larger point for me - we see the breasts as private because we live in a culture that doesn't recognize one of their primary purposes: feeding a child.
That said, I *have* fed Wyatt in a bathroom. He was 2 1/2, we were in a restaurant and he hit his head and could not be consoled any other way. I felt too embarrassed to feed him at our table, because of his age, and took him to the bathroom. I felt humiliated and disappointed in myself. Think of it this way: if a bite of chocolate cake would have helped him calm down, I wouldn't have taken him to the bathroom for it!
About covering: for lots of women and children this works very well. And if covering is comfortable and preferable, go for it! Wyatt enjoyed being covered while nursing for exactly 1 minute. We became more of a "show" nursing in public when I covered him than when I didn't, simply for the struggle we had with the blankets.
Most women who nurse in public do so very discretely - if the baby is in a sling, and the mom is wearing nursing-friendly clothing, you are likely to not even know its happening.
But, again, we don't ask people eating sushi to be discrete about it, do we??
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