Often health visitors aren't very bright (though you can be lucky), so they stick to what they know and don't like deviation.

Top of the list of sticks new parents are beaten by worry with are weight charts. "Which centile is your baby on?" "Your baby is not growing fast enough!" "Don't you think you should try supplimentary feeding?"

After years of well-informed people knowing that the weight charts used by the NHS in the UK are based on a small number of bottle fed babies in the 1970's, bearing no relation to the growth of breast-fed babies, at last research has come out showing the huge mistake here.

Bottle fed babies get over-fed, and may have increased chances of obesity in later life. So this is what health visitors have been pestering us for for years - to make our kids obese. Great! In the process they have increased the stress and worry of breast-feeding mums which is bound to increase the drop-out rate from breast-feeding, the best baby drink in the world.

New Charts on the Way

The World Health Organisation (WHO) now plans to release new recommended growth charts based on breast-fed babies. You can already download them from the Internet (see below).

While waiting for your NHS Trust to catch up with this, get a print-out of the new breast-fed-baby-based growth chart and stick it on top of the one in your baby's notes. It'll help educate your health visitor. They still won't learn that being on 2nd centile is okay - one in 50 babies has to be on this line by definition, just like the 98th centile! If only someone taught them statistics....

References

• New WHO growth charts - download them from links at the bottom of the page
• La Leche League