Victoria brought up a very interesting belief system.  I have one client that comes to my support 
group who probably is from the Ukraine and if she is, I may ask her about this.  She would be a 
walking advertisement for relactation having dropped to a 25% supply and built it back up again.  
She really thought nursing to 6 months was a long time (what about teeth?) and now she's still 
going strong with her more than 6 month old baby.  He's delightful and not the least bit "spoiled" 
or "evil eyed".  If she is Ukrainian, I'll ask if she is willing to be an "example" for other women who 
are relactating.  

I think the use of other superstitions that are no longer used is a great idea.  The other approach 
might be to start the "trials of improved practices" tactic that international nutrition programs 
have tried.  If you can get a small group of "early adopters" - those that are the most likely to try 
the new hot thing, to try relactating, you might have the basis for "examples" for others to follow.  
With ingrained cultural beliefs it takes time, but I've seen many the ingrained belief fall to the 
wayside with persistent gradual effort.  How do you think the formula industry did it?

I'm also wondering if Victoria isn't correct in her assessment of the original source of this 
particular superstition.  Of course as lactation consultants we are the ones who get the 
"confessions" from women who think there are somehow radical and are in the closet about child-
led weaning.  So we all know how psychologically beneficial this can be and for the most part, I'm 
sure that is what everyone does see in their practices..  

Yet, I do get the ocassional situation where that child-led weaning is not necessarily done because 
the mother thinks it is a good thing to do, but because the mother sets no appropriate boundaries  
in the child's life.  This type of situation has nothing to do with nursing per se, but with the 
inability to say "no" to even safety issues for the child.  

I'm just thinking of an extreme case of a mother I know (not a client - a nursery school mom).  She 
would cook elaborate healthy meals for her child and her husband, which by itself is not such a 
bad thing, but then she would allow her son to have three ice cream cones in a row and feel 
resentful.  (This is when my son learned "different parents have different rules").  She would 
routinely keep right on cooking several meals in a row for her son only to then give ice cream 
when he kept refusing her elaborate concoctions.  This was not just a pattern with her son, but 
just about everyone.  She would do things for people that they did not ask for - and then complain 
endlessly about how overwhelmed she was by doing these things.  No limits were set for even 
simple safety rules such as not running into the street or leaving a store and running away.  I still 
remember the 30 min run down the beach at Coney Island trying to help her catch her then four 
year old son who ran away and didn't stop.  It was but one of many such episodes.  She weaned 
and restarted breastfeeding at least five times as she went through many rounds of IVF.  During 
this process, she urged her son to keep it secret from daddy and would complain about her son's 
continued nursing within hearing distance of her son.  She also blabbed about the IVF treatments 
to absolutely everyone and then told everyone to not let her husband know that they knew 
because he would be furious with her. 

So, you can see that the weaning and relactating has really nothing to do with her interaction with 
her son.  BUT if someone were to look at the situation on the surface, they might inappropriately 
conclude that prolonged nursing causes a child to be spoiled.   Sort of like if a baby falls asleep in 
bed with the parents even though they were drugged or smoking or smothered under a fluffy 
blanket - it was the BED that did it.

In societies that have fallen away from seeing child-led weaning as a normal part of behavior, it 
seems to me that you would get two types of women who would continue to do it.  Those who did 
enough outside research or had sufficient intuitive common sense to know that this was a very 
good thing for their child and would do it within a construct of a balanced parenting style that 
included appropriate limits and those who would continue to do so because they set no limits 
whatsoever as a basic pattern in their lives and may even actively resent the nursing while they are 
doing nothing constructive about setting the appropriate limits that might actually help them 
enjoy the continued nursing in a way that worked better for them.

Best regards, Susan Burger, MHS, PhD, IBCLC

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