Catching you up to speed

I suspect Heather W. over at Better Homes and Garden (bhg.com) is going to have an interesting day today. She may be hailed as having touched a nerve and gotten a monster comments thread going or she may be doing damage control. You see, she wrote a little piece called The 10 commandments of dining with little kids that went up over at Shine from Yahoo (pay attention – that’s important for later). In the article she tells us she’s not a child-hater (really!) and then she and bhg.com proceed to gift parents with a nifty little 10 point list detailing how to keep our obnoxious offspring from ruining someone else’s great night out at the restaurant. The list comes complete with recipes kids will love tailored to each point. The whole article is problematic, but the tip that is getting the most attention is #4 “Thou Shalt Not Breast Feed At The Table”. Her solution for mamas with hungry children? She puts on her crossing guard vest and cap to direct us to the lavatory.

Thou Shalt Not Breast Feed At The Table

Public Toilet by catalina77 @ www.sxc.hu

The reception to Tip #4 was what you would expect. It was deemed a failure by many and a whole lot of lactivism started happening. Great  YouTube videos advocating for the normalization of breastfeeding in public (in part by not telling people to breastfeed in a bathroom) are being passed around and sent to BHG in an effort to help them understand the magnitude of their misstep. People are writing in to BHG to tell them how disappointed they are to see writing like this associated with a product they’ve bought in the past. BHG is being reminded that a public restroom is not a sanitary location for feeding a baby. Even a clean restroom can contain E. coli, salmonella, coliform, rotavirus, cold virus and the form of staph known as MRSA. Restrooms are as unsuitable a place for a baby as they are for another adult or child to eat their meal in. BHG is being reminded that Heather’s suggestion flies in the face of the laws enacted in 47 US states to protect breastfeeding mothers and their children. Sadly, Tip #4 is an example of why these laws needed to be passed in the first place.

Breastfeeding supporters and advocates push back on the types of attitudes exposed by this article in our efforts to normalize breastfeeding. Mothers are told they’ll be more comfortable somewhere more private. They’re told we are making other people uncomfortable and “offending”. They’re are accused of being hard-line lactivists with an ax to grind as they attempt to mind their own business and feed their child. People do it in person and in print. They do it in straight-forward ways as well as the round-about tips shared as “Thou Shalts”.

Thou Shalt Show Your Adult Privilege

Adult privilege is out for show-and-tell in this article. The majority of all articles that start with some version of “I am not anti-kid” are going to go on to detail exactly how the author *is* anti-kid and what they want parents to do to get kids out of the public sphere. This article lands squarely in that majority and is just the most recent attempt to discipline parents mothers through their children. Renee at Womanist Musing wrote about this in My Child Takes Up Space and I highly recommend the article and comments.

Then we get to the recipes at the end of each section. For me they are an awkward attempt to tie in content. I mean, the “Thou Shalts” are talking about how to wrangle kids out in a public restaurant’s seating area and not in the commercial kitchen. I can almost see how someone could torture the concept to look like restaurant=kitchen=recipe=BHG content. The thing is – I read them as a consistent recommendation not to even take the kids out. What those recipes said to me as I read the article was “Better yet – STAY HOME and feed your kids there so we won’t be inconvenienced by them.”

So What Happened?

Nothing much at first. More than 24 hours went by before the first comment was posted and we all know that’s like…. a decade in internet-dog years. That didn’t last. People finally began noticing, sharing the link, and getting upset.

People are now calling to have Ms. Heather W fired. (I think retracting the article would be in order) People are writing in to BHG and telling them how upset they are. They are telling her and BHG off in many colorful ways. There’s already a BHG Boycott page up on Facebook and the #boycottBHG hash tag. The interestingly cool thing for me is that people are not only showing their displeasure with their tweets. They are voting with their wallets. They are canceling their subscriptions to not only Better Homes and Gardens but other magazines owned by the BHG parent company including Parents, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, etc. It’s not just the discrete brand experiencing fall-out but the parent company Meredith International.

Here’s a list of all the magazines currently published by Meredith.

What’s Not Happening

As far as I can tell, Yahoo is not on the receiving end of any blowback from the article. There’s no comparable Boycott Shine at Yahoo page up at Facebook and a Twitter searches of Yahoo and boycott didn’t net me anything interesting related to breastfeeding. I’m very interested in why that might be since Shine at Yahoo is where the article is located. Does anyone have any ideas about why BHG is the focus of so much ire while Yahoo (which to my mind would be equally at fault here) is getting off at the moment?

You Want to Do Something?

Sharing with BHG and Shine at Yahoo

If you’d like to share your thoughts with Better Homes & Gardens you can do it here.

BHG.com
Meredith Corporation
1716 Locust Street.
Des Moines, IA 50309-3023
E-mail: support@bhg.com
Their Facebook Fan Page

The contact information for Shine at Yahoo is here.

Shine Suggestion Board (message board)
Yahoo Shine Article Abuse Form (I’d choose other and make sure to include the URL to the article in question)
Yahoo Facebook Fan Page

**Updated**

The article has been updated since I posted this at “oh dark-thirty” in the madrugada. The reference to breastfeeding has been removed completely. That is great but misses my larger point about the article.

During the morning they’ve also put out an apology on the Facebook Fan Page.

We sincerely apologize for the blog post! It was not vetted by our editors, and it reflects poor parenting advice and an offensive tone. We have removed the most patently inappropriate sections. We support breastfeeding moms–and all moms–in their desire to include their children in their public lives. We pledge to do… better in the future in both the tone and content of our posts. We will be posting our positive parenting tips for eating out soon. Post yours on our Discussions tab.

–The editorial team at BHG

Thank you for making the effort to actually own your part in this problem BHG. You are right that the article “reflects poor parenting advice and an offensive tone”. I do not begin to understand why you wouldn’t just pull the whole article if you can see that but I am not in charge of your bottom line and do not contribute to it (I buy none of your magazines). I would encourage you to reconsider leaving even this edited version of the article out there since it still displays an enormous amount of adult privilege and is discriminatory toward children.

**Updated Again**

At some point in the days after the original edit the decision was made to remove the entire article and offer a link to Dining Out with Small Children: 8 Sanity Savers from Real Moms. I would like to express my appreciation for that decision as well as the changes that BHG says they are putting in place to prevent blog posting by BHG authors that are not in alignment with the values of their brand.

And now… Those lovely Commercials embedded for your convenience!

Edited a whole bunch of times in the morning to fix various and sundry spelling errors as well as update on the situation as BHG took action.

Hat Tip to Mother’s Utopia (MothersUtopia on Twitter) for the link to this video. It made my afternoon!

TVNZ 20/20 Video on Extended Breastfeeding

I love these breastfeeding mums and their attitudes! Sending major Kudos to whomever was responsible for producing and editing this segment.

On November 24th, 2009 guest host Jennifer Ludden at NPR’s Tell Me More hosted an interesting segment on breastfeeding rates among black women. She discusses the issue with author Kathi Barber*, journalist Jamila Bey, and television producer Dawn Porter. (transcript here) I embedded the clip at the bottom of the page.

This was a really nice segment! I appreciated the implicit support Jennifer Ludden gave to breastfeeding.

The segment started out noting that we are seeing a positive trend in the US of more mothers breastfeeding for at least some period of time during the first year of baby’s life. However, as we all know, the issue is much more nuanced that that. We’re still falling short as a society of the Healthy People 2010 goals for breastfeeding and the African American community continues to lag behind Caucasian and Latina communities.

Ms. Ludden begins with Kathi Barber -

Kathi Barber has long been a breastfeeding advocate. She brings us up to speed on where things were regarding breastfeeding a little more than a decade ago when she first began breastfeeding. At that time there was a lack of support groups, lack of breastfeeding information, and healthcare providers who didn’t even speak to their patients about breastfeeding because the assumption was that mothers would feed infant formula. Most importantly, she notes, there was no breastfeeding dialog happening in the black community.

Ms. Ludden then asks Jamila Bey if breastfeeding her son was ever a question for her.

Never!  As I listened to the interview I got the feeling that Ms. Bey is an awesome advocate of nursing in public. She covered the topic really well and I think her attitude of treating nursing like the weather (and dressing “appropriately”) is so matter-of-fact. I love that she calls herself a lactivist straight up with no apology! She also touched on a topic that I think is extremely important to unpack to increase breastfeeding rates period. The lack of support from male partners and the idea that our breasts belong to our partners and therefore we shouldn’t use them to feed our babies. She’s got her eye on that lovely example of the kyriarchy in action and apparently she has more than a few words to share there. We don’t get to hear them though because she sticks to the topic at hand. *yes, you are seeing my chagrin at really wanting to head down THAT derail for a while!*

Ms Ludden then asked Dawn Porter for her perspective on what Ms. Bey discussed.

Dawn Porter shared that her mom nursed her in secret in the 60′s. She also noted that African Americans received the same messages about class and modernity being linked to feeding infant formula for her grandmother’s and mother’s generation. I’m totally speculating here, and it seems to me that if you mix in a little 60′s counter culture rebellion then you may have an answer for why her mom nursed her even if that rebellion didn’t extend to doing so openly.

The group then tackled how work impacts breastfeeding rates in the black community.

The guests noted that many moms in the black community get deterred when considering how to continue breastfeeding after they return to work and either wean extremely early or never attempt to breastfeed at all. Jennifer Ludden noted that the type of job you have would impact how difficult it might be to pump at work. The guests then shared some of the difficulties they experienced at “white collar” workplaces.

Toward the end of the conversation they had an interesting discussion regarding a mother’s motivation to breastfeed and how crucial it is to have the resolve to breastfeed.

Finally, Kathy Barber noted that the federal breastfeeding legislation is still waiting to be passed.

All in all a pretty darn good breastfeeding discussion with some nice illustrations of success. I could have done without the silliness about explaining what a breastpump is to the male listeners.

I personally would have LOVED to hear  about  -

• Whether the barriers Kathi Barber noted when she began breastfeeding are being reduced in appreciable ways.
• Combination feeding recommended as an option for working moms.
• More illustrations of barriers experienced by waged workers to dove-tail with the barriers the guests personally experienced.
• It would have been really helpful, in my opinion, for listeners to know Kathy Barber’s organization, African-American Breastfeeding Alliance, (which had been mentioned specifically) has a website.

I highly recommend that you have a listen. There’s much more to the conversation than I share here.

* ‘The Black Woman’s Guide to Breastfeeding: The Definitive Guide to Nursing for African-American Mothers.‘

Tell Me More Segment (Embedded)

OK – I’m sitting here reading this post at PhDinParenting and I’ve decided

• It’s too freaking late at night to be reading about this for the first time.
• I need to at least look at Twitter once and a while because I obviously missed a whole barrel of fun today.
• I’m in serious need of a corner to hide myself in.
• I’m pretty sure the pain behind my left eye is going to need some ibprofen-style love in about 15 minutes.

*sticking fingers firmly in my ears and pinching my eyes shut now* La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

I really like Baby Blues. Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott find the humor in breastfeeding without poking fun at it in an  “it’s weird and crazy and so are those hippie ladies who do it” kind of way. These guys treat it as just another fun and funny part of life with a tiny person.

They are honoring World Breastfeeding Week 2009 by rounding up some of their strips that touch on breastfeeding in one easy-to-find place.

Enjoy!