Not really. Most babies start getting teeth and going through a subsequent biting phase around 6-9 months, which is too early to wean. Usually you can train babies not to do it pretty quickly, though.
Always beaten to the punch. But yeah, a 6-month-old can potentially bite (and I understand many with teeth do, especially since they don’t have practive having teeth yet), and while I’m not an advocate for breastfeeding until 8 or whenever, stopping when they can bite isn’t realistic, either.
That’s exactly what bothers me about it…I think that in a lot of cases, it’s about the mother’s desire to maintain the baby-mother bond, and at some point, that it becomes more about what the mother needs than what the child needs. Also, I think that it’s important to make sure that the child has more appropriate coping mechanisms. It may be hard, but you have to let them grow up.
A third grader is about eight years old, so that would weird me out too. However, I still wouldn’t say anything.
Plenty of women nurse until age four or so, and it doesn’t cause any problems. Some of those children I know as teenagers now in my extended family.
Not that we plan to do that with our child.
But my primary rule is that it’s nobody’s else’s business how we raise our child, and it’s not our business how anybody else raises their child.
People make waaaaay too big a deal about breastfeeding in a variety of contexts. To me it’s a personal choice and entirely between mother and child. There are few ways to do it wrong.
I don’t think it has health benefits beyond 3-4 years old. By that time most kids aren’t going to be getting much nourishment from it, and their immune system is getting stronger. I don’t have kids yet but plan on breastfeeding, and if I enjoy it and it’s feasable, will do extended breastfeeding. I probably wouldn’t do up to school age, though, because I wouldn’t want to deal with people’s judgement (although around here, judgement and the gross-out factor starts after your kid is toddling), and even if I enjoy nursing my older child, I think I would prefer to teach them to soothe themselves without a boob after toddlerhood.
It’s typical in many countries still for kids to nurse for comfort until very late in life and there’s no evidence there’s anything negative associated with it. I personally know many people who were breast fed until later ages and I’ve seen nothing to indicate it causes maladjustment or relationship issues with their mother. My friend from Korea slept in her mother’s bed and nursed at night until she was 10 years old, and she says this was utterly typical there at that time (she is 42). A close friend of mine growing up, and her 3 sisters, nursed until they were 7 and 8 (her mom didn’t hide it, and it wasn’t so weird to see them nursing - unusual, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable about it as a child). Etc. I have never heard of anyone being breast-fed past the age of 10-11 (or when pubertal processes are beginning).
I think we can all agree that while most of us consider breasts to be sexual at least in this culture, there is nothing sexual about our own mother’s breasts, whether or not we were nourished by them or for how long. So that point is moot.
I breast fed all 4 of my children, so I am much less bothered by extended breast feeding than most. But my neighbor has a 5 year old daughter who nurses A LOT and I admit to being uncomfortable about it.
Yes, of course. “I think that’s weird” is nowhere near it.
That is the motivation for everyone who tells other people how to parent, and they’re all just as insufferable and self-important.
–Cliffy
I am ambivalent on this issue, though I find it interesting. However, I do find the ‘it’s okay in other cultures, so it should be ok in ours’ defense to be particularly weak. Varying degrees of incest have been acceptable in cultures past and present that would not fly in ours. Of course, if late-development breast-feeding was considered normal in latter-day Korea, or where/whenever, then that practice would stand a good chance of not causing psychological damage to the child. But in our culture, where it stirs the sort of debate we are engaging in here (not to mention all the squicky feelings), it poses a much larger threat. There’s nothing wrong with running around topless on a hot day, but you’ll receive a lot less grief for it in some cultures than others.
Eh, my kid is only 1 but I’ve sort of gotten the impression that people who overreact to receiving parental advice are shitty parents who know it’s right and don’t want to be inconvenienced by following it. The bits of advice I’ve gotten from strangers have generally been pretty good, or at worst, well-intentioned. And if it’s truly horrible, which I haven’t encountered, you can just smile and say “ok, grrreeeat, thank you so much for telling me that! Have a nice day!” Some people act like parental advice-givers should be on the Group W bench with the father-rapers.
(Cue the anecdotes about how someone told someone that only pedophilic Nazis don’t give their kids haircuts with a blowtorch :rolleyes:)
Oooooh, you lucky, lucky, lucky daddy you. Long may this continue to be your experience with unsolicited parental advice.
(No, I don’t have kids of my own but a lot of my friends and relatives do, and I have seen some doozies of volunteer parenting coaches out there.)
Prolonged breastfeeding does have some potential risks. Nocturnal breastfeeding for comfort into the second year and beyond is associated with a manyfold increase risk of serious and severe dental decay (not as bad as prolonged nocturnal bottle feeding though). Continuing with breastmilk as a prime nutritional source into even the latter portion of the first year, or beyond, without Vitamin D supplentation, risks serious rickets, especially in most Western cultures in which mothers and kids have much less skin exposure to significant sunlight.
The subgroups within some cultures that commonly continue breastfeeding well into the second year and beyond are commonly doing it as a means of contraception, albeit a less than completely effective one.
My personal opinion is that babies get the central incisors as their first teeth at 6 to 9months in order to bite and to thereby motivate a mother to start introducing other foods than the breast alone, to slowly prepare for a weaning process as they get good at it during the second year of life. What other function does those early central incisors serve?
Cisco usually the people who give unsolicited advice are shitty parents or those who don’t have kids themselves and who think they know all the answers as they have at least not made any parenting mistakes (the only perfect parent is the one without children)… and grandparents who know that their kids must be dimwits and that the way they did it over two decades ago or more was the only right way. “Overreacting” may not be appropriate, but if you haven’t had to develop the sweet smiling “Thank you for you concern” while turning away and ignoring the well intended idiot/self-appointed parenting expert then you are unusal indeed.
Pandoranoid, you raise an interesting point. “Normal” anthroplogically is determined by the norms within a culture. Your topless analogy is most cogent: nothing wrong in many parts of the world with being topless on a beach or even just hanging out around preparing food outside the hut, but that does not mean that such behavior is normative in Kansas. And there are very few parts of the world where a majority breastfeed beyond age two (I believe it is over 50% in some parts of Indonesia, but that’s it.) There is no culture in which breastfeeding a child who is eight is considered the norm. Or five. Or four even.
Is there psychological damage from prolonged breastfeeding into school age and beyond? Probably not. And when you see circumstances in which others feel the need to offer unsolicited judgments about a child being breastfed, well the biggest boob in the room is not likely to one being suckled. But neither can one state that breastfeeding into school ages is normal when by definition it is not and neither can one state that it is without any potential consequences, ewww or no ewww.
…chewing solid foods?
Nope.
You do not chew with the central incisors, you tear things off with them. Babies chew the soft foods they are given with their back gums and even those who do not get their first teeth until 14 or 15 months (and there are a few) progress through the usual fingerfood progression just fine with no teeth at all.
If babies needed teeth to chew we’d get molars first.
I can only speak for myself but I’ve gotten some pretty good advice from strangers in restaurants, malls, airports, etc. People (especially old people) get excited about babies and they want to talk, and they usually want to share a tip or two. I’ve gotten no awful advice, and no advice from non-parents. Of my son’s 4 grandparents, 3 have given no advice and 1 has given a little bit. The vast majority of advice we’ve gotten outside of books has been from his doctor, who is really unusually good.
I don’t necessarily believe in “it takes a village” hippie kumbaya lalaland, but my policy in this as well as pretty much all aspects of life is to take in as much information as possible and weed through the good and bad myself. If someone gives me bad advice, I just won’t follow it. If someone says something flat-out rude, then that’s not bad advice, that’s them just being a dick. But again, I have not personally encountered that. My son seems to put people in a good mood wherever we go.
I’m 24 and I’m still perfectly willing to be breastfed, just not by my mom.
Women who want to keep their children dependent have many, many tools available to them. Breastfeeding can be used that way, but I think people focus on it because they see the breast as sexual. That is why we see so many more threads about it than we do other methods of parental control.
I don’t buy that if the child knows the difference between boys and girls then it is time to wean, it is arbitrary and again sexualizes breastfeeding. As for not if they can possible remember, I can remember being two. I would like to see someone suggest a guideline that doesn’t relate to sexuality or strangers being uncomfortable.
My daughter nursed until she was about two and a half. Long before I stopped nursing entirely, I stopped nursing in public, except in very unusual circumstances. I taught her not to tug at my shirt, or grab me starting about 10 months. One reason I weaned my daughter was that too often she was using it to harass and try to control me at home. It became a game to her. The reasons for weaning are myriad and the timing dependent on many factors. The one nursing is the only one well positioned to making the call.
Along these lines, something I find VERY telling is that in all the stories I’ve seen about women continuing to breastfeed their older children, they are always daughters. Seems a little self-explanatory (and icky side reinforcing) to me…
Not true in this thread, at least if you count four- and five-year-olds as “older children”. I specifically mentioned a nursing preschooler son back in post #10, and (though I didn’t specify it there) one of the late-nursers I personally know was a boy.
While I’ve known of as many boys being breastfed for extended periods of time as girls, I am still at a loss as to how your perception of a girls bias is so “very telling”, “self-explanatory”, or “icky reinforcing” … despite the falseness of the initial observation, can you spell that out as I for one don’t get what you are trying to imply.
I mean, hypothetically, if your perception was true, all I’d read into it is that our societal sexual fixation on breasts is enough to bias the pot some against Mom’s continuing to breastfeed boys past “babyhood” (or at least against doing so in a way that it can be observed than the likes of those who think of breastfeeding with a sniggering “I’d like to suckle on that!”) and that daughters suckling longer is less subject to as much societal passing of judgment and of comments. Or possibly, because of the values of those observing, boys breastfeeding longer causes more storytelling about it. Is one of those what you meant? Somehow I am not getting that impression.
In all the media stories I’ve seen or read they’re always daughters. Maybe it says more about the media than anyone else…