Humans are animals too, though we often oppose animals to ourselves as different from us. Since humans are animals, that means we are a part of nature. Nature must have something to tell us about how to live our lives.
But, haven't we pushed humans beyond nature with our scientific knowledge?
We use science to improve upon nature, right?
Health is the one area of our lives that can be improved the most through science, but it can also be harmed the most through well-intentioned, yet misguided, "technological advances".
I'm not a person that eschews technology or preaches that we should all move back to the woods. I grew up using computers, playing video games, and watching TV just like most people born in the 80s. I own a cell phone, drive a car, and obviously use the Internet. But I am cautious about trusting health-related technology because so much of it runs counter to human biology.
When it comes to having babies and nurturing babies after birth, science seems to have done some serious damage to a natural system that works much better than the artificial one we created for the modern world.
Raising babies naturally means that as a parent I want to embrace the natural system, which includes: drug-free child birth, breastfeeding, and "attachment-style" parenting.
In this blog, I want to share my experience attempting to return to the natural way of having and raising children. Mostly, I want to share my experience breastfeeding.
Bottle-feeding with formula (or the milk of other animals) is a technological advancement that has harmed the natural system of feeding babies. It is so easy to give up breastfeeding when it is not going smoothly in favor of this seemingly better, more socially-acceptable, way of feeding your baby. The problem is that the prevalence of formula feeding is what makes breastfeeding so hard.
Women don't know how to breastfeed because no one around them breastfeeds.
Apparently, "only about 25 percent of all mothers in North America even started out breastfeeding" in the 1970s and "most of them had stopped within a few weeks," according to Dr Jack Newman in his introduction to the awesome book Breastfeeding Made Simple by Nancy Mohrbacher, IBCLC and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, PhD and IBCLC.
I keep running into people who tell me they quit beastfeeding or never breastfed their babies because of some issue: perhaps the baby would not latch on correctly (can be fixed) or the mother thinks that she was not producing enough milk (can be prevented, but probably was not true anyway).
I want to gather resources here for mothers (and fathers) so that more babies are breastfed longer. Breastfed babies are healthier babies, but they are also healthier adults later in life.
