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11/15/2007: "Extended Breastfeeding - Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

FoxNews once again wants to stir up "debate" about breastfeeding. The story here is that some Australian researchers have "discovered" that some mothers breastfeed their children as late as the age of 7. Horrors! This follows all the stories bemoaning how so many mothers jeapardize their children's health by breastfeeding too briefly. Well, which is it? Too little or too much breastfeeding going on in the world?

While breastfeeding to the age of 7 might seem over-the-top-extreme, I have been in several American social circles where breastfeeding past toddlerhood is more the norm than the exception, even if not quite to 7 years. A lot depends on the mother. A lot depends on the child. I won't name what groups I belonged to (I've moved several times anyway), lest they and similar groups become targeted by some know-nothing government bureacrats, but I promise you, extended breastfeeding is a lot more common than "mainstream" society will admit. According to other research, the worldwide average duration of breastfeeding is to 4.5 years old, and that was easly seen among families in the groups I belonged to.

So what's going on here? One word: Motherhood. The primary definition of a mother is that she is the first line of defense of any young child against the great big world. She reads the needs of her child and she fills them. Mother loves, protects, nourishes, nurtures, and soothes boo-boos and illnesses. Her breastmilk is teaming with the antibodies against all the big bad germs, and is full of the electrolytes the child needs when he/she does manage to get sick. Sometimes there is no other way to communicate comfort and love to a small child. Frankly, without the breast to comfort my children when they were young, I would have been at a loss to come up with something that worked as well. Babysitting someone else's bottle-fed child was always a bit of an extra effort for me, because I had never actually fed a bottle to my own children. (Yes, I had used a breastpump and let other people feed my babies, but putting a bottle to a baby's lips has always felt foreign to me personally.)

As my own children got older, of course our nursing occasions became less and less frequent. It was pretty much confined to just at home, only at bed time to ease them into sleep, and if somebody came up with a severe injury like a bloody knee. Yes, I tandom nursed for a while, in fact, twice, each time one baby and the next older sibling. (But never simultaneously - that irritated me too much.) Believe me, all of my children eventually outgrew it on their own. It became a right of passage for them, each coaching the next younger on giving it up. It was no big deal. No screaming. No crying. They simply outgrew it. But I knew the climate we live in, and outside of very close relatives and those like-minded social groups I belonged to, it was simply something I never discussed. I did not volunteer it, and let everyone we came in contact with assume weaning was long past. Including the pediatrician. She never thought to ask about it and really, it never crossed my mind to volunteer it. It was such an everyday norm in my life, like breathing, that I just always had other things to discuss.

So why would anybody object? Well, I'd like to say it's the pathetic "sexualization" of the breast by western society, but you know, I don't think that's really it. I think instead it's the pathetic adultification of children by modern western society. I mean heck, it's big business. If your child can somehow be classified as too immature (and what are children, if not immature?), or coming from an "at risk demographic" (whatever that means), it keeps the government bureaucrats in paying jobs to get chidren into early childhood programs, pre-school, and pre-pre-school. Many thousands, even hundreds of thousands of careers depend on "intervening" in the mother/child relationship. I mean everyone knows that children should be up and walking, feeding & burping themselves, changing their own diapers by 6 months, and reciting Baby Einstein by 2 years. Certainly they should be cutting their own steak and washing the dishes by 3.

Just read that FoxNews report. A male psychologist (I presume by the name "Michael Burge" that he is male), who has never breastfed in his life, pronounces that there should be a "cut off line". Oh yeah? Set by whom? By the law? Is he going to send in the state troopers to enforce such a law and rip that child off his mother's breast? (Images of Elian Gonzoles cowaring in the closet float before my eyes...) Burge states that he thinks a child becomes too dependent on the mother if they have such a close emotional bond that they are still breastfeeding. I think this is absurd. If a young child is this close to his mother, I can attest from experience several times over that it makes the kid bolder and more independent!! There is such a trust between him and his mother, that the child thinks he can take bigger and bigger risks on the playground, because afteral, Mommy can fix anything! It's all he's known his whole life. She won't leave him, and he always feels her protective bubble, so to risk new adventures is to live! This drove me crazy, and I now have the gray hairs to prove it! ;-)

One thing I would not have done myself is participate in the survey these Australian mothers participated in. Not only would I not participate in opening the door for bureaucrats to pass legal "cut off lines", but I would not even open the door for any kind of public debate. Like they teach you in Tai Kwon Do, the best won fight is the one you avoid. The best won debate in a mother's own life is the one she thwarts before it even starts. The fewer meddling busybodies a mother allows to undermine her motherhood, the more confidence she will have as a mother. She will need it!

I think it's pretty sad that the world feels it needs to pass judgement on mothers who perceive a need in their children for closeness and nursing up to and past the age of potty training. It's a judgement call every mother must make with every child she has, and nature has put her alone in the position of making that judgement in her life. Not anyone else. Breasts are for loving the people close to a woman, whether it's her small children non-sexually, or her spouse. She wouldn't dream of telling that grown man to just get over his "dependence" on her for physical closeness in the world. Why should her young children rate any less?

All the Breast,

Suzanne.