Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
Some widespread, bizarre assumptions deserve to be discredited. One is the idea that the breast can be emptied. It can't. A baby can get out of a breast what a pump cannot, so possibly this idea hangs on because of pumping, in addition to the false breast = flesh bottle premise. Two, the only way to feed a baby other than the breast is a bottle with an artificial teat. In addition to the obvious (tube to the stomach), babies of any age are fully capable of lapping milk from a cup provided it is held at the right angle for them. A good description of the technique can be found in Jack Newman's book or in Bestfeeding. This might seem pointless, but cups are a lot less likely to lead to an early weaning as a result of nipple confusion. One might think one could just pump and feed with the bottle, but it's hard to get as much volume with a pump and the downward spiral of supplementation begins.
Many breastfeeding books are very breastfeeding unfriendly, in the sense that it is very, very difficult to read them and breastfeed at the same time -- they are heavy and hard to prop up. Newman's book is particularly bad this way. Nursing Your Baby is fairly manageable. Unfortunately, both that and La Leche's The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding originally come from a time when breastfeeding was weird and radical. While revisions have helped bring them up to date, both are saturated with noxious norms from the mythical Leave it to Beaver past. The Womanly Art, after advocating lowering household standards, then describes how to clean the bathroom mirrors after taking a shower when they are pre-steamed. I would not consider this lowered standards. Nursing does a nicer job on tidying rather than cleaning, advocating a standard, highly organized/prioritized approach to maintaining a household. Instead, Nursing presents a hopelessly idealized picture of the emotions women might feel at various stages of nursing, including an outright denial of the grief and mourning many mothers go through upon weaning, even when it is led by the baby, or done through mutual negotiation and agreement. Towards the end of the book, they quote Spock on when babies give up the bottle and how they indicate readiness and then state that it's the same with breastfeeding, which reinforces bottle feeding as normative and breastfeeding as unusual. Both books emphasize discretion when nursing in public, even when they note that lack of discretion is not illegal under most (if not all) indecent exposure statutes in the U.S.
The Breastfeeding Cafe, by Barbara Behrman is one of a recent crop of books that collect breastfeeding stories. Rather than supplying useless generalizations, whether about which position will be most convenient or how a mother feels when weaning a baby, these books have plural voices, and the mundane details that enable the reader of make sense of her own experience. Is it normal for a baby to pull the breast out like taffy? Who knows? But I have now found a few other women, in books and in real life, whose babies did exactly that. Also babies who head-butted the breast, thrashed about, lost the latch because they were making a face. . .
I'm writing this at about six months postpartum, describing something that happened during the first eight weeks postpartum. I have not had a period since.
My lochia tapered down quickly, but persisted through week five. Week six, I did not bleed at all. Then in week seven, I had what in every way seemed to be a fairly normal period. The lochia had been steady, round the clock. The period was heavier during the day; less at night (normal for me). The smell was more like a normal period, and my husband had noticed some changes that he thought were ovulation.
Did I ovulate? Was that a period? I did not bleed during week eight, and my midwives and postpartum doula were skeptical, and saddened by the idea I had gotten my period back when I was exclusively breastfeeding round the clock. On the other hand, I did have one seven hour block when Teddy slept, at night. Could that have let an egg slip through? All the studies on LAM start at two months, which is after this time frame, and they specifically say no bleeding after day 56.
In the past, when so many women formula fed their babies, it was very important to start feeding babies other foods as early as possible, because formula is not a complete food. Breastmilk is a complete food. People will attempt to tell you this is not the case. Doctors, and some knowledgeable regular folk will attempt to tell you that breastfed babies, particularly exclusively breastfed babies who are older than a few weeks or months old, will surely suffer from certain vitamin or mineral deficiencies and your baby needs something different from or in addition to breastmilk. They may suggest supplements, formula or introducing solids.
There is no point attempting to feed babies younger than 4 months anything solid. They have a tongue-thrust reflex that quite efficiently and automatically pushes everything out of their mouth. At around 4 months of age or so, that reflex goes away. Babies this age also start to be able to sit upright on their own, which reduces some of the choking/stuck on the way down problems associated with solid foods. While a baby this age can be convinced to swallow something, that does not mean they will actually get any nutritional benefit from it. Further, by occupying their gut, changing the pH of their gut, changing the bacterial flora of their gut, making them feel full, risking starting allergies and otherwise making them sick, feeding them anything other than breastmilk is probably more likely to do harm than good. From an anthropological perspective, this is really early to be feeding the baby solid foods.
Nevertheless, because so many women formula fed from birth, or weaned from breast to bottle after a few weeks or months, those women are now expecting other women to do the same. They say things that indicate shock and sometimes disgust that someone would breastfeed a baby that was mobile, could lift mama's shirt, could verbally request (ha! demand) the breast (by whatever euphemism) and so forth. Doctors often tell women that if they don't wean soon, they'll have a breastfeeding toddler, as if that were somehow a disaster. And in at least one case, a woman was convicted of child neglect for failing to wean her toddler (this was after a number of other charges, which were late dropped, and after she was separated from her child for months while the system ground along).
A few years ago, I was at a bachelorette party, and a woman was looking for support in not weaning her baby, which her mother was pressuring her to do. The woman felt it was too soon. The baby was a few months old, three or perhaps four. I commented (having done no particular research yet, but having noted some comments in other books and news over the years) that cross-culturally, children tended to self-wean around 4 years of age, probably due to peer pressure. She checked me several times to make sure I was serious and meant four years, not four months. Golden describes several documented cases of women in the 18th century searching for and hiring wet nurses for babies well over a year old, and sometimes over two years old. The age of partial (adding solid foods, animal milks and so forth) weaning and complete weaning (no more breastmilk) dropped throughout the 19th century, reaching 1 year and 2 years respectively. It was not until the 20th century that the age of complete weaning dropped below 2 years, and WHO continues to attempt to restore it to recent historical norms.
Sometimes women who do not wean completely until after a year may still pressure other women to start solid foods quite early. While even the AAP agrees that introducing solid foods before 6 months is asking for trouble (allergies and other immune system problems, as well as increasing the likelihood of vitamin and mineral deficiencies -- the subcommittee on nutrition, of course, continuing in their foolishness to the contrary), they and many others seem to believe that delaying introducing solid foods much beyond 6 months risks having an exclusively breastfed infant for substantially longer. There is a window of opportunity, they believe, that can be missed. This parallels the belief that bottles must be introduced immediately, within three weeks, within 6 weeks, within 8 weeks, or whatever, that many people have, believing that otherwise a baby might never accept a bottle (as if that is somehow a disaster, completely discounting the possibility of feeding with a spoon or a cup, which is quite easy very early on).
Think long and hard about the rationale for feeding a baby anything other than breastmilk during the first year. If people tell you you should, or must, or that you are harming your baby or taking a risk by not doing so, press them for details and pursue that information yourself before partially weaning. While adding other foods may not harm your baby, or even babies in general, it is far from clear to me that they give any benefit at all to a baby under a year old, and they can do substantial harm, if your baby is one of those likely to develop or have allergies.
I recently went to a great party on a Saturday night with a lot of other adults and their children. There was chocolate, wine, other beverages, great conversation. Lots of fun watching the children -- they were what I remember children being like. Active, without being rude. Confident, not needing an adult audience, but happy to interact with reasonable adults.
The mothers at this party were, if not all, then certainly mostly breastfeeding, many of them to two years, but only a few, if any, beyond two years. Most introduced solid foods around six months, and there was at least one lively discussion about how long exclusive breastfeeding could safely continue (I did not start it, I swear!). Several parents noted that their children didn't eat much solid food until 14 or more months of age. If at one point the child appeared ready to wean, an illness or some other event returned the child to the breast and true weaning occurred much later. A major dilemma for at least one mother in the group was how to insist on her needs, when she simultaneously had a goal of child-led weaning.
This wonderful party was still a far cry from another party I attend every year, at which I've seen one woman breastfeed a boy of 6 or 7, and who I understand breastfeeds her daughters to menarche (not sure what the cutoff is for the boys). At least one person at Saturday night's party kept saying my-pediatrician-says this and my-pediatrician-says that. The good news: the pediatrician was a woman who had breastfed her own baby or babies. Still, that pediatrician advocated introducing solid foods at four months, because an exclusively breastfed baby had grown very quickly (I think 24 pounds, starting from 8ish, implying a consistent pound a week gain every week for the first four months. Shocking! Needless to say, mama needed physical therapy to learn how to manage that burden.) I mulled that situation over for a while, and concluded that it was completely ludicrous advice. If some babies are put on rice cereal (the recommended food) to gain better, it hardly makes sense to put a baby on rice cereal to gain more slowly. Clearly, rice cereal is being treated as normal baby food at four months by at least some pediatricians, which any amount of thought will show quite clearly that it is not. Most other folk at the party referred to their own experiences or those of their friends. It was all very friendly.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created February 7, 2006 Updated March 7, 2006