?There is an old saying in paediatrics: "If you want to be healthy, choose your mother." Genes.
It is also an axiom in paediatrics that if you want a sick child to get better, get the mother involved. The father too, but in practice it is the mother who gets the child better, with a little help from the father, doctor and nature. The father supports the mother. The doctor supports the parents. Nature supports everyone, most of the time. You can see this support system easily in that most feared and tragic of common diseases, gastro. Feared because nothing makes parents more scared than a vomiting child who is also soiling the nappies. Tragic because no child should die from such an easily treated illness. Common because everyone gets gastro in childhood, even with healthy genes and scrupulous hygiene. Treatment consists in replacing the water and salts lost in the vomiting and diarrhea. The best way to do this is by mouth. You can actually give more fluid and salts by mouth than by the intravenous route, no matter how bad the gastro. But to do this you must have a mother or other person who has the time and capacity to sit down with the ill child and patiently, hour after hour, slowly give the child the oral rehydration fluid needed. Most mothers cannot do this by themselves. So in the days before oral rehydration therapy (ORT) started, babies with gastro used to be taken away from their mothers, admitted to the horrible "gastro" wards at POSGH and SFGH, and treated with intravenous fluids.
When we started the ORT programme in 1981, I was told by everyone and their nennen that mothers would not listen, would be too emotional, would get vex with us and would simply refuse to do ORT. No such thing ever happened and the ORT campaign was a flaming success, reducing mortality from gastro from an average of 350 deaths a year to less than five in about five years, to the extent that one seldom hears about a death from gastro in T&T today, unless there are associated illnesses like Aids. The women did this. All the ORT programme did was talk to them nicely, show them what to do and supervise them for a couple of hours. All the children rehydrated themselves easily. By showing respect for the mothers' skills and by supporting them, the mothers themselves saved their children. The lesson I learned from that was that mothers, any mother, when given the necessary support, and that support could simply consist in level eye-to-eye contact, plain, simple language regarding what the child had and what would probably happen, no criticism, a hand on the shoulder or a hug, could and would do anything for their children and that children always got better faster when their mothers were around.
This happens in any illness, whether it be cancer, asthma, swine flu, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Mayaro encephalitis. It's also one of the reasons behind the Unicef request to stop sending formula to Haiti. The outcome for children in a disaster is simply better when they are breastfed. But the effect of breastfeeding mothers goes even farther than the immediate effect of preventing outbreaks of disease and infant death. Like rehydrating your ill child, breastfeeding is empowering. Saving your child by your efforts is a powerful confidence- building strategy. The problem is that it is not attractive to policy makers. It's difficult for petty, small-minded bureaucrats to quantify. You can't say, "So many flights landed; so many tins of sardines were handed out; so much money was spent," so you can get your little medal at the end of the programme. It's not captivating enough for the media, "Mother saves child!" Big deal! "Heroic doctor donates own blood for starving little, black child!" Ahh, yes, Dr Tom Dooley saves the world again. And it's certainly not flamboyant enough for the movie stars who fly their own planes into disaster areas, complete with bodyguards and their very own publicity people so that CNN can show them on prime time.
Those values are contemptuous of women. Yet, it's not only in disease where you can see the effect of women on their children. In every field that has been studied, the results are the same. Birth. The nutritional status of the child. The development of the child. Educational attainment. Poverty. Disability. It's always the same. The happier you make women, the better the outcome of her children, the healthier the society. That is one huge mass of humanity waiting (that's part of their attraction) to be respectively addressed and asked to do what they know how to do, given a little support. So far our women in power have been a crying disappointment. The PNM "fat a--" brigade believes its duty is to support a man, regardless of his contempt for them or anyone else. Is there a wind of change coming?
