Catchy Slogan Converts Attitudes Toward Breastfeeding
June 7, 2007 by kate baggott
Filed under Breastfeeding
A catchy slogan pasted on billboards and run during TV breaks has promoted breastfeeding and helped to change attitudes toward nursing in public.
“Babies are born to be breastfed,” is the slogan that residents of Herkimer County in upstate New York saw for three months.As a result, 69 per cent of men and 46 percent of women surveyed said that they would be comfortable with having their baby breastfed in a public place. Before the campaign those numbers were only 54 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women.
The slogan campaign was led by the Healthy Start Partnership of Herkimer County, a coalition of health and nutrition professionals to promote breastfeeding and attitudes toward breastfeeding. The campaign was inspired by findings that women who breastfeed are more likely to shed their pregnancy weight gain and that breastfed infants are less likely to be obese later in life.
It always struck me as the perfect definition of insanity for mothers & fathers to think of reasons to NOT breast feed thier children. Only in rare cases should a mother not breast feed. Some of the reason I hear from women make me sick. Most of them have to do with vanity. The fathers who take that position are just as bad…usually motivated by selfishness.
That’s very cool that numbers of people giving props to breastfeeding went up. What I think they should do though is skip the slogans and stick up a big old picture of a woman actually breastfeeding. (I guess a slogan could be included as well). We need more stuff like that.
I like this slogan because it makes breastfeeding seem normal, like it is. When they did the ‘gold standard” slogans it was a waste. It made it seem as if breastfeeding was the best of the best, which by default meant that formula was the normal/average. Breastmilk is the biological norm, it is the standard basic food for infants. Anything else is less than.