"Boys are also brave": Books About Nursing

"Boys are little men comprised of complex qualities like love, learning, laughter, and most of all, life!" If this statement from page 144 of the Better Homes and Gardens Baby Book (1969) seems a little vague, we can read specifics on the next page. "Boys find laughter and excitement in the simplest things; a birthday balloon bouncing in the summer breeze . . .", "Boys are also brave. They can pick up worms and thread them on hooks . . . If mothers were as brave as their sons, a boy's room would be a small private zoo." "Boys believe it is better to give than to receive. . . " "Being mechanical is just part of being a boy. If it's possible, boys are constructive and destructive both at the same time. They delight in tearing something apart to see what makes it work. In the process of re-assembling the thing, there are always spare parts-- but then this happens with Daddy too."

All of this information is critically useful in helping me to raise a son. The text on girls, meanwhile, is relatively scanty, but if I had a daughter I'm sure the photos captioned, "I wish I had a birthday once a week," and, "See Kitty, now I look just as pretty as Mommy," (pg. 173) would be equally useful.

Note: more generally interesting post about books I've read while nursing below.

One must assume that one can pick out useless (or worse) advice from modern parenting books just as easily as one can pick it out from older ones. That's part of the reason that I'm sure good mothers Irene and Ad Astra are correct that parenting is about what feels right and works with one's child rather than what's stated in a book. However, there are a heck-of-a-lot of details about which one has no intuition (if breastfeeding is not instinctual, the appropriateness of changes in poop frequency would hardly be) and it is really nice to have an authoritative book to consult. And another when one doesn't like the advice given in the first. And perhaps another in case the first two are wrong.

I have the second edition of Heidi Murkoff's What to Expect The First Year. It is easy to read and non-judgemental, but the month-by-month format doesn't work as well for parenting as it does for pregnancy. Would one necessarily think to look under the third month for diaper rash or the fourth month for wriggling during changing? Still, overall it is recommended, as is the handy, Your Baby's First Year issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics. This 4" x 7" paperback has the advantage of being small enough to thumb through while nursing. While What to Expect is written to sound like one is chatting with a friend (who happens to have consulted a bunch of pediatric literature), Your Baby's First Year is considerably more authoritative (I particularly like little boxed "Where We Stand" features that inform the reader that the AAP officially supports breastfeeding and car seats and officially opposes cigarettes and fire arms near babies). The organization of Your Baby's is just as awkward as What to Expect, with a similar hybrid of whole chapters on feeding or safety interspersed with chapters on month by month development which contain boxed essays on particular feeding or safety issues. Fortunately, the index is good.

I ordered The Nursing Mother's Companion by Kathleen Huggins during Dianthus's first week when I could learn from the previous books that breast feeding was not going well and that this was not uncommon, but not how to resolve the problem. At the time, the arrival of The Nursing just made me cry more. The book contains specifics about what I was doing wrong and some guidelines for correcting the problems and Dianthus and I still couldn't make it work. Despite that, I really like the book and highly recommend women who are considering breastfeeding (especially those that don't have breastfeeding classes and are over a hundred miles from a certified lactation consultant) read at least the first few chapters before giving birth or buying breastfeeding supplies.

From my mother I also own the aforementioned Better Homes and Gardens Baby Book, which is not as useless as the quotes I picked out suggest, and The New Revised and Enlarged Edition of Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care (first published in 1948, revised and enlarged in 1968). I haven't read much of either, but both are useful as reminders about how things change (e.g. Dr. Spock thinks that a baby should sleep in a 60 degree room), as support for any methods I like that are contrary to current thought (e.g. Dr. Spock thinks that three hours outside is vital) and for corroboration (methods recommended for sixty years carry more weight).

Images of Dianthus included because he is better looking than these book covers. Note that these images are both about two weeks old; he has much less hair now.