It’s obvious she derives pleasure from it.
Found this about the !Kung San…
http://www.dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/culture.htm
First, my reason for including it:
*The !Kung San of the Kalahari provide a unique perspective on our possible hunter-gatherer origins. As we have noted, they stand close to the root of both the mitochondrial Eve tree and the Y-chromosome Adam tree. *
As for what’s “natural” in nursing…
*Nursing commonly continues until age 4 and exceptionally until age 6. The child is typically weaned only when the mother discovers that she is again pregnant and informs her disgruntled toddler that her milk and energy are henceforth required by a younger sibling-to-be. Well-nourished but thin, !Kung San women seldom conceive within the first couple of years of nursing due to the frequency of suckling on demand.
!Kung San mothers carry their babies in slings, allowing them to suckle essentially at will throughout the day and night. <snip> Such frequent suckling day and night has hormonal consequences for the mother that tend to inhibit ovulation and hence delay her next conception.
In the rare event that a baby is born before the mother feels she can safely wean its older sibling, or it has a birth defect, then she may feel compelled to abandon the newborn. *
Well, the WHO encourages breast-feeding until 2 and that’s about it. My understanding is that their are no further enhancements to child health/immunity after that.
Secondly, I personally know a woman who breast fed until her child was about 8. When the child had a bad day at school, or was stressed out, that’s when she wanted to feed. Personally, I think relying on breast feeding as a coping mechanism is a pretty bad idea - at some point the child is going to have to develop a way to cope with things that doesn’t involve suckling, and 2 seems like as good an age as any other. Much better than 8 at any rate. Seriously - what’s the child going to do if they’re stressed at school? Attack their teacher?
I agree with this…most people I know who nursed for a long time were interested more in the bonding and comforting aspects of it than the nutrition past the age of 18 months or so. While that’s fine for a kid that age, I think that as they get older, they need to develop coping skills that don’t involve being attached (literally) to their mother.
Erm, could everyone please mentally remove the ‘their’ and add a ‘there’ in my last post?
Thanks
Yeah, I agree. When I was little, sometimes I’d just cry and at a certain point, my parents would just let me cry it out (when I wasn’t crying due to something like hunger or dirty diapers, but rather was bored or whatever) because at some point they just needed to have me learn to deal with being alone. I wasn’t a tiny baby at that point…but I definitely learned coping mechanisms that didn’t involve the breast well before eight. (Not that I was ever breast fed, but I digress.)
Wow. I always assumed breastfeeding stopped when the kid could walk around.
But, again, this ignores how extended breastfeeding actually works, and works just fine even when there are hours and hours where the child and parent are separated. One of the little guys I babysit for 10 hour stretches (he’s 2) is still nursing at least twice a day. He copes just fine without nursing while I have him; nursing is not his only “coping mechanism”. He’s never ever tried to nurse from me, and I’ve been watching him since he was 7 weeks old. He knows that’s something he only does with Mom. Her body has acclimated, so that she makes no noticeable milk during her work shift, so she’s not uncomfortable, but when she picks him up, she’s got enough for a snack for him. Then they nurse again before bed, and usually in the morning when she drops him off. Each nursing session is between 10 and 20 minutes.
Nursing a toddler/older child is not nearly as labor or calorie intensive as nursing an infant. There’s no reason at all that you couldn’t do it while out gathering roots and berries (or hunting, if someone stays with your kid). At some point during the day, you have to stop and rest anyhow, might as well do it with a kid on the boob.
As your cite says, it’s not that !Kung San people nurse until 4 and then decide to get pregnant, it’s that they get pregnant when their older child is about 4 (because there’re no longer hormonal contraceptive effects) and then they stop nursing because they’re pregnant. Does this mean humans are “meant” to nurse until 4? Only if they’re skinny and fertile. A fatter woman can nurse while pregnant, and an infertile woman wouldn’t get pregnant again or lose her milk at all.
We fat Westerners with the Pill and wetnurses and formula have so effectively removed ourselves from the “natural” cycle of reproduction that nursing has, for thousands of years, been a culturally determined thing much more than a natural thing. And that’s really okay. Violins are not natural either, but I’m really glad some people play them!
Ah! Did not know this. I thought all women pretty much dried up during pregnancy. Color me informed. How common is it to be able to nurse during pregnancy?
To add onto what WhyNot is saying (I meant to address the leaking issue earlier, but forgot…this is a good place to stick it in)…in my experience, when the babies were really young, I would leak all the time, and I’d get engorged pretty fast if the baby didn’t empty them out (makes sense, the babies eat all the time, so your body is pretty much continually producing milk). As they got a little older and their feedings became more spaced out, the milk adjusted accordingly, and didn’t spontaneously leak out the rest of the time, except under really unusual circumstances. Usually, there has to be a trigger for what they call “let-down,” which refers to the milk flowing out (some people have easier let-down than others, though). If you are still nursing them when they are 2 or older, and it’s only maybe twice a day, I can’t imagine getting filled up enough for it to be uncomfortable or leak.
In fact, the reason they do it is probably because it’s an easy source of supplemental nutrition for the child, I would think. In our culture, that’s not as necessary, since we have access to so much food.
Humans don’t do much of anything that’s truly natural anymore, I don’t think. But we get by. 
A lot of nursing mothers have issues with biting kids. Sometimes, that forces them to stop breastfeeding - other kids never bite. A lot of babies reject the breast about the time teeth come in - the nipple doesn’t feel the same way in their mouths, they become more interested in the world around them and don’t want to have their face in Mom’s chest - and especially if the baby has had an alternative presented (some parents introduce cups around that age, many parents have used bottles - often with pumped milk - for when Mom is at work or off doing her own thing), they’ll decide they’d rather have a very portable bottle or cup. But a lot of babies and toddlers cling to the breast past teeth and well into toddlerhood. Some mothers have the committment to breastfeeding to break biting habits and keep breastfeeding - even if the habit is hard to break - other mothers are less committed and after the first bite just stop breastfeeding.
There are as many scenarios for breastfeeding as mothers and babies. This particular one is a little extreme.
I don’t know if anyone has numbers. There is no medical reason for most women to stop nursing during pregnancy; even a woman with a history of prematurity can do it safely up to 20 weeks (when the uterus becomes sensitive to oxytocin and could potentially be triggered into labor from the oxytocin released while nursing).
I’m still digesting that cite. Really interesting stuff beyond the breastfeeding question, how the women have effectively as much power as men. It’s interesting, too, how late the women become fertile, but then I have heard that it the amount of body fat is important.
My original thought was of a time when we might not have had “tribal” support or when the tribe wasn’t very extended as it is for the !Kung San. Finding shelter and potable water, watching out for predators, locating food, fashioning some rudimentary clothing, keeping a fire going, and teaching the child everything so they would eventually become self-sufficent, etc. would take a lot of time and effort for one woman. But it’s very possible that we’ve always been tribal.
Perhaps the evolutionary aim of the four year period is that nature is not about the individual. Maybe nature is telling the woman that it’s time to have another baby. I.e. you don’t want to invest too little in the offspring and let them die…but neither do you want to invest so much that you forego the chance to have more.
I agree that modern living in the USA probably circumvents, short-circuits, and otherwise obscures what the natural order might be…hence the cite to information about a “primitive” culture. Then of course there’s still the matter of interpreting what the observations mean.
Please tell me you meant that 
Quote a pediatrician friend:
“Cows milk is the best food in the world. It’s complete, nutritious, healthy… if you’re a calf! Not if you’re a human and not if you’re old enough to eat grass.”
Is she also going to be picking the daughters’ clothes when they’re in their thirties?
alice, we can report our own posts now I reported yours to ask for the change
In my friend’s case, with her youngest, it was about intimacy. He nursed at night, I think as part of bedtime, not throughout the day or for the nutritional value. He nursed until he was six.
I dunno; the impression I got was that the daughter was calling all the shots. Thinking about this, there are age-appropriate milestones for children to be obtaining, and the parents’ job is to get their kids to these milestones (going to school at four or five, getting a driver’s license around 16, graduating around 18, moving out on your own in your early twenties, and stopping nursing around one or two and growing away from mom). These parents are missing this milestone by a mile. I guess the question remains, what will the consequences be for the child (and the parents) for missing this milestone?
Probably not a whole lot greater than that of a homeschooled child, or one raised in a city with public transportation who doesn’t get a driver’s license until 25, or one who lives at home with her parents until she’s 30.
These things are really flexible, honestly. That’s the reason Brazleton called them “touchpoints”, and What To Expect broke them into “Will Probably Be Able To” “May Be Able To” and “Might Even Be Able To” (paraphrased) in their books. They’re not discrete, immovable points in time that, once passed, are gone forever. They’re a developmental process that unfolds for a different timetable for some people, generally without longlasting repercussions.
However - some of them are developmental processes that - once passed - are gone forever - or at least with semblance of normalcy for at least some kids. People who have adopted kids with attachment disorder because they missed the early developmental milestones around attachment deal with lifelong issues. I know of a couple who adopted a child from India at four who’d never had solid food - and the PT involved in training her to eat was incredible (after a year of working with her, she was still only eating mushed food). What makes one kid resilient to child abuse and the next a mess because their parents moved when they were four and they lost a sense of permanence isn’t understood.
This could turn out fine because this kid could be resilient. Kids raised more within the norms turn out not fine because they lack it. But the norm serves most kids pretty well - and being an outlier increases the chances it won’t work.
My mother was rather sad that I stopped on my own at nine months.
My ex-wife nursed my daughter till she was three. There were some PPD issues involved, though.