Firing Line:
East, west, Mom is best
Tony Zacharia
Sunday News; Sunday,July 29, 2007 @00:03
You are on a bus heading to a leisure destination. After the hustles or packing and checking in and boarding, you are glad to be on the way. The journey is progressing smoothly save for occasional bumps here and there. So far so good you think. You decide to take a little nap. Half an hour nap a day helps to keep the doctor away.
You wish you could do this nap thing at work. Just when you were dosing off, a screeching sound brings you back from slumber land to the land of the unexpected. A horror movie is unfolding right in front of your eyes.
The bus has left the road for the bush and is heading for a tree. Frightened passengers are screaming, calling their mothers and God in languages you did not know existed. The bus underside hits something with a thump then the whole bus groans as it is brought to an unceremonious stop a few metres from the tree. You are still alive. Someone is still calling mama. Maybe he is hurt.
Why do men, women and children turn to their mother’s names in times of distress? Maybe mothers are comfort and protection. From the womb to the tomb a mother is a safe sanctuary, family food security and the one who makes the house a home. No offence intended to all super dads, but to every child, there is no one like mom. And to every mother, we remain forever children in their hearts.
It is all in the milk you know. Man can build space stations and fly into the stratosphere but will all the machines and technology, only a mother can breastfeed her child. Something no daddy can. Golfing legends or today can bottle feed their super offspring and spend sleepless nights changing diapers. That only makes them TV superstar daddies.
The emotional bond with mothers comes from latching too long onto mom’s breast at infancy. Experts tell us that mother’s milk is the drink of intelligence. That breast fed babies generally have a higher intelligence quotient or IQ than if they were fed cow’s milk. If you want bullish intelligence then start cow’s milk from birth.
Maybe children fed cow’s milk have regular IQ. But they might have become geniuses if they had the benefit of mother’s milk, whose composition differs with the age of the baby. That may explain why many children from bottle-loving countries seem so aggressive like bulls. When the breast feeding rate is five percent and bottle feeding with modified cow’s milk in aluminium cans is 95 percent, everyone wants to play Rambo the macho person and girls are called guys.
In the land of opportunity where Osama is public enemy numero uno, breastfeeding is uh, something poor folks do, a third world phenomenon unfit for modern consumerist societies of gender equality and individual freedom. I tell you solemnly, if God had wanted human babies to drink cow’s milk, he would have doubled the size of the cow’s udder.
Mother comes home from work, tired but happy to be home. The priceless bundle of joy called Junior crawls sits with hands outstretched, ready to be lifted to mama’s warm embrace. Mama finds a seat of comfort, positions child on lap and offers early dinner to eager lips. Mama looks into child’s eyes and child stares back at mama in happy contentment.
Only the breast feeding position allows this unique communication between child and mother. A mother who has frequent births denies the children full enjoyment of the bonding and protection offered by her milk. Many older children who may or may not have missed out long for a return to mama’s natural bottles, bottles that require no sterilisation and milk that needs no warming. Too bad big boys and girls because once you grow up, no more breast juice.
A child who is breast fed well for the recommended one to two years gains protection from allergies and infections such as those of bugs that cause diarrhoea. For a naturally free nutrient available from the best possible source, breast milk is pretty cool as generation X former toddlers would say.
Why am I going on and on about the stuff paediatricians worth their salt call ‘the child’s best start in life’? In the good old days, the first week of August was commemorated worldwide as the World Breastfeeding Week. The whole world did not go on a campaign to breast feed only during this week, which would have been great if they did.
Mothers in the Philippines tried recently to break the record of highest number of women breastfeeding simultaneously in one public place. In Australia, a colleague was booed for breastfeeding her child in a restaurant. Isn’t a restaurant the best eating place? Apparently she was perceived as being – believe it or not – indecent.
We can try here too to have a breastfeeding marathon because most Tanzanian and African mothers breastfeed by default. We need to promote the intelligence benefit so they do it to make their offspring potential academic achievers. With breast milk your child will need less or no extra tuition. It is the best investment for the economic future of new generations.
Have a nice Sunday.
tnaleo@hotmail.com and tnaleo@dailynews-tsn.com
