Have we gone off the deep end here?
[edited for sidescroll. --Gaudere]
There are two aspects to this case, the taking of the boy away from his mother because she was still breastfeeding him at age 5, and whether this breastfeeding is normal or desirable. IMHO, the continued breastfeeding was definitely not normal, but it doesn’t merit removing the child from his mother. Even when the judge conceded that it wasn’t sexual abuse, he kept the child in foster care because the child would be ‘embarassed’, which doesn’t sound to me like a good enough reason!
Stuckey, the mother, states that:
This is simply not true. The WHO don’t think so either.
She’s not even sure if she’s still producing milk, and if the boy is only feeding for a few minutes every ten days or so, then she almost certainly won’t be. Plus, at his age, he does not need the special nutrients that breastmilk provides. So this is not breastfeeding any more, it’s something else. She also says that this is a case of her ‘putting the child first,’ but doing that all the time, giving in to what the child wants, is not always in the best interests of the child. So this is really not an example of good parenting (though her other parenting skills may be better for all I know).
I think when the kid can order off a menu, you should stop breastfeeding him. YMMV.
It is true that in some cultures, breastfeeding continues for at least a few years. This is mainly because in these cultures, breast milk may be one of the few foods available. So it’s a means of being able to spread scarce food around a little more.
However, in THIS culture, it is wrong for an eight-year-old to continue nursing, and whether it’s the child or the parent who wants to keep this up (and I suspect it’s both), the child does need to stop.
Robin
I think breastfeeding an infant is great; it provides special nutrition for the baby and can help to promote bonding between mother and child. But when the kid is old enough to say "Hey Mom, I’ll be in around noon for a snack. . . " then it’s time to move on!
I don’t consider myself to have any hangups about nursing; I plan to nurse my own children. But the situation discussed here strikes me as very, very wrong.
My concern would be with the boy. Although I wouldn’t consider this to be molestation, I can’t believe this wouldn’t damage the kid in some way. It’s similar I think to my nephew who was held back in is nursery school because is parents, my brother and his ex, just didn’t force him to do it. I’m afraid that’s setting a trend that will stay with him for life. This breast feeding case is worse because it does have a tinge of molestation to it, even though I don’t think that’s what the mother is trying to do.
QueenAl is right, it’s definitely an example of bad parenting.
What? Doesn’t everyone occassionally enjoy a fine breast of milk with dinner?
I can’t believe the lack of wise ass remarks in this thread!
The title alone should be enough to fill pages.
Guess I’ll just have to check back in a tomorrow 
I couldn’t help but think that 30 years from now they’ll be talking about a serial killer who breast fed until he was in his teens.
Marc
I think it’s insane.
At the very LEAST, this should cause some serious attachment issues.
Not to mention, this kid is 8. Where will it end?
And no, it’s not sexual. However, what about when the kid starts going through puberty…could there be issues?
This lady is seriously messed up. Her argument that some cultures breastfeed later is nothing more than a justification for whatever her mental hangup is. According to this story she’s not breastfeeding to provide sustenance to her child. She estimates she only breastfeeds once every 10-14 days and doesn’t even know if she’s producing milk:
This is woman is very, very odd. This doesn’t seem healthy for the child.
I don’t have enough information about the child, or the mother to agree that the state is justified in breaking this family.
I don’t say that it’s a good thing. I don’t particularly think it is a destructive thing, alone, out of context with the boy’s total emotional health. I think it definitely has potential to be a negative influence on emotional growth and development. But I think state mandated familial rules are very dangerous.
Breast feeding a child too long doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as Judges taking children away from their parents. I know that causes horrible suffering, and it happens a lot. I certainly don’t recommend eight-year weaning schedules, but I have some serious questions about the other factors available for observation before I support this decision.
I think that Good Morning America has abused the boy, though.
Tris.
I’m having a difficult time calling what she’s doing “Breast feeding”, since by her own admission, she’s not certain she’s producing milk (the integral ‘feeding’ part),
so, if we call it what it apparently is - “having 8 year old son suck on her nipples every 10 - 14 days for a few minutes”, can we get a better handle on the issue?****
If she’s looking for a method of ‘connecting’ with her son on an intimate level, I’d say she’s looking in the wrong place.
*** Breast feeding to me is defined as: providing sustanance (ie human breast milk) to one’s child w/o other intervening steps, through the breasts directly to the child. It’s a good thing [sup]TM[/sup].
I’ll agree with the general consensus that THIS woman has issues beyond breastfeeding and age of weaning. She had the kid nurse ON CAMERA, for pete’s sake (Good Morning America should be ashamed of themselves!), knowing that other people might well harrass him for it. Most kids who nurse past a few years old prefer to keep it private, just as they would keep thumbsucking private, or their blankie private. It just seems disrespectful of the child, which is always an alarm button for me.
Mutter. Grumble. The woman seems to have an agenda, and that makes me leery of the whole deal.
And wring, comfort sucking is a normal part of breastfeeding, even in infancy. The relative importance of the nutrition vs. the comfort gained shifts over time, but it is still technically part of the same process.
As for age of weaning - how old is too old? I still think it depends on the child. Most kids seem to self wean between 2 and 4 years of age (that is, 2 and 3 year olds nursing is not unusual in the world at large, but over 4 it becomes a smaller and smaller minority). Some kids need it more (and yes, for the emotional comfort, which is a valid reason to nurse, IMHO), and hold onto it longer.
I went to a seminar on the ‘natural’ age of weaning, given by Dr. Katherine Dettwyler. She noted in her Q&A session afterwards that everyone she spoke to was uncomfortable with women nursing their kids for longer than they had personal experience with. So, women who nursed kids for 1 year couldn’t imagine how one could nurse longer than that - it was just ‘too old’. And women who nursed their kids for 18 months found older than 18 months peculiar. And women who nursed for 3 years found older than that odd. And women who nursed for 7 years found older than that weird.
Hmmm.
Maybe it has more to do with personal experience than some specific cutoff? Maybe if you have a child who happens to fall outside your expected range of the curve, you MAKE yourself comfortable with their needs, and address those needs, but you will still be unfamiliar with situations where longer suits some other child’s needs.
IMHO, the vast majority of kids don’t need it after about 2 or 3 years old. It serves no purpose for them, so they drop it (you can’t really force them to nurse if they don’t want to, as any nursing mom can tell you!). But some kids have unusual degrees of need, and some of those kids do not switch the behavior to other comforting behaviors like thumbsucking or blankies or nose-picking. And perhaps some of those kids who nurse longer than usual have an underlying psychiatric condition that they are attempting to self-medicate? Such as an anxiety disorder perhaps? If someone who nursed into their teens (as suggested by another poster) turned out to be a serial killer, would it be right to assume that the extended nursing was the cause, or could extremely extended nursing be a symptom of something else, much the way that many people with underlying psychiatric conditions self-medicate with drugs or alcohol or use other coping processes? I’d hesitate to assume causality without more data.
Personally, I always thought it was odd to nurse past 1 year. Not necessarily damaging, but definitely weird. Then I had my first son, who was very attached to nursing. It was the activity in which he took the most solace when upset. I tried to wean him at a year. His behavior deteriorated so rapidly (clinging, crying, anxiety) that I backed off - perhaps a few months more, when he didn’t clearly need it so intensely. I tried again a few times, judging his degree of need by his reaction - hey, I wouldn’t take away his blankie while he clearly still needed it, either. I slowly reduced the duration and frequency of nursing, but he still bounced right back to it under stress. Kids regress when they’re stressed, ever notice that? Anyway, he ended up weaning at just over 3 years old. When he weaned (under gentle pressure because I was pregnant at the time and it HURT!), he was sad and missed it, but was able to shift his comfort behaviors to other things. So that was appropriate timing, for him. And, by the way, he never expressed any unusual degree of anxiety otherwise - his teachers repeatedly noted that he was highly self-assured, had advanced social skills and empathy, and was self-confidant to a degree they hadn’t encountered before in someone his age. Maybe the ‘extended’ nursing, maybe just his personality, hard to say - not enough data (and can’t run the alternate experiment to check!).
As for the appropriate age to nurse to? The AAP says at least a year and after that as long as it is mutually desired (using the term ‘desired’ advisedly). The AAFP (American Academy of Family Practitioners) has a different position. (They don’t specify a time period, but note an increased risk of illness if weaned before two years old.)
The thing that I notice with the medical advice (AAP, AAFP, WHO) is that there is no upper limit specified. Why not? When my son was hospitalized at 18 months, the pediatric medical staff repeated one thing over and over - ‘keep going’ - they said nurse as long as you can, as long as he wants to go. They never once said ‘until he’s 4’, or ‘until he’s 5’, or ‘until he’s 6’. Why didn’t they specify? I submit that it is probably because it was more important to let his own needs determine the age of weaning. Case by case, not blanket ‘N is too old’ regardless of the individual’s situation and needs.
So, how old is too old? If a child nurses past 6 or 7, I’d personally want to check into whether there is an underlying issue that is being masked by the nursing behavior, such as an anxiety disorder. But if there isn’t another issue, perhaps it is just what they need, that child, in their life, with their family. And I won’t judge it as long as it works.
I think it still raises the same issue, though. Even though comfort sucking is appropriate for infants, it might not be appropriate for eight year olds. I don’t know this woman and I certainly don’t want to psychoanalyze her too much, but I wonder if the breastfeeding has more to do with her comfort than his. Even if the comfort is mutual, it might not be healthy for the kid and it’s her responsibility to take care of the child’s emotional and psychological health.
I’m don’t think the state should take the kid away based only on late breastfeeding, but I wonder if it’s not a symptom of a deeper problem. This is just speculation and even if the problems are deeper it still might not warrant taking the child away. But I think she is rationalizing her behavior. Other cultures might breastfeed longer but I’d be surprised if they did so without knowing whether or not they are producing milk.
Even if it’s appropriate in some circumstances to breastfeed an eight year old, the facts in this case don’t appear to make it an appropriate circumstance. She’s breastfeeding on a fairly random schedule without evidence of lactation.
Zoff - Oh, I agree that there’s something going on here other than the obvious. My response to wring was just to clarify that normal breastfeeding behavior DOES include comfort nursing, not just feeding. And yes, the mom needs to check out whether what she’s doing is the best thing for her child. But perhaps she’s already done that.
And my point about the shift in pattern between food and comfort sucking was that is usually is more important for comfort as they get older, not less. Still a nutritious part of a toddler diet (as my son’s pediatrician used to say), but the larger part of the process is the comfort as they get older.
BTW, random pattern nursing is the usual way kids wean. They drop to once or twice a day, then to once every other day, or once every few days, and then to only when they feel a particular emotional need to do so, and then they stop bothering at all. So the fact that he’s nursing once every 10 days or so is actually a NORMAL pattern, indicating that he’s well on the way to not breastfeeding at all anymore. It isn’t like he’s going to continue once every 10 days for the rest of his life.
Also, SURPRISE! (you did say you’d be surprised if this was the case, right?) Most women I know who’ve allowed a kid to self-wean don’t know if they are producing milk anymore by the time the kid is onto a once-a-week or less often schedule. They generally don’t bother CHECKING, since milk is not the issue, comfort is, and at that point the child is weaning anyway, so who cares if they are getting any milk? The mother may let the child nurse/comfort suck simply to ease the process of weaning, regardless of whether she thinks she has milk or not. Heck, the only way I know if I’ve ‘got milk’ is that my son swallows, and that I get engorged sometimes (this being my 8-month-old son, this time). When my first son was over a year, I never even got engorged anymore, either. Unless you check, you don’t know, and if someone had asked at that point, I might well have said the same thing (especially since I stopped being able to get any milk out with a good quality pump before he was a year old). Nobody said she does NOT have milk anymore, either - she just doesn’t know if she does. Heck, my mom could swear she’d long since ‘dried up’ years after she weaned my little brother, but she still let down when she heard a baby cry. Production isn’t a complete on/off thing. And it isn’t really relevant when a kid is self-weaning, either.
Anyway, I still think this woman isn’t necessarily doing the appropriate thing, because of the whole publicity issue. The agenda question does make me nervous, as I said.
oooops there was a lot of text with that quote. don’t know why it didn’t post. will repost later.
Of course ‘comfort’ is part of the sucking process (hence pacifiers), however, my position was/is “Breast feeding” specifically minus the ‘feeding’ is simply sucking on a nipple. So, to call it ‘breast feeding’ was, IMHO, a misnomer at best, and one that allows this woman to percieve her actions as somehow connected with a specific parental duty (ie feeding and nurturing her child). Since the ‘feeding’ is specifically not happening in this action, I don’t think it’s accurate at all to refer to it as breast feeding. The fact that an infant derives comfort, intimacy etc. from this while also getting nutrition is immaterial.
There’s all sorts of things that people do to make themselves ‘feel better’, ‘feel comforted’, ‘feel good’. Not all of them are appropriate behaviors for a parent to perform on a child of 8. It’s also likely that babies feel ‘better’/‘good’ etc when their diapers are changed. This doesn’t make it perfectly ‘ok’ to allow an 8 year old to continue to soil himself so mommy can help him ‘feel good’ by changing his pants for him. (no, she’s not doing that, but I see it as an analogous situation).
Parents are obligated to feed, clothe, nurture, and allow their children to mature.
Thanks for the brief education on breastfeeding, hedra (I’m not being sarcastic, by the way.) But I agree with wring. I guess I simply think there is a point where a mother should say “Timmy, you need to stop sucking on my breast.”
I understand the idea of comfort and weaning but those ideas seem more applicable to infants with less developed brains and means of reasoning. It can be traumatic for an infant to be deprived of a comfort in some cases. I don’t see the same damage for depriving an 8 year old of a breast. He is old enough to be told to stop and why he should stop. Comfort in the context of breastfeeding is not the most important thing at that point in his life. Learning limits is much more important.
My son would love to sit around and watch TV all day for comfort, but he needs to learn that he can’t do that. Though you can argue breastfeeding is biological and watching the tube isn’t, an 8 year old is past the age where the biological draw to a breast is overwhelming or even necessary. I guess the whole idea of an 8 year old breastfeeding for comfort simply strikes me as indulgence. Not enough for her to lose custody, but enough for me to wonder about the child-rearing techniques.