It's official - HV's weight charts are for bottle fed babies and not breastfed ones!

[aloha]

Very interesting article in The Observer today about a new study that finds that breastfed babies are meant to be lighter than bottlefed babies - that the weight charts are all wrong and that actually babies benefit from being lighter than the charts say. Hooray - an end to the tyranny of the HV's scales (yeah, right!).
I hope someone can do a link.
Oh, and I post this as the mother of a chubby toddler so it's not having a go at mothers of chubsters.

Well god knows what my 6 year old would look like if she had been bottlefed. She already a lovely little heffalump, whereas 3 year old is and was fed excatly the same way and is a skinny as a rake. (Just like his mum. NOTTTTTTT!!!!)

is this it aloha?

My HV knew of breastfed from birth charts (said she couldn't get hold of them), knew DS was breastfed, but still gave 'looks' to the woman doing the weighing when DS failed to follow his bottlefed baby line and said 'So how do you feel feeding's going?' like perhaps I was forgetting some days...

So I stopped taking him to be weighed

Oh dear - someone should have told my DS1 that LOL - he has remained quite 'high' on the charts for sometime - even when he was BF for 14 months, and also stuck pretty rigidly to his line,.

Actually most of my BF mums found their babies tended to follow the lines anyway..........

Yup, thanks Pixiefish. I am crap with technology. Interesting, isn't it? I really don't think I'll bother taking my daughter (due in two weeks - eeek!) to be weighed.

I'd still take them to be weighed - you can still plot a 'line' to see how much weight they're putting on and I've always found it good to know - not to see if they're the 'correct' weight - but to see how much weight they've put on

Ha ha ha ha

All 3 Ds's were......shhhhh....bottle fed and Ds3 has just been discharged from hospital (out patients, we've had about 4 appointments) becuase he wasn't following the "line". He still isn't anywhere near the 50th centile so who knows how/where/why HV's etc get their info.

Imagine if I was able to breast feed him.....he'd be wasting away.

Exactly! I've only felt crap when I saw the HV or read Gina Ford.

Why mind being under the 50th? Statistically, just about one in two babies is under it anyway!

I could always see that ds was fine - as I say, he's a bit of a porker (but so was his dad as a baby and he's now 6'4" and has been slim all his adult life) but I still got hassle. Esp in hospital when he born when they kept saying he had lost too much weight and I should give him formula. Totally unnecessary IMO.

I judge DS by how 'in proportion' he looks, how bright his eyes are and because he almost never cries (really only when his evil teeth are hurting him) - he's a sunny little chap!

Aloha, I haven't had dd weighed at all apart from at birth and at the appt where the hv came here when she was 2 months or something. I'm very glad I haven't bothered tbh, esp when I read here about hvs panicking people unnecessarily.

I think I'd heard this before, but still didn't persuade my HV that there was nothing wrong with my skinny dd - cue blood tests, referrals to the consultant and dietician. Ggggrrrrrrrrrr.....in a slightly smug way now!

Just raed this article and was checking here to see if anyone had posted a link. Think I'll give the weighing a swerve this time.

Message withdrawn

Very true Oops - HV seem highly suspicious of breastfeeding. Yes like we might 'forget' to do it for a few days. So many times I'd leave the clinic in tears. What crap.

Glad it wasn't just me - the HVs always made me feel inadequate and the last time I went, they were giving the lass in front a hard time because her little boy was too big! He just looked a big boy to me.

So, I stopped going with DS2. If I was worried, I went to the doctors. DS2 is lots lighter than DS1 - totally different builds - but like Hunkermunker said, he was a bright, happy thing.

Mind you, you should hear what the paediatrician says here about the vaccination page in the little red book - not very complimentary!

My red book for DS (almost 9 months) has the breastfeeding from birth chart. I always wondered what the difference would have been on the bottlefed from birth chart.
Now I know.

What I don't understand is, are they suggesting that ALL breastfed babies are going to follow the same trend and be of the perfect weight?
My DD and DS were (are) both breastfed. My DD was born chubby and is still a substantial girl. My DS was born skinny (same birthweight of 10lbs though) and is a lean little thing.
DD was 98th percentile for weight and DS is 75th percentile.
Surely it is more to do with how active they are?

No, I don't think the article suggests that breastfed babies should all follow the same line, but it does suggest that it is perfectly healthy and indeed normal for b/f babies to be on the light side and that HVs should back off with all their pressure to supplement with formula/wean before six months and all the other stuff that makes the mothers of slimmer babies feel so awful - as we've seen over and over again on MN.

Oh dear, my bottle fed child is on the small side too! He's on the 9th centile, but hey ho, he's perfectly healthy and happy so what do charts mean anyway!