Now that I’ve done the specific posts, does anyone have thoughts about the Life series in general?
babies
Life at 1, 3, 5: disability
The Life at 1, 3 and 5 treatment of disability could have been worse with either a more tragic air or the Fighting Fat episode’s constant refrain of “risk” but that this is still a particularly problematic area for the show to be keeping its tight focus on the particular impact on the abled child when talking about family members with disabilities.
Life at 1: breastfeeding
The longitudinal television program Life at 5, following from Life at 1 and Life at 3, is now showing. The whole thing has my Hoyden antenna up a bit, so I am going to post a few discussions of some of the aspects of the show I was less impressed by. Today: breastfeeding.
Things that are not our business, Duggar edition.
I don’t suppose anyone has a cite for this? “Every time you have a pregnancy, the placenta implants in the uterus and that implantation site cannot be used again because it’s scarred,” said Dr. Diane Harper of the University of… Read More ›
Infant Formula Product Placement in Chemistry Matric Exam
School and university exam writers often invent scenarios. They play with made-up names for people, they dream up companies, they have fun devising original scenarios and puns to spice up their questions. But what happens when they get bored doing… Read More ›
More confected fat-baby epidemic panic? The “increasing trend” that isn’t.
This supposed ongoing upward trend in birthweight has been used as an excuse for absurd levels of inductions of labour and skyrocketing C sections, and a springboard for blaming lazy, old, fat, neglectful mothers for the “obesity epidemic”, childhood cancer,… Read More ›
Baby toupees: “i’m Not a Boy!”
Dissatisfied with lacy elastic garters as a salve for gender-neutral panic in the carers of baby girls, the market has come up with this hideously hirsute scalpgirdle: The splash page reads: Baby Bangs – for the girl who has everything…. Read More ›
Some women are afraid of being mummy-tracked; others are afraid of being fired.
One of the ways of starkly illustrating an aspect of the gender divide is DeBecker’s quote: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” I think there’s a… Read More ›
Antibreastfeeding Bingo
We’ve done the other Bingos, and this one’s long overdue. With a nod to all the misogynist trolls out there who’ve provided the material for this card, I present: Antibreastfeeding Bingo! It’s focussed on public breastfeeding conversations, not “mommy wars”… Read More ›
What the media isn’t asking about that private hospital birth study (or, Bayes’ Theorem for Dummies)
Have peer review committees just given up on actually including a statistician these days? or do the statisticians need to do more sociology classes?