Outside In | It’s time to give a monkey’s about breastfeeding
Year of the Monkey baby boom a good opportunity to banish over-reliance on baby milk formula
The advice of any Chinese mum with newlywed sons or daughters over the past three years will have been the same: avoid having a baby in the Year of the Goat ... but relax and have as many as you like in the Year of the Monkey.
Combine this with the new Chinese “two-child” policy, and officials across the mainland are predicting that between 1.5 million and 20 million “extra” babies will be born in 2016 – about 10 per cent more than the 16.5 million that would be expected in a “normal” year.
I have tried in vain to discover what is so awful about having a baby born in the Year of the Goat. Everyone says it is the unluckiest of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac, and that people born as goats are always unlucky through their lives. But beyond that the reasons become very sketchy.
One friend noted: “Remember, the Empress Dowager Cixi was born in the year of the Goat.” As if that explained everything. True, she presided over the catastrophic implosion of the once-powerful Qing dynasty, and took China to one its lowest points in history in terms of global power and influence or national pride and dignity. But all this due to being born in the Year of the Goat? My skeptical Western brain thinks no. But who am I to contradict so many Chinese mothers and mothers-in-law? And remember the last Goat year was 2003 – the year of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Say no more.
If all babies were breastfed, there would be 820,000 fewer child deaths a year
I’m sceptical too about the good fortune that is supposed to be associated with being born in the Year of the Monkey – though I waver here, because one of my daughters is a Monkey, and of course I am very happy to be assured she has been blessed with luckiness. But sceptical or not, such beliefs have significant practical consequences. Many young couples in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland last year delayed attempts to start a family until June last year, confident that their newborn would thank them for the rest of his or her life for having been born a Monkey. Beijing medical authorities reported a 21 per cent jump in registration of pregnant women in July last year. The best of all years is of course the Year of the Dragon, but that is not going to roll around again until 2024, and we cannot reasonably ask prospective young parents to wait so long.
Frustratingly, when you try to test this family-planning theory against actual annual birth rates over the past decades, the numbers seem to show nothing. It is true that mainland births in calendar 2015 were 2 per cent down on the 2014 Horse year – to 16.55 million from 16.87 million. But we need to remember that births have been falling steadily in China since the 24 million in 1990, influenced as much by the one-child policy as by superstition, and by other powerful forces like urbanisation, the rising cost of living, rising numbers of women in the workforce, and women marrying at later ages.
