PFP is based on the belief that childrearing is a responsibility given by God to parents. Parents are to guide, nurture, and train their children.
When a woman becomes a mother, she does not stop being a wife, daughter, sister, friend, or neighbor. A mother feeds her baby when he is hungry, but takes advantage of the first few weeks of life to guide the baby's hunger patterns by a basic routine. A baby is a welcome member of the family, and not the center of it. With this in mind, everybody wins, baby, mother, father, and the often-forgotten siblings. A husband/wife relationship is a basic prerequisite for optimal parenting and both the husband and wife need to be active in parenting of their child.
...read the full article
PFP is based on the belief that childrearing is a responsibility given by God to parents. Parents are to guide, nurture, and train their children.
When a woman becomes a mother, she does not stop being a wife, daughter, sister, friend, or neighbor. A mother feeds her baby when he is hungry, but takes advantage of the first few weeks of life to guide the baby's hunger patterns by a basic routine. A baby is a welcome member of the family, and not the center of it. With this in mind, everybody wins, baby, mother, father, and the often-forgotten siblings. A husband/wife relationship is a basic prerequisite for optimal parenting and both the husband and wife need to be active in parenting of their child.
What is Parent-Directed Feeding (PDF)?
It is a proactive approach to infant care. It creates and maintains healthy patterns for your baby, which enhance all phases of development. At the same time, PDF is flexible enough to meet the growing emotional needs of the child through infancy and the toddler years. The PDF plan involves more than just feeding a baby. It is a twenty-four hour strategy designed not only to meet the baby's needs, but those of the entire family. PDF is made up of three basic activities that are repeated in rhythmical cycle throughout the day: feeding time, waketime, and naptime.
What has caused the popularity of Preparation for Parenting and On Becoming Babywise?
1) Healthy Sleep
A sampling of 520 babies revealed that PDF helps babies organize nighttime sleep. By the end of the ninth week for "Babywise" participants, 87 percent of breastfed girls and 77 percent of breastfed boys begin sleeping through the night (7 to 8 hours). By 12 weeks, both groups reach 97 percent success, and both start sleeping 10 to 11 hours at night.
2) Successful Breastfeeding
Despite numerous benefits to breastfeeding, the Academy notes that in 1995, 59.4 percent of women in the United States were breastfeeding exclusively or in combination with formula-feeding at the time of hospital discharge; only 21.6 percent of mothers were nursing at six months, and many of these were supplementing with formula." (Pediatrics, December 1997, pp. 1036-1037). A convenient sampling of more than 240 mothers following the PDF principles demonstrated that 88 percent of mothers who start with the program breastfeed, and 80 percent of those moms breastfeed exclusively, and 70 percent continued into the sixth month. The average PDF mom breastfeeds 33.2 weeks.
In summary, we believe infants, pretoddlers and toddlers with healthy eating and sleep habits, are more content, easier to manage, faster learners, and happier children.
How should a parent respond when a baby cries?
This question is very difficult to answer, especially for first-time parents. [. . .] Discern the cause behind the cry, and then respond appropriately. In addition, parents learn when it is normal or abnormal for their baby to cry, and what may be causing the baby to cry. [. . .]
Nothing beats breastfeeding for physiological benefits to baby. That is plain fact. Mother's milk is the complete and perfect food nothing short of miraculous. Easily digested, it provides excellent nutrition and contains the right balance of proteins and fats. It also provides additional antibodies necessary for building your baby's immune system.
When it comes to nourishing baby, mother's milk is clearly superior to formula. Now for the stickier issue of nurturing. Is breast superior to bottle? In times past, experts said yes. Stressing the value of breastfeeding, they associated bottle-feeding with child rejection. [. . .] In truth, studies over the last sixty years which attempted to correlate methods of infant feeding with later emotional development failed to support any of these conclusions. A mother's overall attitude toward her child far outweighs any single factor, including manner of feeding.
click to close
