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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We've recently read an article that raises the concerns of soya for young boys.... apparently it can have a negative impact on their fertility later in life. How much should we worry about that? There are so many things that we are told we should avoid because of feritility problems or an increased risk of cancer- artificial sweetners being one particular contender - that I'm not sure what to believe.
In countries such as China people have been eating large quantities of soya for thousands of years and they don't have fertility problems en masse... surely something like soya milk is a safer bet than some of the more unknown milks / products that are around if a child is clearly not just intolerant of, but allergic to all forms of dairy.
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