Breastfeeding and growth monitoring.

One of the main reasons women stop breastfeeding is they lack confidence in their ability to produce enough milk. Growth monitoring gives them the confidence by showing their baby's satisfactory growth. There are ten pitfalls to growth monitoring programs however: (1) the emphasis on a curative rather than a preventive approach; (2) monitoring starts too late; (3) programs emphasize nutritional status rather than growth status; (4) the chart is not used to prompt a dialogue with the mother on meaning; (5) health workers do not listen to find out why some babies are succeeding and others are not; (6) insufficient attention is paid to training and supervision, and programs should address the child's total environment; (7) growth monitoring is seen as isolated from other aspects of health care; (8) the community should become involved in addressing growth problems; (9) additional food is often seen as the only activity rather than separating the preventive strategy of growth monitoring from the curative activity; and (10) growth monitoring itself achieves little unless it leads to growth promotion.