12/12/2011 The Joy Of Feeding, Without The Parental Angst (The New York Times)

News Text

Back before computers moved into our exam rooms, I tended paper growth charts ritually at every checkup. Pink for girls, blue for boys. Age on the X-axis, weight on the Y-axis. I paid particular attention to the charts of infants, plotting weight and length and head circumference with my pen month by month to show parents how their babies were growing, to reassure them when they worried that there wasn't enough breast milk or because their babies were spitting up a little. It's a primal impulse to worry about an infant's growth. But experts on child nutrition, mostly enlisted nowadays in the battle against childhood obesity, point out that some of our standard infant feeding practices and attitudes may need revising, including some of those encouraged by pediatricians like me. Read the full article here.

By The New York Times, 12/12/2011