Weighing the dangers: part 3.

© www.sarawickham.com This article first published 2008 Practising Midwife 11(10):48. Republished with permission for personal use only. Page numbers do not correspond to the original. Please do not reproduce/reprint without prior permission, thank you. In the last two issues, I have been discussing the discrepancies that some midwives and mothers have noticed wherein the WHO Child Growth Standards (2006) seem to be showing that the weight of breastfed babies is falling behind the average during the first few days after birth. This is not easily explicable by the existence of bias in the methods used to carry out the research that led to the development of the standards; the high quality of this project would seem to imply that the charts are accurately representative of the reality experienced by the babies in the study. I also asked a number of midwives to reflect on their real-life experiences in order to check whether perhaps our existing knowledges and experiences can be challenged, and while there is always more that we can learn I found nothing to suggest that there is a significant problem with our current understanding either. This article explores some of the deeper issues that underpin the notion of developing global standards, and considers whether the research that has tested these standards in the field can offer insight into this situation.