It turns out that it’s not as simple as going “eww, ick” at that breastfeeding scene on Game of Thrones. Katie Hinde explains the science of weaning — there’s lots of solid information there, but the bottom line is this:
So proscriptive attitudes about what women should and shouldn’t do with their bodies can suck it.
Yeah, but…
Those only tell half of the proscriptive attitudes to suck it– those who argue that you shouldn’t breastfeed past an age. It says nothing about the other proscriptive attitudes that you should breast-feed until an age.
Just saying.
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Funny. I remember the scene in the book and I distinctly remember the scene *not* being in the series.
@1 woozy – true of course, though I think GOT describe the kind of society where an absence of breast milk would be close to a death sentence for infants. We’re largely dependent on nutritional technology for other possibilities.
I guess we could figure out a ‘best case*’ lower limit for weaning by asking at what age weaned children have outcomes statistically indistinguishable from unweaned children for a given society. In ours I think it must be pretty low, and probably not strong enough to warrant coercive pressure on mothers who choose lower ages.
Very timely, as Dutch Toddler and I are in this process right now, which I suspect will last months. I suppose ‘mommy wars’ is a real thing, but luckily I have not encountered it at all.
Anne Fenwick @2: in a lot of the literature I’ve been reading, weaning refers to the cessation of breast feeding only and does not include the formula-in-a-bottle babies. So if those babies are technically ‘weaned’ the lower limit would be day one. Research shows the benefits of breastfeeding is real, but that outcomes past early childhood are similar for breastmilk and formula.
As long as you and your child are happy and healthy with it.
If you feel kinda grossed out at the thought: Ask your doctor about the pills taht prevent you from lactating.
If you feel uncomfortable: just stop.
If your child isn’t getting enough food: supplement at least.
If it is too much of a drain on your own bodily resources: stop.
We live in a world with safe and healthy alternatives. You are not a bad person and a failure for giving your child formula. You are not a super-mummy, selfless heroine and saviour if you breastfeed for 4, 6, 12, 24 or 36 months.
Maybe you should remember that it might be a bit embarassing if they have to leave their prom night for their nightly feeding ;)
Woozy@1: Slight correction. She told those with proscriptive attitudes to suck it. She didn’t really say anything about prescriptive attitudes.
HInt: proscribe = forbid “Thou shalt not.”
prescribe = recommend or require “Thou shalt.”
People seem to mistake the former for the latter all the time. I’ve only seen someone mistake the latter for the former once.
Well, I’m a failure as a breastfeeding mother, by some standards – Elder Daughter weaned herself around ten months, as I remember. Younger started refusing to nurse except at bedtime as soon as she started on solid food, so around three or four months. They both indicated quite early that they’d rather hold a bottle and be able to look around, given the option. There’s nothing quite like trying to force-breastfeed a baby who doesn’t want to, and as for the asshole nurse who told me to force Younger to nurse by withholding solid food… Not helpful is putting it politely.
Yes, let’s support the mothers who breastfeed. But let’s not shame the mothers who can’t or prefer not to, whatever the age of their child.
And thank you, Giliell. You said it all.
@inquisitiveraven
That makes sense. I’ve learned something. (I’m not a frequent user of the word “proscriptive” or proscribe so it isn’t surprising I used them incorrectly.)
The usual joke is that you stop breastfeeding when the baby can pull out the tit without your help.
Child 1 weaned himself at the same age, which turned out in retrospect to have been the first sign that I was pregnant again HAHAHAHAHAHA …yeah.
Isn’t it obvious? Human mothers should stop breastfeeding at the comparable time that duck mothers do.
Well, I started out as a complete failure with not being able to nurse either kid because my tits are just too big. Yes, that’s a problem.
But after formula, pumps etc we became a team.
I weaned #1 at 14 months because I couldn’t take it any longer. I refused to act as a walking pacifier.
The little one lost interest at about 10 months because hot dogs.
But, Carlie, I thought you couldn’t get pregnant while breastfeeding! (Or so I was once told by a couple, who also used ‘herbal birth control’. They now have a passel ‘o kids).
It should be pretty simple. You breastfeed IF you want/can until you want/can. Emphasis on *you*, whose body it is.
yazikus – my guess is that idea started with the correlation, not realizing that the reason for so much lack of pregnancy was the woman going “I never sleep, I have a baby all over me all day, and I do all the housework, so NOT TONIGHT” for a year or so rather than the breastfeeding. ;)
carlie, yazikus
There actually is biological factor, but it only lasts about 6 months at the best, and often not that long.
Nah, breastfeeding actually does work as a contraceptive. Many women won’t ovulate and get their period for some months (real perk! No periods AND not being pregnant!)
BUT: You ovulate 2 weeks before you get your first period, which means you never know how long that protection lasts.
Yep, that’s how my friend’s second son was conceived.
One of the things I’ve read is that it has to be exclusive breastfeeding, so as soon as food has been introduced, the amount of lactation goes down and boom, ovulation. (although I was also on the mini-pill at the time, so.)
So Child 1 weaned himself earlier than I would have liked. Child 2 went to almost 18 months, but the last 2 months or so were once during the night only, more I think as a security/habit thing. I definitely felt a lot of internal pressure to be able to do it, especially since I had already felt like a failure for having epidurals and then c-sections, unlike the perfect natural childbirth I thought I would have (which is another whole area of telling women what to do…) I will shamefully admit that I was on the “you should breastfeed or else” bandwagon for a time, but then I realized how many reasons there were for women not to, and also that it was none of my business anyway.
Well, with women of childbearing age – AKA subhuman breeding vessels – having been deemed unworthy of constitutional protections per recent SCOTUS decisions and state legislatures, it’s only a matter of time before breastfeeding is legislated such that “failure” of the mother to do it to the state standard, and/or any outcomes in the child where there is the possibility (however slight) that it could be traced to breastfeeding or lack could lead to the prosecution.
I wish I were joking.
I had to wean abruptly because I became ill with some undiagnosed thing and was given ultra-strong painkillers. I was in no condition to pump for quite a while so that was that. My kid was 11 months old and appeared to understand ‘Mummy is sick!’ so all went well, but it could just as well have happened when she was six weeks old. Just goes to show, nobody should ever leap to conclusions about a mother’s reasons for weaning or not.
Now your in one of my areas of expertise! I was a La Leche League leader for several years.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that breastfeeding continue for at least 12 months, and thereafter for as long as mother and baby desire. The World Health Organization recommends continued breastfeeding up to 2 years of age or beyond.”
http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/
When you have babies with severe allergies, like mine and like my granddaughter, breastfeeding for a long time is the safest and healthiest way to go.
A mom and baby are known as a nursing couple, and it’s totally up to that nursing couple when, where and for how long nursing should happen. I get really, really pissed off at restaurants and other businesses that try to ban moms and babies to the restroom to nurse. Would you want to eat in the restroom? Ewwww. They certainly don’t do that to moms and babies with bottles. Most nursing moms know how to be discreet. I could nurse on planes, buses and in any public place without anyone around me realizing it. I often got comments about how quiet my child was.
That’s why my hubby and I make it our business to smile encouragingly when we spot a lady with a blanket over her shoulder and two baby feet sticking out.
I’ve never seen The Game of Thrones, but a breastfeeding mom and baby should never be shown on a TV show for an eww, yuck factor. A nursing couple is a beautiful thing.
It’s not a baby, it’s a nine year old sociopath.
“This video may be inappropriate for some users. Log in to confirm your age”
The top two comments explain how that happened.
@11:
And lest anybody think Pierce R. Butler is confused, I can attest that in my local market I have actually seen genuine duck breasts.
Re: fertility during lactation – As with so many other things, it varies with the individual. Certainly it depends not only on IF you are nursing, but how often you are nursing, and how “in demand” the milk supply is.
I nursed our only child for 2 years 10 months, at which time she weaned herself. She was 100% breastfed until she was about 10 months old (again, her choice). Her dentition was rather late and it has always seemed related that she showed no interest in solid food until she started grabbing it off my plate at 10 months, around the time she started to get her first teeth. My monthly periods did not return until she was 13 months old, at which time her primary nutrition was no longer coming from breast milk. I sensed that my body “knew” that, and the decreased demand changed the hormonal balance, signaling to the brain that my body could now support a pregnancy (hence, ovulation).
In any case breastfeeding (or not) — and the how, when, why, how much, etc. — is entirely a personal choice and is no one else’s business. I am a very strong supporter of breastfeeding AND ALSO of women’s freedom to choose to do so, or not, without harassment, guilt, or recrimination.
And yes, women can and do breastfeed very discreetly — I always nursed “in public” and I doubt that many people knew.
I doubt breastfeeding will ever be mandatory at least here in the US even given all the other logical reasons why it is sometimes impossible. As with single payer in health care the businesses that profit from nursing babies would lobby against it most vigorously.
America has weird reactions to things sometimes especially in relation to sex.
uncle frogy
In general, mammals lose the ability to produce lactase at a young age. As the enzyme decreases, the ability digest lactose decreases; milk starts to cause digestive upset, which encourages the animal to self-wean. Humans are one of the very few (the only?) mammal able to consume milk in maturity, and even then, about 75% of adults have diminished or absent capacity.
It seems to me that if anyone wants to pinpoint a “proper” age for weaning, we should look at societies with zero lactase persistence.
I never understood this obsession with people having to stuff their babies under blankets.
People see much more of a boob on the average billboard that advertises something that has nothing to do with boobs as such but a bit of skin when a baby is nursing? Eleventy!!!!
Yes, it is technically possible that you might see a nipple.
If you are a creep who stares in order to catch the moment between taking out the boob and the babe latching.
It’s nothing but outrage at the fact that a woman uses her boob for something that is not pleasing straight men.
What a great article! I think it was very respectful of mothers who wouldn’t or couldn’t breastfeed; it just focused on those who did for a long time.
[OT about discreetness: none of my kids could ever be persuaded to feed under a t-shirt, blanket and the like (would *you* eat under a blanket?) luckily I live in a country where mothers have a right to nurse wherever they are.]
I’d like to see further research on the connection between breastfeeding duration and the mother’s breast cancer risk. Correlation is not causation, but with both my mother and MIL having had breast cancer *and* having been prevented from breastfeeding (you know, the seventies) I tried hard to nurse as long as possible for my own sake.
The blanket thing never worked, as far as I remember, with either of my two. We went with sit down, hoist t-shirt, attach baby. Considering the size of a baby’s head relative to the size of my breasts, I doubt much was visible, not that I care if it was.
Rob Bos: In my experience, a baby doesn’t have to be very old before it can get at a breast without help. After my second son became mobile I could call him from across the room by lifting my shirt, a trick reserved strictly for family settings. He nursed until age two or so, older son for maybe sixteen months.
I was peripherally involved in some business where a woman sued a pharmaceutical manufacturer because their product was distributed into breast milk — which she claimed made her child sedated — while she was breastfeeding him — at age 6!
She wanted a few million dollars. The case didn’t go all that far.
One of the books I read recently suggests that dairy milk, rather than benefiting us, may actually be making some things, like osteoporosis worse, to give just one reason why there may be a good argument for this adaptation being not quite as useful as it should be. The second issue is… well, apparently the standards for bacteria from a single cow are “lower” than for a “batch”, once mixed. Its unclear to me if a) this is a loophole, b) its being taken advantage of to mix infected milk into the whole batch, or c) if it even matters, since the milk is supposed to be pasteurized anyway. But, milk does go bad, and its sometimes done so “faster than it should, if the stuff in it is actually dead, like its supposed to be”, so I am also not sure how much I trust that the industry is doing its job properly, to make sure its actually safe.
That, and its like, the number one staple for “state based subsistence programs”, with people often being nit picked over vegetables, or denied real alternatives, while ending up with 3-4 gallons of the stuff in their cart, in some cases. If there is a problem with us relying on it, then.. the government is going the, “We don’t believe it, or possibly care, and its a cheap way to provide the minimum nutrients to someone’s kid, instead of actually making sure they get truly healthy food.”, which just pisses me off, if the case.
But, yeah, when it comes to actual breast feeding… Past a certain age, it gets… odd, at the least… lol
I really liked this for the prudes and pervs that have a problem with public breastfeeding.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–QZ2vs_oU–/18k2d3i9vooaojpg.jpg
Fortunately public breastfeeding is accepted by most people where we live.