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Friday 4 December 2009

Weighing tables and eating issues

I realised today that the whole monitoring of babies with the Centile Charts, (which are based on bottle fed babies anyway, so if you breastfed you are at a disadvantage straight away, shocking really when the NHS are supposed to be promoting breastfeeding), could have an adverse effect on how a child is introduced to food.
If the baby is not tracking its particular line this can be stressful for the parents as they then feel that they are responsible for that child not putting on enough weight and making the whole food thing stressful, you give the baby food, its full, it refuses, you try and make it eat so it will put on weight etc etc and it really is as easy as that to destroy a healthy attitude to eating. This did not happen in my case as Bea was always stuck to her percentile line(thankfully! She could have been even worse) but its something I have recently noticed among some parents, as this time around I have a very petite baby and have really only had her weighted once a month, as my HV says she is healthy she is developing normally so for me to obsess about her weight is really counterproductive.

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