As if Motherhood isn't hard enough, it seems that the media is keen to report on just how bad things have become by making mothers their latest target.
The Guardian starts off with an article claiming breast isn't best, when it comes to intelligence, at least. Whilst factually 'correct', I would be surprised if any mother admitted breast feeding purely because it is rumoured to increase the IQ of their kids. Rather frustratingly, the article goes on to touch on one of the key factors in breast feeding (education), but only in passing:
"The researchers did find a direct link between the mother's intelligence and the likelihood she would breastfeed, however. An increase of 15 IQ points in the mother's intelligence score more than doubled her chance of breastfeeding - meaning that a mother with an IQ of 115 was more than twice as likely to breastfeed as one with the average IQ of 100."
If there are to be more of the researches into the benefits of breast-feeding, perhaps they should look closely into the effects of informed education and what effect that has on the length of time new mothers are prepared to breast feed for. Given that, "in Britain 76% of women start breastfeeding but only 28% persist until their child is four months", there is clearly room for improvement.
Elsewhere, the BBC report that smoking rates are stubbornly high among teenagers, no pun intended, I'm sure. Not only that, but 'pregnant teenagers smoke to try to reduce the size of their babies, and make delivery less painful.' Which, once again, highlights the need for better education for teenagers around all of these issues.
And finally, Slate posted an article entitled "When Moms Work, Kids Get Fat". Packed with disputable statistics, the article claims that "if a given child watches an extra 30 minutes of fast-food advertisements a week, he or she will get fatter, with an increase in body mass index of about 1 percent." Not only that, but "a mere 10 hours at work raises the chance of childhood obesity by 1.3 percentage points, which is about 10 percent."
We seem to have a strange fascination with mothers these days - they seeminly cannot afford to make any mistakes and yet they are also denied much in the way of education and long-term help from the community.
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I have to say that as a working mother it's a VERY difficult balance. You feel guilty for working, but need to have time to be you, you can't commit the amount to feel you should to work.... you're tired when you're at home because of work.
And then you're getting all of the mixed messages - nursery is good, nursery is bad, you must do this / do that. Surely what's good for a family varies depending upon your family. I know that if I was at home full time it wouldn't be good for my or our son as I'd be restless, yet I don't like the idea of working full time, predominantly because where we live means a long commute for most jobs, so I'd hardly see him, and that's not right either. Weekends then get taken up doing chores, not having fun and doing things together.
I have to say that there is one thing we are good at so far - no television and very little in terms of videos. I don't believe that children should watch TV from a young age - books allow for so much more creativity. Our son now reads them to himself and makes up stories based on the pictures, and it's wonderful to watch. TV just spoon feeds both the "good" and the bad of the adverts.
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