Friday, July 31, a total of 199 mothers with their babies trooped to SM City San Fernando Downtown. Saturday, August 1, another set of 221 crowded the SM City Pampanga’s Event Center.
This, for what can, arguably, be the biggest synchronized breastfeeding event which, unarguably, helped promote the primacy of mother’s milk in infant feeding primacy and engender community support.
Dubbed “Big Latch On,” the event was spearheaded by the City of San Fernando through its tourism office in partnership with the SM malls in the capital town.
City Tourism Officer Ching Pangilinan-Gonzales said the Big Latch On gathers breastfeeding women in registered locations around the world to “latch on” – a euphemism for breastfeeding their child at a set time, for one minute, and are counted by witnesses. The numbers are added to a global total to see if it can beat the previous year’s Big Latch On record.
Added to the breastfeeding activity, Pangilinan said that the program for the two malls also included games and raffles for the participants. “Nursing” fathers who came along with their wives and kids at the event were publicly recognized and handed token gifts from the SM malls.
The event also featured talks from medical practitioners on the importance of mother’s milk, highlighted thus:
Breastfeeding as beneficial to the health of both mother and infant, and helpful for children to avoid a host of diseases like high cholesterol and inflammatory bowel disease in later life.
Breastfeeding is also very important in the first six months of life of an infant as breast milk contains all nutrients and vitamins that a child needs.
In his opening remarks Mayor Edwin Santiago underscored the importance of breastfeeding in the formation of physically and mentally fit Fernandinos, as enunciated in his Fernandino First agenda.
An art exhibit featuring nursing mothers from indigenous cultures as interpreted by local artists accompanied the event.
The Big Latch On at the two SM malls coincided with the different “Hakab Na!” events, which were held in celebration of National Breastfeeding Awareness Month and in coordination with the Big Latch On.
According to Pangilinan, the global initiative this year is set to break the current 2013 record of 14,536 children breastfeeding across 845 locations, and the 2014 record for number of countries taking part, number of breastfeeding women attending and total attendance.
