At what age does breastfeeding become weird?

[TransatlanticCityGirl]

My MIL made a comment today about a mother who breastfed her child until she was 5 years old - as in, 'can you believe it???? that's just not right!'

Which got me wondering, where do most people draw the line in terms of how old is too "weird"?

I'm perfectly ok with drinking cows milk - though we're still at a (evolutionary ?) point whereby some children and adults are not able to digest it beyond infancy, because they stop being able to process lactose. So a world-wide, universal adaptation it is not.

We drink a lot of cows milk in the UK - and the same applies to other places - because historically the cow was an easy animal to 'domesticate' and rear for meat and milk. Then when processes became industrialised and agriculture became organised on a mass scale, the cow was already 'here' as it were.

('Hard data' on the causes of men wanting to leave relationships, whatme? I take you can find some.....)

Correction: the 'natural' form of lactose intolerance, commoner in some ethnic groups rather than others, which means difficulty digesting cows milk, begins from early childhood onwards, not from infancy.

If we are going to debate whether breastfeeding has ANY benefits over bottle??? well that is ridiculous. Of course it does and there are swathes of studies that provide evidence.
I think people have forgotten also that breastfeeding is beneficial for the mother too; assisting in weight loss, returning the womb to the normal size and aiding in the regulation of hormones post pregnancy. There is a lower occurrence of PND in BF Mums in comparison to their bottle feeding friends, that is a fact.

So whether you acknowledge the benefits to baby, there are benefits to MUm. To suggest that it is not preferable to breast feed is ridiculous, but it is not always possible or comfortable for some women to breast feed.

This post is about the length of time for which a mother feeds a child, not whether BF is good at all. Honestly it is ridiculous to suggest otherwise!

Not sure BF forever DD2 has been to the GP since she was 5 months old, she's 11.

Seen far too much of the hospital for broken bones

Not sure BFing has much to do with being a tree climbing accident prone little monkey.

Actually not sure it has much to do with being or not being ill either.

Her non BF sister darkens the GPs door occasionally, but more because she worries and needs reassurance than anything serious.

startail, as has been explained on this thread and many others, personal and anecdotal experience is not evidence.

BF/ff/mixed does not predict anything in an individual baby.

It is only by doing research with many babies that you can reveal the links. The more mothers and babies, and the more detail you have of lifestyles etc, the better for controlling variables so you end up being more certain that you're comparing the feeding and not (for example) the social and economic background of the families.

The fact that a kid who was bf has been in hospital with broken bones after climbing adventures is irrelevant - no one suggests that having been bf keeps you safe up a tree :)

A baby who is often at the GP because of anxieties in his mother is also irrelevant. The studies record actual incidents of illness - the Millennium cohort study only counts illness that has landed the baby in hospital, for instance so a well baby who just visited the GP rather often because his mother worried about minor sniffles would not be relevant.

pickled I think you missed the point about telling apart FF and BF

If you gave me one FF kid and one BF kid (along with their medical records) I could NOT tell you which was which.

If you gave me a group of 1000 FF kids and a group of 1000 BF kids (along with their medical records) I would definitely be able to tell you which group was which.

This is because there is a statistically significant difference between 1000 BF and 1000 FF kids but not between 1 BF and 1FF.

Im going to stop wading in entropygirl

Im seeing things which in isolation I feel like chipping in on, but I can see the we are heading for a Lemon Curd style situation, I see now you are answering a previous point (hazard a guess from whatme?)

I still think it would make an excellent game though.

pickled ah yes I see what happened.

Ironically I have been rather taken with the whatme kCalorie...and have spent many an idle moment in the lunch queue dividing everything by 1000 and giggling.

I mean snickers bar = 0.5 kCalories....I think it may catch on....

whatme has her own definition of research, though, entropy.

A quote cut from an interview is apparently 'research'. An anthropology text written in the 1990s reporting practices that have gone on 1000s of years is 'a bit old'. Not knowing something means the 'something' cannot exist.

I've just checked some anthropological sources, and there are many examples of breastfeeding continuing (alongside other foods) for many years in pre-history and more 'recently' including 20th century in pre-industrial societies: Inuit, Aboriginal Australians, China and Japan, Kenya, Bolivia. There are contemporary reports from the UK in the early 19th century which remark on the way children in some rural areas still bf aged 8 (probably unusual elsewhere, or the commentators would not have remarked on it).

But whatme knows better, for some reason.

So drinking cow's milk is ok (for the minority with a genetic mutation) but drinking human milk isn't

Eh? There's nothing stopping you drinking human milk!

The point is that cows (and goats and sheeps milk) is digestible by many humans due to a genetic change in our makeup, so it is "natural" to humans as well.

And you have to ask yourself why that occurred, it wasn't by accident.

Ironically I have been rather taken with the whatme kCalorie...and have spent many an idle moment in the lunch queue dividing everything by 1000 and giggling.

Actually, I preferred your calculation that BF could be cheaper than FF if you fed on Tescos Value Lemon Curd at 22p (not Ordinary or Superior curd, as then the economics didn't work) for however many months you BF.

And btw its is perfectly acceptable to put k in front on a unit if you mean 1000 of them.

whatme "And you have to ask yourself why that occurred, it wasn't by accident."

Oh dear...you don't understand about evolution do you...

If goat milk was previously non-digestible to humans, whose genetic code then changed in some way to make it digestible, then the one thing you can say with absolute CERTAINTY is that it happened by accident.

Because all genetic changes do.

Whatme well yes you can certainly use k to mean a thousand times a unit, but you wrote kcalorie instead of kCalorie and were therefore wrong. (kcalorie was already the unit I was using)

I personally have been using the kweek to mean just over 19 years for some time....

whatme has her own definition of research, though, entropy

As opposed to your definition, which seems to consist of quoting papers which when examined do not say what you claim they did....or conveniently forgetting to mention the later research, as when you say:

A quote cut from an interview is apparently 'research'. An anthropology text written in the 1990s reporting practices that have gone on 1000s of years is 'a bit old'. Not knowing something means the 'something' cannot exist.

...you fail to mention that Dettwyler has largely been debunked because she did not at all see that early humans artificially brought weaning forward via using complementary foods, which no other species does

But whatme knows better, for some reason.

Nah, I just read what the research says, and don't try and assume it says what it doesn't, which is your wont.

So for eg when dental recors of prehsitoric humans show they were weaned by c 2.5 years old, I don't the redefine "weaning" as "carrying on BF till 5 years old because it didn't say they don't", as is your wont.

but you wrote kcalorie instead of kCalorie

Actually i wrote kCalorie, but you missed it, and later admitted I had :)

whatme check the fecking thread. You wrote kcalorie not kCalorie which was precisely and exactly why you were wrong.

I didn't not at any point admit that you wrote kCalorie. I suggested that that was what you meant but not what in you had in fact written. And I was right. As a brief check will reveal.

This thread has been really interesting. Being pregnant at the moment and a bit bamboozled about breast feeding and logistics of stopping etc, it seems the answer is to stop when you are both ready. As someone with a lot of faith in nature, I think this suits me well. : )

Bun fight over a capital 'c'. Really?!

slinky well yes indeed.

But at the end of the day should we really be listening to opinions on complicated things like evolution and research papers from someone who cannot accurately check for themselves whether they used a capital 'C' or not before accusing someone else of being wrong?

whatme check the fecking thread. You wrote kcalorie not kCalorie which was precisely and exactly why you were wrong.

You are right, I did write kcalorie, but as the whole goldarned thread was about food calories and was using teh term "calorie" I felt I would be understood.

And I was not the one who suddenly popped up measuring stuff in kcal, the energy unit. You got it wrong there and you just hated that I called you on it.

My calculations and economics were spot on.

And you eventually realised yopur error by trying to say I had "invented a new unit", where all I had done put "k" in front of calorie.

Anyway, tis rude to bring other freds in so I will stop on that one now.

whatme, Please give me a reference to where Dettwyler's observations in Mali have been debunked. Did she not see what she said she saw? Were the feeding practices she reported somehow staged? The babies/children in Mali were having other foods as well. We are not talking about breastfeeding without other foods.

Your other bit is hard to read (tip: there is a preview button) but again, if I have understood you right, you are suggesting I am denying evidence.

I am stating that dental remains (not records!) do not show when breastfeeding ceased - they cannot. They can only show when meat eating and grain eating became predominant in the diet. We can tell from that - given there are no written records - that these children's diets were less and less likely to major on breastmilk. Observations from living children by anthropologists recording infant feeding practices allow us to infer that it would be very common for breastfeeding to continue, dwindling away over a period of years, alongside the meat etc etc.

Still waiting for the 'hard data' on the cause of men wanting to leave relationships. You're not allowed to make it up, BTW, or to pick a quote from an interview on the BBC website.

Bun fight over a capital 'c'. Really?!

Nah, more entropy trying to wriggle out of being wrong. Everyone else knew what a calorie is.

I dont need to wriggle out of being wrong because I actually physically, intellectually and in all other ways WAS NOT WRONG.

The 'c' versus 'C' argument is a microcosm of the whole thread.

whatme can think was s/he likes but the moment she accuses other of being wrong, s/he needs to have actually checked the facts.

I think it's clear that anyone who can't / is unwilling to check a thread using control F before declaring themselves right and anyone else wrong can have nothing useful to say on more complex issues.