There is nothing better in the world than having your 2-year-old give you a big hug and say “I love you” right before starting to nurse. The love that you are giving to your child from birth starts to show back once the baby matures and breastfeeding certainly helps with creating that special bond with your child. I remember when I had our first born and thought I was going to breastfeed him for a year because I thought that is what you are suppose to do. Our pediatrician, Dr. William Sears, was kind enough to explain the benefits of extended breastfeeding to me and open my eyes to the idea of child led weaning. It totally made sense to me. I was a working mom at the time as well so nursing after a long day at work really helped me to reconnect with my child and he looked forward to it also. 

Our daughter is 2 now and in the so called “terrible twos” phase. Breastfeeding really helps to calm her down if she gets upset and gives her a moment to wind down. This has been really helpful at restaurants and other public places. I use a nursing cover with her when we are out and about. I never used a cover with our son but after discovering a nursing cover and how convenient it is when you are breastfeeding in public, I highly recommend one. It’s not matter of having to hide your breastfeeding, to me it’s more like having my own privacy and our daughter likes it too because it shields her from the outside distractions and gives her a moment of peace as well. Now that she is older she asks for the cover if we are in public places and she wants to nurse. It’s so cute that she associates that with public places and knows that we don’t use one at home unless there are other kids around such as our older son’s friends who might have not been exposed to nursing at home.

I’m forever grateful to Dr. Sears for helping me to realize the benefits of extended breastfeeding. Now I wouldn’t have it any other way. Each child matures at different rates so the time they wean varies. Our son self weaned at 2 ½  years of age, right after he potty trained himself. He was a big boy now and didn’t need/want breastfeeding anymore. It was the most joyful yet sad day of my life because my baby had grown up to be a little man of his own who knew what he wanted. Now at 7 years of age, he is the same way. He is extremely confident and social and caring child. He always wants to make sure people around him are ok. He helps the children at school who might not be considered “popular” so that they don’t get left alone. He is also so kind, caring and affectionate with his little sister and he knows how important breastfeeding is for his little sister. I contribute all this to extended breastfeeding and the strong foundation he got in the early years of life.

I’m interested in seeing how long our daughter will breastfeed. At times she tells us that she is too big to breastfeed but wants it still at the same time. It’s so cute to see her journey growing up and how she is thinking about being a big girl all on her own. Until she self weans, I’m cherishing these moments of nursing. I even cherish the night time nursings because it’s our special time together. Her little arms are wrapped around my body and she is so content. After nursing, she goes right to sleep and I lay down next to her. I feel so content knowing that I’m helping her to grow up day and night and I help her sort through her feelings during these sometimes difficult times of being a 2-year old by breastfeeding.  

Please read here for more details regarding this issue. There is an excellent book written about this by Jennifer Block called “Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care”. I highly recommend reading it. I really hope that American College of Obstetrics loses their fight to make home births illegal because if they succeed, it will mean that this country is going way backwards and it’s very unfortunately for the women of this country. I’ve given birth twice here in America and I can tell you that both times I had to fight to give birth naturally at a hospital. It was such a nightmare that I don’t wish that for anyone. If I had known better, I had delivered at home with a midwife. 

Finland’s teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why.

By ELLEN GAMERMANFebruary 29, 2008; Page W1

Helsinki, Finland

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they’re way ahead in math, science and reading — on track to keeping Finns among the world’s most productive workers. 

The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland’s students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland’s combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the OECD’s test, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The U.S. placed in the middle of the pack in math and science; its reading scores were tossed because of a glitch. About 400,000 students around the world answered multiple-choice questions and essays on the test that measured critical thinking and the application of knowledge. A typical subject: Discuss the artistic value of graffiti.

The academic prowess of Finland’s students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country’s secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers create lessons to fit their students. “We don’t have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have,” says Hannele Frantsi, a school principal.

Visitors and teacher trainees can peek at how it’s done from a viewing balcony perched over a classroom at the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, a city in central Finland. What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach. The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, marching bands or prom.

Fanny Salo in class

Trailing 15-year-old Fanny Salo at Norssi gives a glimpse of the no-frills curriculum. Fanny is a bubbly ninth-grader who loves “Gossip Girl” books, the TV show “Desperate Housewives” and digging through the clothing racks at H&M stores with her friends.

Fanny earns straight A’s, and with no gifted classes she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up. She often helps lagging classmates. “It’s fun to have time to relax a little in the middle of class,” Fanny says. Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress.

At lunch, Fanny and her friends leave campus to buy salmiakki, a salty licorice. They return for physics, where class starts when everyone quiets down. Teachers and students address each other by first names. About the only classroom rules are no cellphones, no iPods and no hats.

Fanny’s more rebellious classmates dye their blond hair black or sport pink dreadlocks. Others wear tank tops and stilettos to look tough in the chilly climate. Tanning lotions are popular in one clique. Teens sift by style, including “fruittari,” or preppies; “hoppari,” or hip-hop, or the confounding “fruittari-hoppari,” which fuses both. Ask an obvious question and you may hear “KVG,” short for “Check it on Google, you idiot.” Heavy-metal fans listen to Nightwish, a Finnish band, and teens socialize online at irc-galleria.net.

The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines. Teachers must hold master’s degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs,” says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

One explanation for the Finns’ success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.

Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most popular English-language books are translated here long after they are first published. Many children struggled to read the last Harry Potter book in English because they feared they would hear about the ending before it arrived in Finnish. Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles instead of dubbing. One college student says she became a fast reader as a child because she was hooked on the 1990s show “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. “You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?” says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.

Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn’t translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: “‘Nah. So what’d you do last night?’” she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely “glue this to the poster for an hour,” she says. Her Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to repeat the year when she returned.

Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they find classes too easy. He says he is trying to make his schools more rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.

Despite the apparent simplicity of Finnish education, it would be tough to replicate in the U.S. With a largely homogeneous population, teachers have few students who don’t speak Finnish. In the U.S., about 8% of students are learning English, according to the Education Department. There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. (All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school dropout rate of about 4% — or 10% at vocational schools — compared with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education departments.

Another difference is financial. Each school year, the U.S. spends an average of $8,700 per student, while the Finns spend $7,500. Finland’s high-tax government provides roughly equal per-pupil funding, unlike the disparities between Beverly Hills public schools, for example, and schools in poorer districts. The gap between Finland’s best- and worst-performing schools was the smallest of any country in the PISA testing. The U.S. ranks about average.

Finnish students have little angstata – or teen angst – about getting into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is free. There is competition for college based on academic specialties — medical school, for instance. But even the best universities don’t have the elite status of a Harvard.

Taking away the competition of getting into the “right schools” allows Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood. While many U.S. parents worry about enrolling their toddlers in academically oriented preschools, the Finns don’t begin school until age 7, a year later than most U.S. first-graders.

Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their own. At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.

The Finns enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, but they, too, worry about falling behind in the shifting global economy. They rely on electronics and telecommunications companies, such as Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, along with forest-products and mining industries for jobs. Some educators say Finland needs to fast-track its brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at producing more go-getters. Parents also are getting pushier about special attention for their children, says Tapio Erma, principal of the suburban Olari School. “We are more and more aware of American-style parents,” he says.

Mr. Erma’s school is a showcase campus. Last summer, at a conference in Peru, he spoke about adopting Finnish teaching methods. During a recent afternoon in one of his school’s advanced math courses, a high-school boy fell asleep at his desk. The teacher didn’t disturb him, instead calling on others. While napping in class isn’t condoned, Mr. Erma says, “We just have to accept the fact that they’re kids and they’re learning how to live.” 

By Bob Unruh© 2008 WorldNetDaily

 

 

A California court has ruled that several children in one homeschool family must be enrolled in a public school or “legally qualified” private school, and must attend, sending ripples of shock into the nation’s homeschooling advocates as the family reviews its options for appeal.

The ruling came in a case brought against Phillip and Mary Long over theeducation being provided to two of their eight children. They are considering an appeal to the state Supreme Court, because they have homeschooled all of their children, the oldest now 29, because of various anti-Christian influences in California’s public schools.

The decision from the 2nd Appellate Court in Los Angeles granted a special petition brought by lawyers appointed to represent the two youngest children after the family’s homeschooling was brought to the attention of child advocates.

“We find no reason to strike down the Legislature’s evaluation of what constitutes an adequate education scheme sufficient to promote the ‘general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence,’” the court said in the case. “We agree … ‘the educational program of the State of California was designed to promote the general welfare of all the people and was not designed to accommodate the personal ideas of any individual in the field of education.’”

The words echo the ideas of officials from Germany, where homeschooling has been outlawed since 1938 under a law adopted when Adolf Hitler decided he wanted the state, and no one else, to control the minds of the nation’s youth.

Wolfgang Drautz, consul general for the Federal Republic of Germany, has said “school teaches not only knowledge but also social conduct, encourages dialogue among people of different beliefs and cultures, and helps studentsto become responsible citizens.”

Specifically, the appeals court said, the trial court had found that “keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where (1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children’s lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents’ ‘cloistered’ setting.”

The appeals ruling said California law requires “persons between the ages of six and 18″ to be in school, “the public full-time day school,” with exemptions being allowed for those in a “private full-time day school” or those “instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught.”

The judges ruled in the case involving the Longs the family failed to demonstrate “that mother has a teaching credential such that the children can be said to be receiving an education from a credentialed tutor,” and that their involvement and supervision by Sunland Christian School’s independent study programs was of no value.

Nor did the family’s religious beliefs matter to the court.

Their “sincerely held religious beliefs” are “not the quality of evidence that permits us to say that application of California’s compulsory public school education law to them violates their First Amendment rights.”

“Such sparse representations are too easily asserted by any parent who wishes to homeschool his or her child,” the court concluded.

The father, Phillip Long, said the family is working on ways to appeal to the state Supreme Court, because he won’t allow the pro-homosexual, pro-bisexual, pro-transgender agenda of California’s public schools, on which WND previously has reported, to indoctrinate his children.

“We just don’t want them teaching our children,” he told WND. “They teach things that are totally contrary to what we believe. They put questions in our children’s minds we don’t feel they’re ready for.

“When they are much more mature, they can deal with these issues, alternative lifestyles, and such, or whether they came from primordial slop. At the present time it’s my job to teach them the correct way of thinking,” he said.

“We’re going to appeal. We have to. I don’t want to put my children in a public school system that teaches ideologies I don’t believe in,” he said.

A spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association, one of the world’s premiere homeschooling advocacy organizations, said the group’s experts were analyzing the impact of the decision.

“It’s a very unfortunate decision,” he said.

Randy Thomasson, of Campaign for Children and Families, said under California law parents have the legal right to create a private school in their home and enroll their own children.

“Children belong to the parents, not to the state,” he said. But he acknowledged that there’s a great deal of misinformation about the status of homeschooling in California.

“For years the government school establishment has been lying to parents about the law. Just this week, a Los Angeles Unified school district employee lied to a mother who wanted to homeschool, telling her you must have a license, you must be credentialed and you must follow all the state curriculum. That’s three lies in one sentence.”

“Now we have judges going crazy and actively separating children from their parents.”

A legal outline for parents’ homeschool rights in California, published byFamily Protection Ministries, confirmed Thomasson’s description.

The state’s legal options for home educators include establishing a private school in their home by filing a private school affidavit with state regulators or enrolling in private school satellite instruction programs or independent study programs, it said.

The Long family had been involved in such a program with Sunland Christian School, but the appeals court took the extraordinary step of banning the family from being involved in that organization any longer, since it was “willing to participate in the deprivation of the children’s right to a legal education.”

A number of groups already have assembled in California under the Rescue Your Child slogan to encourage parents to withdraw their children from the state’s public school system.

It’s because the California Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked together to establish Senate Bill 777 and Assembly Bill 394 as law, plans that institutionalize the promotion of homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and other alternative lifestyle choices.

“First, [California] law allowed public schools to voluntarily promote homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality. Then, the law required public schools to accept homosexual, bisexual and transsexual teachers as role models for impressionable children. Now, the law has been changed to effectively require the positive portrayal of homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality to 6 million children in California government-controlled schools,” said Thomasson.

Even insiders joined in the call for an abandonment of California’s public districts. Veteran public school teacher Nadine Williams of Torrance said the sexual indoctrination laws have motivated her to keep her grandchildren out of the very public schools she used to support.

The Discover Christian Schools website reports getting thousands of hits daily from parents and others seeking information about alternatives to California’s public schools.

WND reported leaders of the campaign called California Exodus say they hope to encourage parents of 600,000 children to withdraw them from the public districts this year.

The new law itself technically bans in any school texts, events, class or activities any discriminatory bias against those who have chosen alternative sexual lifestyles, said Meredith Turney, legislative liaison for Capitol Resource Institute.

There are no similar protections for students with traditional or conservative lifestyles and beliefs, however. Offenders will face the wrath of the state Department of Education, up to and including lawsuits.

“SB 777 will result in reverse discrimination against students with religious and traditional family values. These students have lost their voice as the direct result of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s unbelievable decision. The terms ‘mom and dad’ or ‘husband and wife’ could promote discrimination against homosexuals if a same-sex couple is not also featured,” she said.

Karen England, chief of CRI, told WND that the law is not a list of banned words, including “mom” and “dad.” But she said the requirement is that the law bans discriminatory bias and the effect will be to ban such terminology.

“Having ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ promotes a discriminatory bias. You have to either get rid of ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ or include everything when talking about [parental issues],” she said. “They [promoters of sexual alternative lifestyles] do consider that discriminatory.”

The California plan still is facing a court challenge on its constitutionality and a possible vote of the people of California if an initiative effort succeeds. 

 

I just finished reading an article in the February edition of the BabyTalk magazine about mixing breast and bottle feeding. The article makes it sound like it’s no big deal which is completely bogus and made me so upset. It appears to me that the whole idea of this article is to make it easier for moms not to feel “guilty” about bottle feeding and not wanting to breastfeed exclusively. In my opinion the reasons for why a woman chooses a bottle over breast is because they haven’t received the proper support from the beginning as to how to breastfeed and what should be expected. I’ve delivered 2 babies and I have to say that the hospital staff in both cases (2 different hospitals) varied tremendously on their knowledge about breastfeeding. Unfortunately I don’t have the confidence that the staff in the hospitals around the US really is adequately equipped to support a woman who wants to exclusively breastfeed due to constant push by the formula companies with free formula samples etc.

The article also talks about how nice it is for the dad to be able to give an occasional bottle and how that’s good for bonding. The fact is that a woman was created with the ability to breastfeed not a man and for that reason alone, the mother is the primary care taker for a long time by nature. The father has several years to work on the bonding with the baby and one bottle here or there won’t help that bonding. It just confuses the baby who is looking for the mother and the breast to give him comfort. I’ve also heard that some women like it when the dad can do some of the night time feedings etc. The unfortunate fact is that having children is not easy and it was not meant to be easy so if a woman is not ready to have several sleepless nights, then maybe she is not ready for a baby. The time when a newborn needs a constant closeness and mother to feed every hour or so is so little in the child’s life that it certainly should not be a reason for a mother to choose to give a bottle especially one that has formula in it.
Now there are times when breastfeeding doesn’t start off the right way and a woman is forced to pump and bottle feed while trying to work on improving the breastfeeding situation. This actually happened to me with our second even though I considered myself to be a pro at it after nursing one child for 2 1/2 years. I had to pump and work really hard to get my baby to learn to breastfeed. It was difficult but all worth it. Everything worked out great due to wonderful support and guidance I received from a lactation consultant (Susan at Dr. Sears’ office).

When a mother returns to work, the baby obviously has to receive bottles during the day when the mother is at work but as long as this happens later in the baby’s life, it won’t affect the breastfeeding as much. The fact that women are expected to return to work at 6 weeks post-partum speaks to the problem we have in America and the lack of general awareness and knowledge about breastfeeding. A 6 week-old baby is not ready to be “weaned” from his mother during the day to be bottle fed by someone other than the mother. This is great rule for the formula manufactures because so many women won’t even bother trying to pump at work especially if they are not given a proper place and time to do it during the work day. I’m a working mother so I know first hand what it’s like to work and pump at work and juggle the pumping and breastfeeding. It might sound like a lot but it’s an investment you are making for your child’s future and it’s all worth it. Going back to work is no reason to quit breastfeeding and for sure is no reason to not to breastfeed from birth knowing that the mother will be going to work. Sharing those special moments after work while breastfeeding your baby makes all the difference in the world and helps the mother and baby to bond and take back some lost time. The bottom line is that I wish the society would be more pro-breastfeeding and the health care professionals would be more educated about breastfeeding and how to encourage and help mothers to succeed with breastfeeding. It’s proven to be way superior to formula in all the levels imaginable (nutrition, IQ, mental development etc) yet the formula companies have such a hold on the general public that more women choose the formula over convenient and free breastmilk just because they don’t know any better or are brainwashed to think there is no harm of giving bottles of formula to babies. Articles like this mentioned earlier also speaks to how the American public is conditioned to think this way. Since I’m from Finland I can say that the mentality there is very different and working mothers are being supported very differently than here in the US to assure that the mother and baby get off in a good start and can share what nature intended for mothers and babies.