Author: API Blog

By Heidi Ripplinger

When I was little, I had a favorite baby doll. She was big enough for me to cuddle in my arms, was plump with silvery curly hair and had a round face. She looked like a cherub, and I loved her. I brought her with me everywhere I went. I changed her diapers, I wrapped her in warm blankets, I washed her face and I fed her bottles.

Yes, that’s right, bottles—the kind that had the pink nipple and the “milk” that flowed back and forth. I even had one that was divided into two liquids: orange juice and milk.

I never learned about nursing—well, that’s not entirely true. I think I intuitively understood what breasts were for, but I only saw one woman during my childhood breastfeed her baby, and she hid under a blanket, tucked away in an out-of-the-way room of her home while we were visiting.

I was 8 years old. I was exploring the house and stumbled across her sitting on a couch, all covered up, holding her baby. I asked her what she was doing under there, and she said she was nursing. I was confused. I had never heard that word before. I wanted to check it out.

I reached in to look under the blanket and was quickly told that it was private and I shouldn’t look. I felt embarrassed and humiliated, like I had done something terribly wrong and vile. I thought she was ashamed because I couldn’t come up with any other reason why she would hide what she was doing.

Later, I told my parents. My father laughed it off, and my mother looked annoyed. Now I really felt terrible. No one talked to me about it. No one helped me understand. No one paid much attention to the situation at all.

Fast forward to my 20s: I had a friend who just had her first baby. She was adamant that she would never breastfeed her children. She was convinced it was akin to incest, especially when they were older than three months. Because of my earlier experiences with nursing and because of being raised in a culture where women’s bodies were exploited and devalued for nothing more than a man’s plaything, I was inclined to agree with her.

But there was something gnawing at me. I couldn’t really tell what it was, just a quiet tapping deep in my soul. It moved around a lot, and it was the lightest whisper, so it took me a long time to hear it and even longer to listen. I had to be quiet. I had to be still. I needed to learn to sit with my baggage and noise that accumulated over the years of passive conditioning.

It took a very long time. It wasn’t until I was pregnant myself that the floodgates finally opened. It was akin to ocean waves crashing to the shore: I would nurse my babies. Better yet, I would nurse them on demand, openly—wherever I was—proudly and with no reservation. And I would nurse them for as long as they wanted. I felt released of my shame I had harbored since that fateful day long ago when I stumbled upon the breastfeeding mom. I felt empowered knowing I would be the one to give my children the perfect food, specifically made for them. No one else can do that, just me.

I nursed my first child until he was 4 years old. I’m nursing my second child, who turned 4 years old in June.

In the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing. I remember the first time I brought my firstborn to my breast. He was 15 minutes old. My midwife had helped me get out of the birthing tub and settled into a rocking chair that was in our living room. I was so tired, and my arms felt like Jell-O. We tried nursing, but my son just wanted to root and cuddle.

The next time was about an hour later. I was comfortably in bed and felt refreshed after having a nice dinner. My little love was hungry, but I couldn’t figure out how to get him to latch. I was so clueless to such a normal function of the human body, of our human connection.

Thankfully, my midwife was there and was experienced herself. With a little coaching and a lot of patience, my son filled his belly and I filled my soul. In that moment, I knew what it was to be a momma—his momma—and I was in love. I could feel another voice in my soul starting to emerge, a voice that would eventually lead me to understand where our power as women lies. Once again, I needed to be still and listen.

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By Sheena Sommers, MA

The recent controversies generated by depictions of Attachment Parenting in the Western media and elsewhere have revealed a fairly astounding degree of misinformation about infant and child development. Most especially, the media’s fetishist focus on “extreme breastfeeding” has revealed the tremendously wide chasm that exists between official medical recommendations about breastfeeding and the actual reality and perception of the practice on the ground.

Discussions generated by overly sexualized and highly sensationalized depictions of breastfeeding have often helped only to bolster a set of beliefs about the practice that are as dangerous as they are inaccurate. Though breastfeeding is touted by almost every recognized medical body as being one of the best things a mother can do to ensure the health and well-being of her child, the fact remains that very few infants are exclusively breastfed during their first six months of life and even fewer still are breastfed beyond their first year as official medical guidelines recommend.

Breastfeeding older babies, sometimes referred to by advocates as full-term breastfeeding, means different things to different people. Though some feel that nursing an infant past one year should be considered full term, others define it as breastfeeding a child past the age of two. Perhaps more important than any specific age reference is instead a commitment to continue breastfeeding until a child initiates the weaning process.

While beliefs and approaches to breastfeeding have certainly varied widely through time and place, the current level of societal discomfort breastfeeding engenders is without doubt an anomaly. What has since our earliest days been central to our very survival as a species has, more recently, been made to seem—by some of the more vocal critics at least—as an unnatural, immoral and even perverse practice when engaged in beyond the first year of an infant’s life. Thus, mothers who breastfeed their toddlers and very young children have been called everything from odd and eccentric to sexually perverse and even abusive.

What may therefore come as a shock to many in the West today is that from an historic and cross-cultural perspective, breastfeeding older babies and very young children is the norm. As Cornell University (USA) anthropologist Meredith Small, PhD, surmises in her groundbreaking work Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent, the “hominid blueprint of the way babies were fed for 99% of human history indicates breast milk as the primary or sole food until two years of age or so, and nursing commonly continuing for several more years.”

Breastfeeding children until the age of three or four years has been the norm throughout much of human history and remains so in various parts of the world today. Even as late as 1800, an infant born in the United States could expect to be nursed for somewhere between two to four years.

What happened over the last 200 years to have so dramatically altered breastfeeding patterns is too complicated a history to review here. It is needless to say, however, that despite no shortage of scientific and medical evidence to support much longer-term breastfeeding, this has not been enough to sway popular practice or belief in any large measure. In the United States, Canada and elsewhere, breastfeeding beyond a year—or two for the more progressive types—raises eyebrows and even ire amongst some otherwise seemingly rational people. As discussed further below, though breastfeeding rates are on the rise, the increases are small, and breastfeeding older babies is still a far cry from the cultural norm in the West.

Not only does the historical and anthropological evidence suggest that weaning before age two is unusual, but from a purely biological perspective, nursing a child through the toddler years is not in the least bit abnormal. In fact, the typical age for child-led weaning from a physiological standpoint has been estimated to fall within the broad range of two and a half to seven years of age.

Click here to read this article in its entirety on The Attached Family.com. Or, alternately, you can find this and many more articles in the latest issue of Attached Family magazine.