Saturday, August 25, 2007

Reflections from the CAPPA conference

I am attending the CAPPA conference this weekend in my very own city of Nashvegas (funny how it's in my city but still an hour away). Anyway, yesterday, Jack Newman started off the weekend with a bang or more like a whirlwind of "controversies in breastfeeding".

Quote of the day:
What do colostrum and formula have in common?


They are both liquids.


And then he went on to say that even that point is debatable. (Colostrum is often a very thick liquid.)

And I sat next to two very lovely ladies from Australia that commented that our obsession with pumping - which pump to buy, when to pump, pumping instead of breastfeeding, etc - is primarily an American obsession. In Australia, mothers and babies are together (only in the nursery if in intensive care), mothers have 24-hour access to their NICU babies, mothers have long maternity leave, mothers have true breastfeeding support and culturally, BREASTFEEDING is the norm.

Not that they don't have their own problems, have WHO code violators and aggressive marketing by companies looking to make money but they are doing some things right that we in "the states" could learn from. Now I want to go to Australia - maybe I will try to go to the Hot Milk conference one year. That would make a fun vacation!

I'll post more about the conference later!

3 comments:

Nina said...

Hi Micky! I can't wait to hear more about the conference. Very interesting what you have shared thus far. Have fun! (I met you at the LLLI Conference in Chicago).

Great blog--I'm reading backwards. :)

Renata said...

I grew up in Australia, but haven't been back since 1989 :-( One of my childhood friends took a whole year of maternity leave. I don't know how she worked it out, but she had a government job.

K said...

LOVE that quote!!!!!