World Mom, @JenniferBurden, Writes About post-Ebola Sierra Leone @BabyCenter!

World Mom, @JenniferBurden, Writes About post-Ebola Sierra Leone @BabyCenter!

As part of World Moms Blog’s collaboration with BabyCenter’s Mission Motherhood™, our World Moms are writing posts on maternal health around the world. In today’s post, Jennifer Burden writes about

“A friend at the nonprofit, WaterAid, recently shared photographs with me from the photographer Monique Jacques, which were taken during a trip this year to Kenema, Sierra Leone. Kenema was among the hardest-hit areas during the Ebola crisis, and research conducted by WaterAid and the nonprofit VSO found an alarming rise in the rate of maternal and newborn death during the Ebola crisis.”

Read the full post, “A window into a maternity ward in post-Ebola Sierra-Leone”, over at BabyCenter’s Mission Motherhood™!

Photocredit to Monique Jacques/WaterAID

Jennifer Burden

Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India. She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls. Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.

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GUEST POST: Caitlin Domanico of United We Feed #WorldMoms

GUEST POST: Caitlin Domanico of United We Feed #WorldMoms

Her feature on The Huffington Post is going viral, and her e-mail inbox is currently overflowing with media requests. Caitlin Domanico of “United We Feed” is a World Mom on a mission through photography to unite mothers in how we feed our babies. We look forward to following the journey she has launched as she continues to capture the diversity of mothers feeding their babies around the globe. We are excited to bring you her guest post on World Moms Blog today…  

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To the mom who is feeding her baby,

You decided how to feed your child long before they were ever born.

“I am going to breastfeed.”, you said. Or maybe you said, “Nursing is not for me, I will pump.”  Maybe neither of those were an option for you. Maybe formula was your milk of choice, or maybe, just maybe, your doctor informed you that it will be necessary to use a tube to help your child thrive.

I see you. I see you feeding your child every single day.

I see you feeding your child on very happy days, and on very sad days.

I see you feed while you sing and coo and gaze into your baby’s eyes.

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I see you feed while you are filled with pain and sorrow, as you try to find a smile through the tears.

You feed at first thing in the morning, you feed in the wee hours of the night while the rest of the world is sleeping.

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You feed while you are out to eat, and while you are on vacation.

When you are at work or at the store, you leave your baby with a loving caregiver and ensure they have enough to feed your little one.

One thing is very apparent while noticing you and your baby — the insurmountable amount of love that exists between you.

You smile and your baby smiles. You frown and your baby frowns.

Your baby holds your shirt, your hand, twirls your hair, and kicks her feet with joy and contentment.

Your baby loves you and you are smitten over him.

Maybe your bottle was filled with pumped milk, or maybe is filled with formula, but that doesn’t matter to me.

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Maybe your baby gets her milk from you while breastfeeding, or maybe she nuzzles in close and as her pump delivers milk directly into her stomach so that she can grow and develop, but either way, it doesn’t matter to me.

I know it matters to you, and it should.

Please don’t take that to mean I don’t care, and that I don’t respect your choices as a mother, because actually, it is quite the opposite.

I care.

I care about you as a mother.

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I care about your beautiful child.

I support and respect you, because you are a good mom. There are so many ways to be a good mom, and you are one of the best.

You see, I fed my first child with breast milk and formula, and now, six-years-later, she is a gem. We are close, so close that at times, I wonder how I ever lived without her.  She had both types of milk and she is absolutely lovely, just like your little one.  My second daughter only had breast milk, a decision she made when she refused a bottle. She is incredible, just like your little one. She loves her mama and takes every opportunity to snuggle in close, just like your little one. I know where you have been, because I had the cherished task of feeding my babies, too.

Motherhood is tough, and mommy guilt has worn-out it’s welcome here.

Tonight, when you hold your dear one close and feed them before bed, feel proud that you are apart of a community of women who love fiercely, protect feverishly, and support one another, no matter how they choose to feed their babies!

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xoxo,

United We Feed

About the Author: 

Caitlin Domanico grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on a small horse farm.  Now a mother of two, Ava (6) and Genevieve (nearly 2), Caitlin resides in Montgomery County with her daughters and her husband.  She operates a photography studio in the center of her town, where she focuses on capturing families and specifically, documenting motherhood.  During the week, Caitlin can be found having dance parties with her daughters, photographing families, or part-time teaching as a special education teacher in birth-3 services. Caitlin’s photo series “United We Feed” had gained international recognition for empowering and uniting women and the many ways they nourish their babies. For more photos head to her photography site

Photo credits to Caitlin Domanico. This has been an original guest post to World Moms Blog from Pennsylvania, USA. 

World Moms Blog

World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children. World Moms Blog was listed by Forbes Woman as one of the "Best 100 Websites for Women 2012 & 2013" and also called a "must read" by the NY Times Motherlode in 2013. Our Senior Editor in India, Purnima Ramakrishnan, was awarded the BlogHer International Activist Award in 2013.

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WORLD TOUR: NETHERLANDS: Gender Equality and Gender Neutrality

WORLD TOUR: NETHERLANDS: Gender Equality and Gender Neutrality

gender equalityMy neighbours in the Netherlands just had a baby and have proudly decorated their window with pink balloons and a garland saying: ”Hooray, a girl!”

This would probably be shocking to a new category of Swedish parents, who refuse to reveal the sex of their baby to family and friends as well as to daycare staff. The baby is given a gender-neutral name, and will be dressed in anything but pink and light-blue.

Why? The parents don’t want their child to be subjected to society’s division of human beings into male and female, claiming that the stereotypes linked to it limit the child’s freedom.

While this remains rather rare, there is a rapidly increasing number of preschools in Sweden where gender equality is the main ideological and educational basis.

In these schools, the staff strives to treat girls and boys equally in all respects. They don’t hide the fact that both sexes exist, but don’t make a point of it and won’t encourage the children to play and behave in a way that is typical for their sex. They won’t call them girls and boys, but refer to them as ”friends” or ”children”.

Conveniently enough, a new pronoun is making its way into the Swedish language: ”hen”, meaning both ”he” and ”she” (”han” and ”hon” in Swedish). When the practice of using ”he” for both sexes in law texts was changed to the more cumbersome ”he or she”, texts became difficult to read and people started looking for other solutions.

The idea of ”hen” comes from the Finnish language (although Finnish is completely different from Swedish; its closest relative among European languages is Hungarian), which uses the pronoun ”hän” for both sexes. Apart from being used in texts to increase readability, the Swedish pronoun ”hen” is now used by advocates of gender neutrality.

The new pronoun and gender-neutral preschools are hot topics in Sweden right now. An increasing number of people like and make use of them, but a big part of the population is very critical towards them.

Sweden is one of the leading countries when it comes to gender equality. Thanks to the important work that has been done in this regard, women and men now basically have the same opportunities in all areas of life.

When gender equality turns into gender neutrality, however, are we still going in the right direction? Isn’t there a risk that gender-neutral treatment introduces another type of prejudice? When girls behave in a traditionally girly way, and boys behave in a traditionally boyish manner, will this be happily accepted or will they feel that their behaviour is wrong? Will there be a new ideal of tough girls and soft boys, as some critics fear?

How will children develop when their parents actively try to conceal what sex they are? Will they think that it’s bad to be a boy or a girl? Will they revolt against their upbringing and shower their own daughters with princess stuff, and their sons with cars and toy guns? Or will these children simply be freer and more unprejudiced than those who grow up in more traditional families, and contribute to a positive change in society?

Time will show.

What are you thoughts on this modern, Swedish approach to gender equality?

Kristina was born in Hamburg, Germany, but moved to Sweden at the age of 8 (her mother is German, her father Swedish). She studied French and linguistics and works as a translator. At the moment she lives in the Netherlands with her French husband and their two daughters, aged 17 months and 4 years. Kristina is interested in psychology and right now particularly focuses on child and family psychology. Working three days a week and being a full-time mom the remaining days, she doesn’t find as much time to read, write and practice yoga and music as she would like, but appreciates her early mornings in trains. There is nothing like contemplating an awakening landscape from a train with a cup of hot chocolate. 

The image used in this post is credited to Jonathan Stonehouse. It holds a Flickr Creative Commons attribution license.

World Moms Blog

World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children. World Moms Blog was listed by Forbes Woman as one of the "Best 100 Websites for Women 2012 & 2013" and also called a "must read" by the NY Times Motherlode in 2013. Our Senior Editor in India, Purnima Ramakrishnan, was awarded the BlogHer International Activist Award in 2013.

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Saturday Sidebar: How long does it take for an idea to germinate in your mind before it becomes a published post?

This week’s Saturday Sidebar is a spin on one of the writing prompts from Mama Kat’s Pretty Much World Famous Writer’s Workshop:

“How long does it take for an idea to germinate in your mind before it becomes a published post?”

Check out what some of our World Moms had to say…

Alison Lee of Malaysia writes:
“I get ideas for posts very randomly. Some days, I have a ton of ideas and I jot them down quickly, and when I have time, I sit down to just write or flesh them out. They don’t always make it to being published, but at least I get them out of my head! Between my head and my fingers, ideas become posts within 2-3 days.”

Eva Fannon of Washington State, USA writes:
“I’m glad I’m part of WMB where I post periodically, because this is hard for me! I would not have enough time to write stuff for my own blog on a daily basis. I let an idea sit for a few days and start writing thoughts in a notebook I carry in my bag. Once I have enough to work off of, I schedule about an hour to sit and write a post. Then I sit on it for a day and re-read/edit the day after.” (more…)

World Moms Blog

World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children. World Moms Blog was listed by Forbes Woman as one of the "Best 100 Websites for Women 2012 & 2013" and also called a "must read" by the NY Times Motherlode in 2013. Our Senior Editor in India, Purnima Ramakrishnan, was awarded the BlogHer International Activist Award in 2013.

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GUEST POST: We’re at “By Word of Mouth Musings” Today!

I was thoroughly delighted when Nicole Morgan at the blog, “By Word of Mouth Musings,” in Florida, USA invited us to be featured on her growing list of “Monday Muses.” Here’s how she defines the list:

Muse
a. A guiding spirit.
b. A source of inspiration.
My interpretation  …
They encourage and support.
They share and teach. They go that extra mile.
They give freely unto others.

Let’s hope I was able to put into words and capture “the international goodwill” of World Moms Blog. I invite you to please stop by and read my guest post over there, and please comment! (Comments will be closed here.)

And afterwards, be sure to scroll around Nicole’s site and check out her amazing adoption story and her homeschooling resources!

Jennifer Burden — Founder/Editor, World Moms Blog 

Jennifer Burden

Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India. She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls. Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.

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