Combining my professional and personal experiences, I have come up with five things for new parents and parents-to-be to 'expect' on this crazy ride:
Ensuring that young children are well nourished has a dramatic impact on their whole lives -- most immediately, on their survival to celebrate a fifth birthday.
Beware the easy slogan, the unproven bit of advice and the newly-coined parenting expert.
Every year, more than 3 million babies die before they turn one month old. That number is dropping, but not nearly as fast as more successful efforts to end deaths to older children and mothers. That's because global health efforts haven't quite caught up with what we now know works to save newborn babies.
It seems as though a healthy moderate version of parenting -- where our shame about our bodies and our sexuality, our traumas and our resistances to connection are addressed -- is where most of us, ultimately, really want to fall.
For the first year of my daughter's life, everything was big: big love, big frustration, big anxiety, big mood swings, big me. Not since I was a teen had I been so transfixed by my own now-shriveled navel.
This is the story of my breasts, and how they fed my children in a wide variety of ways and for different lenghths of time through their early years.
After the CDC lowered the threshold at which a child is at risk for lead poisoning by half last week, the number of children under 6 who are now considered at risk jumped from 77,000 to 442,000.
As a culture, Americans need to move beyond narrow interpretations of parenting practices.
Some days, I lay next to her in bed in our new apartment, wondering when the sorrow of divorce would stop. I wondered whether we would survive.
Although I do not like the cover photo TIME magazine chose, the magazine has at least started a national conversation about extended breastfeeding.
As someone who spends approximately 38% of the day with her boob in someone's mouth, I took particular interest in the recent TIME magazine kerfuffle over attachment parenting.
"Are you mom enough?" Seriously? TIME magazine should be ashamed. As if Moms aren't hard enough on themselves.
In the same way we should avoid religious extremism and political extremism, perhaps we ought to avoid parenting extremes as well. Inappropriate helicopter parenting potentially snuffs out a child's initiative, individuality, and sense of self. Attachment parenting runs the same risk.
We may practice attachment parenting (or not), we may chose the bottle over the breast, but we are all bound by the fact that we never, ever feel like we can do enough for our special needs child(ren).
by Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff Executive Director & CEO Healthy Child Healthy World www.healthychild.org TIME raised a ruckus recently with a profile of "...