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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- 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 *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html