>I'm sure there are others on this list who feel they are still nurturing
>their children every time they bring them to breast, even if only a few
>times a day. And I feel the close, nurturing relationship continues after
>weaning, regardless of the age of weaning or who initiated it.
>
>Please be careful in labeling people, you never know who you might offend.
I think of lactnet as a "looking-forward" forum, not a "looking-back" forum
- a place where we look for ways to optimize the experience of future
mothers and babies without feeling that the ideas we bat around are in any
way a criticism of our own experiences.
I assume we're all agreed that nursing beyond the age of two is normal and
thus desirable, if for no other reason that no one has shown that *not*
doing so has no negative consequences. I also assume many of us never did
so, or didn't want to, or didn't with one or more of our children. But what
we ourselves *did* is looking back. What we *can do* to raise the cultural
bar is look forward, identify nursing styles that tend to lead to premature
weaning, and help mothers who don't want to wean prematurely to learn
patterns that can help them avoid it.
Someone else asked whether setting the bar "too high" doesn't intimidate
mothers. Ah, but we set two bars. One is the mother's own, nudged up a bit
perhaps by the information we give her but still her own. ("You decided to
nurse while you're in the hospital and bottle-feed once you get home?
Nursing in the hospital is a fabulous idea! You might want to think about
using it it as a nap-time routine for a while, too...") The other is the
bar that we set for ourselves professionally: ("This study looked only at
breastfeeding success to 6 months. That really doesn't tell us much about
whether this behavior would sustain a breastfeeding dyad into toddlerhood.")
It's the second bar - the cultural bar - that I was talking about, and my
interest was in looking at the probable outcomes of certain behaviors, not
in finding out who did what and when. (And if anyone wants to know who
among us *pinched* her toddler during a photo shoot to make him stop fussing
- with predictable results - and then lied to him about having done it...
well, I'm not telling. Let's just say it was one of those nurturing moments
not to be looked back at as a model...)
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC Ithaca, NY
www.wiessinger.baka.com
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