I second Dettwyler's wisdom-enriched post about the statistical artifact we call an "average." Remember that arithmetic mean (the average) is derived by adding all the amounts of time together (from the speediest to the most pokey) and dividing by the number of individuals involved. That figure has NO RELATIONSHIP to ANY of the babies involved UNLESS a particular individual just happened to nurse that amount of time. Perhaps more appropriate (from a statistical standpoint) would be to find the modal (most frequently occurring) length of time babies nurse. To do so and be relevant to reality would require each time be linked to age of the baby; ie only those 1-day old babies contribute to modal length of time for 1-day old babies AND mothers helped NOT to take baby off. This would be MOST difficult to manage in a culture where so many other variables create situations in which the mother must CONTROL the feeding. We need to teach all mothers that babies be given the opportunity to control their own feedings, just as most adults do. I really LOVE the example given earlier of limiting a prospective parent to a 10-minute (or 5-minute) feeding to give them the idea of how a baby would feel when the breast is taken away. By placing ourselves in the position of the vulnerable baby, we may learn far more about their lives than a whole bookshelf of "baby care" books--which really seem to me to be designed to make parents feel good doing something the author has told them to do! mailto:[log in to unmask] "We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations." Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Ferndale, WA USA) [log in to unmask] WEB PAGE: http://www.telcomplus.com/~kga/lactation.html LACTNET archives http://library.ummed.edu/lsv/archives/lactnet.html