Greetings! I am an adoptive mother of six children, now ages 7-19, whom I
breastfed for a total of ten years. I am not a professional. I am well
educated on the topic of breastfeeding in general, but have never become
certified in any way. I have been devoted to helping other adoptive moms
breastfeed since 1989.
I am a former Lactnet subscriber, some of you may remember. I left about
five years ago, planning to concentrate on finishing a book about adoptive
breastfeeding. I never got to the book. In addition to a chronic illness
worsening, I found myself in congestive heart failure. The stress from this
illness was the last straw for my 27 year marriage, to an MD.
I am currently getting back on my feet, in more ways than one. However, I
have had the opportunity to continue my support to adoptive moms (and
continued to learn from the experience) all along, thanks to the internet.
I am currently planning to start working to obtain certification as a
lactation educator, and hope to be prepared to take the IBLCE exam in the
next year or two.
I look forward to learning from each of you here on Lactnet, and hope that I
will be able to help support those of you who are working with adoptive
mothers, or other mothers who have similar issues. One special area I have
experience with is the topic of teaching older babies to nurse. A decade
ago, I was able to get my daughter, Julia nursing. She was a full-term
baby, born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. When I got her, she was
six months old, nine pounds, fed through a gastrostomy, and antisocial. It
took five months to figure out how to get her to accept both food and
comfort from my breast, but we finally made it, and Julia nursed until she
was 25 months old. Since then, I have had the privilege of following many
other adoptive mothers through their journeys to teach their older babies to
nurse. In these cases, the emotional benefits of nurturing at the breast
tend to be even more important, as many of these babies have been
traumatized, by such things as drug addiction, medical procedures or
parental abuse, or have spent their early lives in institutions, where the
human contact and attention they recieved was limited.
Experience has shown that there is no age limit after which it becomes
impossible to teach a child to nurse. I personally know of cases where
children as old as five years have learned to take comfort from the breasts
of their adoptive mothers, although the procedure with an older child tends
to be quite different than with an infant.
Best Wishes,
Darillyn Starr
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