United Nations agencies are promoting breastfeeding to avoid unnecessary illness and deaths of children in the wake of the disaster wrought on the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) earlier this month.

“The estimated 12,000 babies to be born in the worst-affected areas this month need to be exclusively breastfed, meaning that they get nothing but breast milk, which protects them from potentially deadly infections,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a joint news release.

Corporal Anjannete Obligado only went to the makeshift hospital at the Tacloban airport to bring a woman who had passed out after hours of lining up for a seat in a C130 flight out of the city.

The next thing the lady soldier knew, she was breastfeeding babies of evacuees.

At the hospital, Obligado saw a bloodied woman lying down with her baby in a corner. The woman had just given birth. It was November 11, just 3 days after Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) hit the city.

A new book by Murray Straus, founder and co-director of the Family Research Lab and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, brings together more than four decades of research that makes the definitive case against spanking, including how it slows cognitive development and increases antisocial and criminal behavior.

Advocates for physiologic care in labor will be pleased, although not surprised, to know that a Cochrane systematic review supports mobility and upright positioning in first-stage labor (the cervical dilation phase)

"My 18-month-old son blissfully naps and I decide to catch up on some emails. I look at my inbox and notice a request for advice. I open the email, curious. After reading the first sentence, I take a deep breath.

"'I experienced my first stillborn birth as a doula. I am so confused.'”

One thing we definitely know for sure is that how we treat our children will affect them for the rest of their lives, and it doesn’t take much to speculate that how we treat our children would be repeated in their relationships with their own children, their children’s children and so forth. Without an intentional change to how we raise our children, by healing our childhood wounds and consciously raising our children a different way, we are passing along the same hurts generation by generation.

Regular contributor Henci Goer examines the most recent study on the safety of home birth in the United States.  When taking a closer look at the data analysis done by the authors, there are concerns not addressed in the study, that raise issues that cause the study’s conclusions to be questioned. Henci shares some other studies that do not reach the same results about the safety of home birth.

While she's used to taking celebrity portraits like those of actress Keira Knightley, chef Jamie Oliver or the rock band Beastie Boys, photographer Jenny Lewis shows that she's just as skilled at capturing beautiful portraits of mother and child. One Day Young is a touching photo project that shows mothers with their babies within 24 hours of their birth. Lewis didn't know any of the mothers beforehand, rather, she called out for participants in the London borough of Hackney with this message:

[VIDEO] NAPCAN, Australia’s National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, launched a thought-provoking television/cinema campaign this year with “Children See, Children Do”. The 90 second spot features children following adults, mimicking their habits. At first the pattern appears to be innocuous, talking on a mobile phone while walking through a city square, making a call on a public telephone, waiting behind the yellow line in a railway station. The behaviour becomes more insidious with a girl copying a woman’s smoking habits on an escalator.

Watch for the full details in API's upcoming annual report, but for a peek now, see some of the important work you supported.

Studies investigating body ownership and awareness in adults have highlighted the importance of the temporal synchrony and spatial congruency of sensory stimuli, in addition to body morphology and anatomical posture. These studies show that body-related cues, here defined as information attributable to the current position of one’s own body, are fundamental for body perception.

It was a story that captivated the nation in 1995 — two babies accidentally switched at birth, then, after three years, forced by a judge's decision to stay with the families that had been raising them. Today those famous babies, Callie Johnson and Rebecca Chittum, are 18-year-old young women, and each says she is happy to have remained with the caregivers she knew. 

What is the best way to ease someone's pain and suffering? In this beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities.

Maybe you never knew there was a name for it—the unique way you raise your child—but it's in tune with your child's needs and with your own needs, and your family lives it out daily. Or, perhaps, you do know there is a name for it, with many synonyms and variations, but you live it out without being defined.

…It's hit the news, blogs, social media, and forums where parenting approaches are more contentious than politics or religion.

Children who experience profound neglect have been found to be more prone to a behavior known as "indiscriminate friendliness," characterized by an inappropriate willingness to approach adults, including strangers.

Indiscriminate friendliness is in some sense a misnomer. The behavior is not characterized by a deep friendliness but simply by a lack of reticence that most young children show toward strangers.

Even with today's technology, it still takes both a male and a female to make a baby. But is it important for both parents to raise that child? Many studies have outlined the value of a mother, but few have clearly defined the importance of a father, until now. New findings from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) show that the absence of a father during critical growth periods, leads to impaired social and behavioral abilities in adults.

Find out what the Searses have been up to in Poland:

What Is Attachment Parenting?

Meeting with Martha and William Sears

William and Martha Sears in Wroclaw