Jo-Anne asks:

>Do people feel that self- or natural weaning occurs before one year, or
>two years?

I think that my research indicates that 2.5 years is a general minimum for
the normal/natural duration of breastfeeding in modern humans, and that,
given the opportunity, *MOST* children will nurse until they are 3-5 years
of age.

I think that many times, when a mother says the baby 'self-weaned' at an
early age -- before 2.5 years -- that the mother may have been subtly, and
perhaps even unconsciously, encouraging the child to wean.  She does so by
such practices as feeding lots of solids, nursing only after meals,
routinely asking the child to wait until later to nurse, designating many
places as off-limits for nursing, and even just acting exasperated when the
child asked to nurse or during the nursing.

Of course, nursing strikes can easily be misinterpreted as self-weaning if
the mother thinks children are *supposed* to want to wean at 8 months, or 10
months, or 14 months, or whatever.

At someone posted, an overactive let-down can make nursing unpleasant for
the child, instead of having its usual pleasant, reinforcing, attributes.
When that is the case, the child will nurse as long as they need to for
basic food needs, and as soon as they think they can, they'll wean.  This
doesn't mean the mother did anything wrong, or encouraged weaning.  And it
doesn't mean that breastfeeding is only for food -- it is also for its
health-promoting and disease-fighting properties, and for comfort, as long
as it continues.  But if the child is relatively healthy, and gets no
comfort from nursing, then early weaning is to be expected.

Finally, as with any human variability, there will be both ends of a normal
distribution -- so that some children will want to continue nursing until 9
or 10 or 11 years of age, and other children will self-wean at less than a
year.  The early weaners may be children who were thumb-suckers in utero and
continued to self-soothe with their thumbs/fingers/pacifier after birth.
They may be children who seem to have low needs for physical contact, who
are constantly on the go, who are extra-curious about the world around them
and want *out* of mom's arms at the earliest possible moment.  They may also
be those kids who are very healthy and eat a lot of solids at an early age
-- all indications to their body that probably it would be OK to stop
nursing.  In the past (and today in parts of the world where diseases are
rampant and medical care is not available) these early-weaners may have died
of disease, or not made it through the 'hungry season,' while their
still-nursing counterparts survived.  Where diseases are few and medical
care is available, these early weaners may do OK -- not as good as if they'd
nursed longer, but still OK.

I guess I don't really like to see specific cut-offs for ages, but rather a
range of variation, with an understanding that there will be kids on both
ends of the extremes of the range of variation.  More important is to debunk
the myth that most children will lose interest in breastfeeding between 6
and 12 months -- which is the typical garbage printed in most baby/parent
magazines.


Kathy Dettwyler


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