Talk about breastfeeding

Remember that time we had some friends visiting us and stayed with us for 3 weeks? Of course, you don't. How can you remember, unless you are my family members who knows every single thing about me. Anyway, I remember asking my friend unending questions about having a baby, and one of our conversation included breastfeeding. If you know science, and if you are well-informed, you will know that breastmilk IS good for the baby. But I was appalled when she told me how she was discouraged by her family members especially relatives when she breastfeeds for more than a month. But she is a very strong-willed person and is not easily dissuaded. She knows what's best for her baby. When she was here, her little boy was almost 2 years old and she was still breastfeeding! I was amazed as I never knew anyone who breastfed for that long.

Today, I came across this article and thought it was an excellent article. The message was clear and right to the point! I thought I'd reproduce that article as I'm afraid it will be taken down soon.

Yes, actually, breast is best
Linda McIver
September 20, 2008

I didn't set out to be weird. I didn't intend to be strange. It wasn't a deliberate choice to do something so way out, something that was obviously not quite right. Not just bizarre, but frankly rather distasteful. Some even find it disgusting. The thing is, it's OK when you start. People are even supportive initially. But as you keep going, failing to stop at the invisible stop sign, people start to get very edgy. It starts to seem a little perverse.

Apparently there is a rule I didn't know about. You stop breastfeeding by 12 months at the latest. Continue any longer than that and … well, it's a bit twisted, isn't it?

"Will you still be breastfeeding her at her 21st?" It's delivered with a smile - it may be the funniest thing the speaker has said all day, possibly even all year - but, let's face it, this is the 100th time I've been asked the question this week, and it wasn't funny the first time. My mother was the first to say it. I knew she would have a hard time with me "failing" to stop breastfeeding when my daughter, Chloe, was one. She always referred to my friend Ann as "that woman who was still breastfeeding her toddler at your baby shower".

But, to her credit, she came around. When I asked her why it was so wrong, she had no answer, and finally admitted that it was just what she was used to. She could find no reason why I should stop at the magic 12-month mark.

Which is just as well, because I would not have stopped whatever she said. I was happy to keep feeding Chloe, and Chloe was happy to keep feeding, so why stop? When I went back to work when she was 11 months, a feed when I got home on Daddy's day, or when I picked her up from child care, was a nice way to reconnect. It was an excellent behavioural tool - a feed could always calm her when she was hurt or upset. A feed always helped to get her off to sleep (yes, I committed the terrible crime of feeding her to sleep, right from the start. Oh, the shame), and it was brilliant the few times we flew - feeding on take-off and landing made the flying thing a breeze.

Yet despite the fact that breastfeeding was overwhelmingly positive for Chloe and I, and for my second child, Jane, who is still feeding at 18 months, I have received a host of negative responses and comments. Everyone feels qualified to offer an opinion. From the type of social pressure in the joking comments such as the ones above, to the more disturbing pseudo-medical comments. "It's time you gave her own immune system a go" (actually breastfeeding has a host of immune benefits, and helps to strengthen the baby's immune system at least until two years of age - studies haven't been done beyond that age yet, but there's no reason to believe that immunological components of breast milk would disappear at that age). "You're stopping her from getting adequate nutrition from solids" (breast milk is nutritious, and my children eat plenty of solids as well). "It's too draining for you physically." (I'm doing fine, thank you!) "It will make her too dependent on you." (Research in the US by Professor James McKenna of the Mother-Baby Behavioural Sleep lab at the University of Notre Dame suggests that the reverse is true - children who are attachment parented, who tend also to experience sustained breastfeeding, are more confident and independent in the long term.)

Why do people have a problem with it?

The problem seems to be a strong feeling that it is wrong for the child somehow. That it makes the child "unnaturally dependent on his mother" as Dr Spock wrote in the 1950s, or interferes with nutrition or taking up of solid foods. A GP once told me that I should not be feeding my toddler at night, because it "interferes with her daytime nutrition". This is based purely on prejudice - there is no medical reason for it.

It is interesting to challenge our assumptions and instinctive reactions to milk. Apparently it's OK to feed your child cow's milk (or formula made from it) at any age, but continuing to give her your own milk is weird. Possibly even perverted.

At a recent meeting of the Australian Breastfeeding Association someone mentioned that her mother was raised in a village in Eastern Europe, where they would try to ensure that two women got pregnant at similar times, so that they could share working and raising the children. One mother would go to work in the fields, the other would stay home and breastfeed both children. The next day they would swap roles. Almost every woman in the room immediately went "Eeeew! How could you let your child drink someone else's milk?" A very wise breastfeeding counsellor by the name of Shirley Brown smiled at us all and said, "It's funny, it's OK to feed your child an animal's milk, but not another person's!" Until we question our prejudices, we can't detect the ones that are baseless.

Many people object that "it's just for comfort", which raises the question, "What's wrong with comforting my child?" (It's also medically wrong, by the way - as well as the immunological components, there is plenty of nutrition in breast milk.)

It may be that it challenges the notion of parental control - that we should be controlling, almost forcing the child to do what we perceive to be right. Child-led weaning is the antithesis of this - allowing the child to do what feels right seems to be a real source of tension. There is a perception that a child left to wean herself will choose never to wean.

It may be true that they don't "need" it - after all, plenty of children do fine on formula from the start. But even if they can survive without it, that doesn't make it necessary to stop. I can survive without chocolate, too, but I choose not to give it up, even though it has nowhere near the benefits of breast milk.

It is interesting that many people don't simply feel that sustained breastfeeding is not something they could contemplate themselves, but that it is actively wrong for anyone. This may be partly the usual human desire to see others replicate and hence confirm our choices, but it seems to be more than that. Somehow breastfeeding seems to have become tangled up in our strange attitude to the human body, nakedness and sexuality.

Is it about breasts? Certainly feeding a toddler in public increases the chance that a stranger (or worse, a friend!) may inadvertently glimpse your breasts. Yet I can't for the life of me work out why that should be so problematic. Is it the risk of accidentally arousing someone for a moment? Most mothers will not leave their breasts hanging out longer than necessary, and if a brief glimpse of nipple sends someone into a frenzy, I think there are other issues involved (and they're not my issues or my problem). Is it the interaction between child and breast? Particularly if the child is male, there seems to be a fear of sexualisation, that the child will somehow perceive his mother's breasts, hitherto a source of nourishment and comfort, as sexual objects. This, again, says more about the perceptions (and, yes, perversions) of the observers than the child. Anthropologist Kathy Dettwyler points out that the idea of breasts as sexual objects is a largely Western cultural belief, rather than inherent in the breasts themselves.

HOW do we decide what is obscene? It's not fundamental. There is no secret list, or magic criteria. It's a value judgement, based on social norms. Why are breasts obscene (particularly when they're under-age, as in the Bill Henson furore) but violence is not? As a society, we seem to have developed some odd attitudes to nudity, and to breasts. I know parents who go out of their way to make sure their children never see any naked breasts or bottoms, but people beating each other up, blood everywhere, guns and other random violence? No problem. By letting our children see naked flesh, and use breasts for their fundamental purpose, are we setting them up for some dreadful fixations? I can't see it. I don't understand how seeing breasts as a food source translates to sexual perversion. In fact, the recent media story about a model who refused to breast feed because she preferred to reserve her breasts for her husband strikes me as far more perverse than sustained breastfeeding.

Despite the World Health Organisation recommendation that children be breastfed until at least two years of age, a recent long-term study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that at 12 months, 28% of children were breastfeeding; at 18 months, only 9% of children were being breastfed; and at 24 months, the rate was only 5%. In contrast, by about two years of age a third or more of the children in sub-Saharan Africa were still breastfeeding. In five out of seven Asian countries studied, 50% or more were still being breastfed at two years; in Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala 40% of children; and in Indonesia 63% of children are still breastfed at this age.

Rather than asking why people continue to breastfeed, perhaps we should ask why people stop breastfeeding? It is interesting to note that, in the 1880s in the US, 95% of children were still being breastfed at two. By 1990, only 50% were being breastfed at birth. So what has changed? There is the problem of returning to work, plus the powerful marketing strategies of formula companies. That very 1950s idea that anything out of a scientific lab was far superior to anything natural may have played a part. Some women are forced to wean for medical reasons, or because breastfeeding is difficult or painful. Others choose to stop breastfeeding, and there are many possible reasons: wanting to drink alcohol; wanting the "freedom"; wanting their body back; wanting space; working; wanting to go out without needing to express; wanting/needing to go away; being fed up with it.

Sometimes children wean themselves. Some women wean due to the pressure and negativity surrounding sustained breastfeeding. Others become closet feeders, feeding in secret to avoid being judged. Sometimes even medical advice is inaccurate - mothers are put on to medication that is incompatible with breastfeeding, despite a safe alternative being available, or mothers are told they must wean for surgery, instead of expressing for the necessary duration and resuming the breastfeeding relationship when it's safe. Too often I hear stories at breastfeeding association meetings of mothers who visit a doctor because they have health problems and are told "first of all you need to wean" before the problems are even investigated, let alone identified.

I dream of a world where we don't impose our ideas on others, where women are given all the facts on breastfeeding, and none of the myths. Where the decision to wean is left to mother and child, where it belongs. Where we support women and children to continue their breastfeeding relationship as long as they want.
Linda McIver is a Melbourne writer.

I wanted to put a picture to correspond with the blog, and for a second there, I wanted to put a photo of naked breasts!! But nah, I don't want to arouse perverts!