Someone wrote:
>I bristle at the thought of charactering a set age range as "normal".
The posting to LactNet about normal weaning ages being 2.5 years to 7.0
years is based on my research. If you have not read it, I highly recommend
you do so! You can find it as chapter 2 of "Breastfeeding: Biocultural
Perspectives."
Saying that there is a normal range for weaning in humans is no different
from saying there is a normal range of length of gestation, a normal range
for age at eruption of the first permanent molars, or a normal range for
first menstruation. Weaning is a BIOLOGICAL variable. The fact that we
can muck about with it culturally as much as we have, while we can't really
change eruption of the permanent teeth or age at sexually maturity, does
not change the fact that weaning is fundamentally a BIOLOGICAL variable.
The weaning range of 2.5-7.0 years is based on looking at correlates of
weaning in the other primates (humans are primates too). Age at weaning in
the non-human primates is highly correlated with other life history
variables such as length of gestation, body size at maturity, timing of
eruption of the first permanent molars, etc. We assume that the non-human
primates do not have complex cultural beliefs about how long their
offspring should be nursed, but humans do, to the extreme that some
children are weaned at birth. If you take the life history variables from
the other primates and their relationship to age at weaning, and you use
these to predict age at weaning in humans, you find a range from 2.5 years
to 7.0 years. None of the predictors fall at less than 2.5 years.
Research collected in the 1940s suggests a typical world-wide average
weaning age of 2.8 years in "traditional" cultures, with many cultures
having an average of 3-5 years, prior to the widespread marketing of infant
formula.
>We need to remember that very few
>mothers (comparatively speaking) nurse their babies beyond a year
This is simply incorrect. MOST WOMEN IN THE WORLD nurse their children
well beyond a year. I know that many people on LactNet live and work in
the US and deal with mothers who think 3 months is a long time to nurse.
However, this does not change the fact that most women in the world nurse
their children well beyond a year, many beyond two years, and some even
beyond 3 years. There are women in the US (more than 1,000 of them that I
know of) who nurse their children beyond 3 years, in a cultural context
which is not supportive (to say the least).
>and of the
>ones that do most wean before age 2.
According to Nestle/Carnation in the summer of 1999, 2% of women in the US
with children under 2 years of age were nursing a child over 13 months of
age. I am not aware of any statistics that track how many women nurse til
2 or 2.5, etc.
It would be the very rare child who voluntarily weaned before 1 year, and
probably before 2 years, with the exceptions I mentioned in my earlier post
(specific personality types). Likewise, it is very difficult to encourage
a child to nurse who is no longer interested. I think that if allowed to
nurse ad-lib, most children would nurse until 3-5 years of age, and then
would wean "on their own." There is a huge difference between true
child-led weaning and a mother encouraging a child in overt and subtle ways
to stop nursing.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D. email:
[log in to unmask]
Anthropology Department phone: (409) 845-5256
Texas A&M University fax: (409) 845-4070
College Station, TX 77843-4352
http://www.prairienet.org/laleche/dettwyler.html
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