The arguments put forth in attempt to discount the neuroendocrine effects of breastfeeding remind me of the arguments put forth in attempt to discount the effects of breastmilk on infant health... Is the earth flat or is it round? Well that depends on perspective... It is very hard for individuals to see the powerful role neurotransmitters and hormones play in their lives because they can't clone themselves and serve as their own controls... Just as we can't clone our babies and feed one ABM and breastfeed the other to see the different outcomes...we can't clone ourselves and see what we would have done differently if we were and weren't breastfeeding in a given situation... The way to see these differences is over large populations... But without giving some credence the intuition and anecdontal evidence, the numerous, rigorous scientific studies that are needed to decide the question conclusively will never be conducted... What if the founders of LLL had not acted on their intuition and the *anecdotal evidence* of their own lives? You and I would not have IBCLC or LLLL behind our names... We can't always wait for the science to catch up with our experience... As the mother of six breastfed children the first of whom I did not nurse anywhere near a normal course of nursing, I would say that nursing multiple children through to a natural weaning is helpful in seeing the neuroendocrine adavantages of breastfeeding... It is also helpful if you have the experience of having mothered both ways -with and without breastfeeding, because with more experience you can see the change in yourself when you are lactating and when you are not lactating, everything else being more or less equal... My children and my husband can tell when the youngest is weaning, because mom is less patient among other things... I remember my own mother encouraging me to breastfeed for the bonding...this had no effect on me whatsoever... bonding...smonding... My interest in breastfeeding was purely immunological as this was what I concentrated on when getting my biology degree- the molecular genetics of immunology... And even having nursed my first child nine months I would not have said that it did much for *me* in terms of bonding... Although I would probably have said at the time it made my son *overly bonded* to me... But looking back I can see breastfeeding did profoundly affect my behavior. I tried to return to college when he was just 2 weeks old. I remember going to campus and being so agitated that I could not sit in class...I just walked around for 2 hours conflicted...then I went home and let the babysitter go... On a concious level I wanted to return to school as soon as possible after giving birth- this made *sense* for a variety of *reasons*... My intellect and will tried to over power my maternal instincts, while I roamed around campus aimlessly, but because I was breastfeeding maternal instinct won out. My intellect wanted so much to continue with my studies that I left a prestigious school for a community college near my mother so I could solve my *problem* of what to do with my baby. I rationalized that my difficulty revolved around *who* was babysitting my child... My son was 3 months old when I tried to return to classes for the second time... I made it to more classes this time but ultimately I quit half way through the semester.... I was still breastfeeding so my maternal instincts again conquered my intellect and will, and my *solution* of having my mother be the babysitter turned out to be no solution at all... As I was making plans to move back to my original college, my mother told me, "You are never going to be able to leave this baby until you wean him." I don't think I even gave her a response. I'm sure I thought she was silly. I have a brain! I have an intellect! I have a will! You can't possibly think the reason I've dropped out school twice has ANYTHING to do with the fact that I am breastfeeding!!!! Maybe subconciously, to be on the safe side, I weaned him- but I rationalized that this was because I was taking a full course load and pumping was going to be impractical. When I registered the registrar offered to arrange my classes so that it would allow me maintain breastfeeding, if I was breastfeeding... (Was his wife an LLLL I have often wondered?) I turned him down. Now why on earth did I do that? After all, I had told myself that I was only weaning my child because it would be too impractical to continue breastfeeding... Now here was someone offering me a practical way of preserving breastfeeding and I was turning him down?!?! Now after weaning my baby I still found leaving my child the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life, but as a non-lactating woman I WAS ABLE TO DO IT... I was able to squash my feelings enough to leave him... I was not consciously aware that scales tipped in favor of mother-baby separation BECAUSE I had stopped breastfeeding... It was only through the course of nursing other children that I realized I was right when I thought my problem was *who* was caring for my son, but I still came up with the wrong solution because the part of my brain that was pulling me to care for my own child did not have the gift of speech. The part of my brain that had *good reasons* for wanting me to go back school did have the gift of speech and so it won out. But the other part of my brain could not bear it so breastfeeding had to go... The speech centers of my brain came up with perfectly rationale rationalizations for weaning, which was really a decision made by another part of my brain... We do things that we can't articulate even to ourselves because those decisions are being made by regions of the brain that are not well connected to the language centers. You can honestly believe that a lot of parenting decisions you are making have nothing whatever to do with the way you are feeding your baby and still be completely wrong about that... Have you ever seen the films of experiments involoving people who had the neuronal connections of the two hemispheres of their brains severed as a treatment for severe epilepsy? The subjects are shown two pictures... a bird is shown to their left eye only and an orange is shown to their right eye only (the optic nerve runs directly back to the vision center of the brain without crossing over) They are then asked to draw what they saw... They begin drawing an orange because the right hemisphere is dominant in activities like drawing... But when the observer starts asking the subject about what they are drawing the subject begins to add wings and limbs and a head to the orange because the left hemisphere is dominant in language and their left hemisphere saw a bird... When the observer points out to the subject that at first the drawing looked like an orange, and he asks the subject "Did you see an orange?...the subject says "No"... The observer presses the subject "Are you sure? That drawing looked like an orange.." The subject's left side of the brain is in conflict with the right side of the brain but since left side is dominant in language only the left side can *speak* to the concious mind of the subject. The concious mind of the subject *rationalizes* his actions by saying the bird only looked like an orange at first because he is not very good at drawing birds. What I am trying to say ( in a long winded way...sorry) is there isn't some vast disconnect between your body, your mind, your intellect, your will, your chemical being, YOURSELF...you are all of those things and what you do or don't do with your body, like breastfeeding or not breastfeeding, has profound effects that you may not be aware of conciously but that doesn't make them any less real... And it does no one any good for us to stick our heads in the sand and say just because we can make this or that intellectual rationalization for actions and behaviors, we don't even want to look into the mind body connection of breastfeeding... Ok sorry for my rant I resolve to be quiet on Lacnet for a good while... Jen O'Quinn *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html