Dear Editors,
        In the March issue of Child Magazine, in the Your Child Now section
pertaining to 10 month olds, I found the following statement:

 "There is no "right time" to stop breastfeeding your baby. Some mothers do
it in the first couple of months after birth so they can go back to work;
others breastfeed supplementally for up to two years."

"Finally, there's a compelling physiological reason to start to wean now:
youngsters who nurse more than twice a day past their first birthdays may
not eat enough solid foods to get all the nutrients they need."

There is no reason for a mother to have to wean because she is going back to
work.  There are many ways to continue nursing while working, including
pumping.  I returned to my teaching/research job at the university when my
youngest was 3 weeks old, and he is still nursing at 4.5 years.

More importantly, your second statement is totally false.  It is not the
case that a child who nurses more than twice a day past their first
birthdays may not eat enough solid foods to get all the nutrients they need.
Where in the world did this notion come from?  Certainly not from the
scientific research literature.  There is no better food for children than
breast milk.  No solid food can possibly be better for a child than breast
milk, thus there is no way that taking in "too much" breast milk can result
in a baby not getting the nutrients s/he needs.  That's like saying that if
a child eats too many fruits/vegetables/grains/meat they won't have room to
eat all the *candy* they need.  Children need more food than just breast
milk alone, for some children beginning about 6 months after birth, and for
others not until well into their second year, but there is absolutely no
reason at all for a mother to begin weaning her child to fewer than 2
nursings a day at 10 months.  I repeat, there is no solid food that could
possible replace breast milk in the child's diet to the child's nutritional
benefit.

I am a professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University, and have done
extensive research on the physiology of infant feeding, health, and growth,
and have many publications in scientific journals.  My research on when
would be the "right time" to wean your baby, based on comparative primate
studies, and treating humans as physiologically the primate mammals we are
(instead of using recent and idiosyncratic cultural beliefs to decide
nutrition/medical issues) provides predicted ages for a natural time to wean
in modern humans.  These predictions all fall between 2.5 years and 7.0
years.  That's right, an absolute *minimum* of 2.5 years.  To suggest that a
baby should be weaned from the breast at 10 months so it can eat more solid
food is like recommending that kittens should be taken away from their
mothers at 2 weeks so they can eat more Meow Mix.  Every veterinarian knows
that for optimal kitten/cat health, the kittens need to be with the mother
for at least 6 weeks, and preferably 9.  Likewise, human children need to be
nursing for at least 2 years (as the World Health Organization recommends).

The predictions of a natural age of weaning falling between 2.5 years and
7.0 are confirmed by cross-cultural studies showing that children allowed to
nurse as long as they like usually wean themselves between the ages of 3 and
4 years.  It is also confirmed by the persistence of the sucking instinct
until the 4-7+ year range in most children, and by research showing that the
child's immune system is not fully mature until about the age of 6 years.
In addition, ALL the research on the relationship between duration of
breastfeeding and health shows that the longer you nurse your child the
better the child's health (less SIDS, less cancer, higher IQ, etc. etc.
etc.).  Not to mention that the longer you nurse your child, the greater
your own protection against breast cancer (Newcomb et al.'s 1994 study in
the New England Journal of Medicine).

I'm sure that Child Magazine is dedicated to accuracy, and dedicated to
providing information to mothers that will help them make informed infant
feeding choices to maximize the health of their children.  Therefore, you
*really* need to read the current literature on breastfeeding and print a
prominent correction of your incorrect statement.  There are *compelling
physiological reasons* to nurse your child for a minimum of 2.5 years.
There are *compelling physiological reasons* to avoid adding solids to the
diet too soon, or in too great a quantity such that they replace the
healthier breast milk in the child's diet, instead of just supplementing it.
I would be more than happy to send you reprints of my published work on
weaning, or to write something for you myself.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Department of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
(409) 845-5256
Author of Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa, winner of the
1995 Margaret Mead Award, published by Waveland Press, 1994.
Co-editor (with Patricia Stuart-Macadam) of Breastfeeding: Biocultural
Perspectives, published by Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.