child Development and Public Health

Today I am going to talk about Breastfeeding and why I feel that it is an important topic relating to public health and healthy child development. Breastfeeding is the best form of nutrition for a child’s first year of life. Breast milk contains all of the important nutrients and antibodies that an infant’s body needs for proper growth and brain development. Breast milk is also convenient because there are no bottles to carry around and it is always warm and ready to eat. Breast milk offers a mother and her baby a time to bond because of the closeness and interacting involved in breastfeeding. “Babies who are exclusively breast-fed are less likely to get sick, because breast milk provides them with antibodies against any disease to which the mother is immune” (Berger, 2009, p. 154). As a currently breastfeeding mother, I feel that I am offering my baby Sophia with the most nutritious meals that I can offer her. I have always wanted to breastfeed. I have had difficulty with breastfeeding my first daughter due to hospitalization and her death in 1996, my second daughter was an emergency cesarean and she wanted nothing to do with the breast. As I have successfully been breastfeeding for 8 months now, I have learned a great deal about the benefits as well as, the dedication to my child. Breastfeeding requires a lot of time and patience because there is no given time to complete a task when you have a hungry baby. But the closeness and bond that comes out of breastfeeding is the greatest gift one can be blessed with. I would never trade it for the world. In other countries, where majority of the population is at risk for HIV, breastfeeding may not be the best for the baby. “Other researchers find that bottle-feeding may sometimes be better, such as when the mother is HIV-positive or uses toxic or addictive drugs” (Berger, 2009). In Africa, where mothers may have HIV it is sometimes encouraged because the risk of contracting the disease is “less than their risk of dying from infections, diarrhea, or malnutrition as a result of occasional bottle feeding (Cohen, 2007). Information such as breastfeeding can impact my future work because breastfed babies tend to be sick less often and their immune systems are stronger. Also, it is important to learn about the benefits of breastfeeding to help parents to create better bonds with their infants and to offer their babies all of the nutrition that they need. I feel that having information about breastfeeding is important to share with others so they can raise their children via breastfeeding to reduce infant mortality, obesity, heart disease, and various other killers in children. References Cohen, Jon. (2007, March 9). Hope on new AIDS drugs, but breast-feeding strategy back-fires. Science, 317, 1315-1317. Berger, K. S. (2009). The developing person through childhood (5th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.