Wondering about Weaning

My son is now nearly 15 months old; technically, no longer a baby but a toddling toddler with a toothy smile and a growing vocabulary of, well… not exactly English, but he gets his point across. It’s kind of a baby-English creole. “Ka” is cup and “ga” is milk and “ka ka” is cracker. He calls me “pa pa,” but I know what he means. Point is, he’s a little person now.

Maybe that’s why I’m starting to feel a bit sheepish about the fact that he’s still nursing.

He loves it. I love it. It’s great for him and a sure fire way to help him sleep. I don’t see it ending any time soon as he hates milk (of the non-human variety) and has never soothed himself with either a pacifier or a bottle. That boy is a purist.

But he’s the only kid over 10 months still nursing in his daycare, and when we nurse in public, people are starting to make comments. “Oh. So, he’s still nursing?” (attempt at self-censoring, but ultimately...) “He’s getting kind of big for that, huh?” My husband looks at me worryingly now when we nurse and tells me that “we” don’t want him to be nursing past 2 years of age. I nod reflexively in agreement. It does seem weird. But why?

Is it because breasts are so sexualized in this culture that when our little ones start acting more childlike than babylike, breastfeeding just seems a bit odd? Is it because we’re simply not accustomed to the image? Or, alternatively is it because nursing toddlers is not what we humans are meant to be doing? Stripped of our cultural taboos and expectations, what would be the “natural age” of weaning anyway?

I did a little digging and comparisons with our closest genetic relatives, who we can assume are freed of our cultural constraints, seems to indicate that the “natural” age of weaning is actually quite late by our standards. Here are some of the arguments:

• Larger mammals nurse their offspring until they have quadrupled their birth weight. In humans, quadrupling of birth weight occurs between 2.5 and 3.5 years, usually.
• For chimpanzees and gorillas, the two primates closest in size to humans and also the most closely genetically related, nurse their offspring for six times the length of gestation. In humans, that would be: 4.5 years.
• Non-human primates (monkeys and apes) are weaned at the same time they were getting their first permanent molars. In humans, that would be: 5.5-6.0 years.

For those who balk at inter-species comparisons, other research has found that in societies where children are allowed to nurse "as long as they want" they usually self-wean, with no arguments or trauma, between 3 and 4 years of age. I found one study that looked at American women who practiced extended breastfeeding and “child-led” weaning, and it found that the average age their youngest child weaned was 3.0 years old (older children were weaned earlier due to the arrival of a baby sibling).

But this is clearly not the norm in the U S of A. The American Academy of Pediatricians officially recommends breast feeding until the age of one, even though the World Health Organization recommends at least two years of breast feeding for women worldwide. Could it be that Western cultural expectations and practices are out of sync with the natural order of things? Most likely.

But maybe that’s OK.

We generally don’t live the lives of our more nature-dependent ancestors and global cohabitants. Earlier weaning allows women to assert themselves more freely in the workplace and to socialize more flexibly with friends and family, and the science shows that the health benefits of breast feeding taper off as the baby gets older. I guess at the end of the day, it should just be a choice.

But it doesn’t seem so much like a choice to me. My sister, who breast fed her son for 26 months, suffered serious derision, disdain and disgust from people, including those who are meant to support and love her unconditionally most – her family. And she’s fortunate enough to live in a community of yoga-practicing, organic baby-food making, co-sleeping moms, who generally support the practice.

So, where does that leave me? People ask me when I plan on weaning him, and it makes me feel like a bit of a flake, because I don’t have any “plans” per se. But I can’t really picture doing it anytime soon. Complete strangers will interfere in very few aspects of your life, but the decision to, or not to, and for how long to breast feed, like so many parenting decisions, is treated as fair game for intervention. I have to admit, I fear those interactions.

I guess I should ignore all that noise and make the best decision for my baby and my family. But, as my frantic search for parenting guidance from friends, books and the Web indicates, I don’t always have a good handle on what that is. I like to trust my instincts, but it’s hard to ignore the loud and pervasive messages, which seem to contradict my gut. It’s hard to swim upstream. But I guess that’s what your kids look for you to do sometimes.