Natural Family Planning International

“On the basis of years of research, I am totally convinced that the first priority with respect to helping each child to reach his maximum level of competence is to do the best possible job in structuring his experience and opportunities during the first years of life.”
—-Dr. Burton White, director of the Parent Education Center, Newton, MA; 1975.

“But let us think, for a moment, of the many peoples of the world who live at different cultural levels from our own.  In the matter of child rearing, almost all of these seem to be more enlightened than ourselves—with all our Western ultramodern ideals…Mother and child are one.  Except where civilization has broken down this custom, no mother ever trusts her child to someone else.”
—-Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, 1967.

“The breast was intended to bind the baby and his mother for the first year or two of life.  If we read the biological program correctly, the period of breastfeeding insured continuity of mothering as part of the program for the formation of human bonds…A baby who is stored like a package with neighbors and relatives while his mother works may come to know as many indifferent caretakers as a baby in the lowest-grade institution and, at the age of one or two years, can resemble in all significant ways the emotionally deprived babies of such an institution.”
—-Selma Fraiberg, professor of Child Psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Every Child’s Birthright, 1977.

Note:  Fraiberg credits lactation as part of nature’s way to keep mother and baby together.  Many parents place their children in Montessori preschool and regular school.  How many of these parents listen to Montessori when she emphasizes that babies should receive only breast milk for the first 6 months of life and that mothers should nurse for 1.5 to 3 years because “prolonged lactation requires the mother to remain with her child”?

Sheila Kippley
Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding
The Crucial First Three Years

In the spring of 1997 new studies demonstrated that problem solving skills and reasoning are largely established by age one and that the single most important predictor of later intelligence, school success and social competence was based on the number of words an infant hears each day from an “attentive, engaged person.”  That person would naturally be the mother, and breastfeeding provides that one “attentive, engaged person.”

The 1997 discussion centered on the importance of the first three years of life and especially the first year of life when the infant’s brain is growing at a tremendous rate.  Breastfeeding is also the best nutrition for nourishing the infant’s brain.

As a result of this research Newsweek published a 1997 issue in which the entire magazine was devoted to the “critical first three years of life.” (Some of this research is in The Crucial First Three Years available at this website. See below.)  All the research during that year could be summarized by two points.
1) It showed the importance of a consistent caregiver.
2) It showed the importance of breast milk.

Needless to say, prolonged breastfeeding as God intended for mother and baby already provides both the consistent caregiver and the breast milk for the baby. God’s plan is so good!

Sheila Kippley
Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding
The Crucial First Three Years

Just as mother and baby are one during pregnancy, nature intended mother and baby to be one after birth.  Mother and baby are one biological unit.  What benefits the one also benefits the other.  Each provides benefits to the other in the breastfeeding relationship.  (See the many benefits on pages 103-104 in the NFPI online manual, Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach.)

The World Health Organization described this oneness well:  “Mothers and babies form an inseparable biological and social unit; the health and nutrition of one group cannot be divorced from the health and nutrition of the other.”  (“Infant and young child nutrition,” 55th World Health Assembly, April 16, 2002)  Other researchers have also described mother and infant as one biological system.

This mother-baby oneness or togetherness is the key to natural child spacing and also to better outcomes of all the other benefits associated with ecological or extended breastfeeding.  God’s wonderful plan for natural child spacing should be promoted by the NFP movement and the Church and the government.  

Our society would be better if we made efforts to keep mother and baby together, especially during the early years and during the breastfeeding relationship.  Mother and baby need each other.

Sheila Kippley
Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding
The Crucial First Three Years