Yesterday I was in the same room as several mothers who nurse their school aged children

[Babieseverywhere]

This was the annual LLL social coffee morning for nursing mothers of children over 4 years old !
It was so nice to discuss the good and bad points about nursing older children. :D

Roll on next year :)

Not sure what sexuality/sexual awareness has to do with bfing though Maryz? Breasts (biologically speaking) have nothing to do with sex (the act as opposed to gender), it is just that breasts have been fetishised in this culture as a sexual characteristic.

In other cultures ankles/bottoms/ears/necks are sexual and people still walk/sit/hear/turn their heads with out giggling or making innuendo.

I mean as far as children are aware bottoms are for pooing or sitting on - should we tell them of the 'Friday Night Bum Sex' threads so they are fully aware of all the uses for a bottom? Just because some people use their/their partners breasts in sex play doesn't mean children need to be made aware of it.

Children will not bf for ever, it is something that is left behind when they grow out of the need for it (nutritionally/emotionally/immunity wise) when that happens is up to the child (and the mother if she choses to wean earlier). I do not get the disdain some people hold children who wish to bf for longer than they deem necessary and it is ultimately the children that they seem to have a problem with not the mothers.

It is not the mother's 'fault' the child wishes to carry on nursing - it has been normal and ordinary for a 2/3/4/5/6/7 year old to want to nurse for the vast majority of human history just not for some reason 21st C Britain are we no longer human any more?

the argument that they self-wean is a bit of a cop out really though isn't it? Really people might as well be saying that they wouldn't have an upper limit but clearly don't want to admit that.

So what if a child doesn't self-wean - at what age would you think it no longer acceptable to allow them to bf? nine? ten? when they reach puberty? Where is a line crossed between breasts being seen as a form of comfort/nurrishment and them becoming more than that? Because there does have to be a line.

And no you can't force a child to bf, but equally you can't force a child to take a dummy but you often have to force them to give it up - it's the same thing.

rita THANK YOU for posting that, it was a fascinating read.

RitaMorgan - Brilliant article .

Have to feed my two now. Bolognese.

leyroy - the Mongolian society linked to below is an example.

Anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler did her research in Mali, where children were breastfed for several years. You can read her work here: www.kathydettwyler.org/detcross.html

There are many other examples in Breastfeeding: biocultural perspectives By Patricia Stuart-Macadam, Katherine A. Dettwyler. IIRC they look at Africa, Australasia, North America.

Historically speaking, there is archeological evidence (from the skeletons and teeth of dead children) of longer term breastfeeding at many sites all over the world - I have no time to search for links now, sorry, but there is a famous 'dig' in Yorkshire (I think) which revealed evidence of breastfeeding well into toddler age (3 or 4) in graves unearthed from (I think) the 18th century.

What if a child never self-weans? Are there any cases of this actually happening - are there any 15 year olds still being breastfed?

You might as well be asking what if your child grows fangs? Or a second head? Or spontaeneously combusts?

Thanks for the positive posts from the usual suspects and one hairy handed trucker ;)

As long as all the old breastfeeding myths are around, we need good humoured posts, educating those who so clearly need it.

Keep up the good work everyone, I appreciate it and there will be other lurkers who will benefit from the information posted.

truthsweet but sexuality is relevant.

A bf five year old wouldn't be seen as a problem. A non bf five year old that went to school and said they'd been touching someone's breasts would immediately be flagged as a child protection issue.

Breasts shouldn't be seen as sexualised when used for feeding babies, but reality is that five, six, eight is not a baby, and at six, eight, a child has the capasity to understand that breasts are about more than just feeding, whether we care to admit that or not. Surely at the point where a child can grasp that is where a line should be drawn.

Wannabee, Come on. Any young child touching his/her mother's breasts would not be a child protection issue and to suggest otherwise is just stupid.

rita, there are adults who have breast milk fettishes. How young could that develop?

History is irelevant - historically children were sent up chimneys/men beat their wives/babies were weaned at birth.

It's not about educating; people need to be educated about the benefits of breastfeeding babies. We don't live in a society where breastfeeding a seven/eight year old is seen as normal - what people do in the privacy of their own homes is of course up to them, but no-one else should feel that they have to view that as normal or be witness to it.

Breastmilk fetishes - so basically if you breastfeed your child for too long they will turn into a pervert. Interesting.

Good for you Be
DS is still feeding as he comes up to 4 and I admit to bribing him with a fireman sam engine to convince him to have his last feed on his 4th birthday
The "would you still feed a 15yo?" argument is a bit pointless - you are asking us to draw acceptable boundaries, it's not that clear, it's not that black and white and you don't know until you get there. Fairly sure when DS was 1 I thought I would feed until he was 18m, then at 18m I hoped he would self wean shortly after his 2nd birthday, then as he passed that age I decided 3 was very old to be nursing, surely he'd stop then, well here we are, he is 6 weeks away from his 4th birthday and showing no signs of stopping...

LOL. If you have to try and compare abusive adult sexual acts TO a loving mother child relationship, then you have already really missed the point......by a mile.

But would you flag it up as sex abuse if your child saw her teachers ankles?

Ankles aren't sexual here and now like they were in Ancient Greece and in Victorian England so we can see an ankle with out getting all hot under the collar. Breasts are only sexual now for some weird reason (I don't know why - anyone else?) but they are't sexual for the majority of the world.

By the way 'infant' in zoological terms means offspring which has not had it's adult dentition erupted. Any child which is able to bf wouldn't have it's adult teeth. If a child has't had any adult teeth by the age of 15y/o wouldn't you say bfing is the least of their worries?

Haven't read the whole thread, just some of it, but wanted to say that it bothers me not a jot when people breast feed until - to each their own.

However, it REALLY hacks me off when people start using the anthopological "it used to be done like this, so why not now" argument.

Infant mortality USED to be above 50%, women dying in childbirth USED to be the norm. While I'm at it, men and women USED to be burned at the stake for heresy and we all USED to assume that the sun went round the earth.

If you're going to argue for/against breastfeeding till whenever, please at least use arguments with a valid context that's relevant to the world we live in today, not to a world 10,000 years ago.

How long to women continue to produce milk for, does anyone know?

I've got a couple of friends whose milk dried up when their kids were 3, but it sounds like it can keep going longer than that.

NoWayNoHow - the point about things happening in the past or in other cultures isn't that those times were better or preferable, just that concepts like weaning ages are socially/culturally constructed not natural or biological truths.

I am slightly out if the loop on this thread. I want to read all the fore and against stuff but tbh I can't be arses.

I will feed/fed my children for as long as I or they wanted and I don't give the teeniest weeniest toss what anyone else thinks.
They don't know me or my circumstances or my child so quite why anyone would think I what they think makes me

Interestingly the only two people who ever questioned my feeding were deeply stupid. Not that that is scientific or anything.

but breasts are sexual.

I don't care what was considered sexual in ancient Greece - I don't live there.

The fact is that it is not the norm to breastfeed 7/8 year olds in this country - the mere fact that people appear to have meetings to discuss this fact is clear evidence of that.

As far as I remember I bf Dd for about six months gradually getting less.Ds thesame but when he was about 8 months he suddenly stopped and went straight to a cup - his own idea. They never had a bottle- teaspoons of water and then a proper cup.

Correction, breasts can be sexual, just like hands and lips. Breasts are multi functional and their other non sexual function is to breastfeed our children with. Just as the act of talking or eating lunch is a non sexual way of using our hands and lips. :)

History is helpful, as it shows us there is nothing inherently odd or sexual or immoral or crazy or weird or disgusting in breastfeeding at whatever age.

I mean, some behaviours are inherently those things - murder, rape, child cruelty and so on are inherently wrong, even if some societies permit them. Dettwyler makes just this point in her work - female genital mutilation (she uses this as an example) may be culturally acceptable in some societies, but this does not make it right.

So bf a child beyond babyhood is not 'ok' because historically it has been 'ok'. It is 'ok' because it is 'ok' :)

How are breast sexual? What makes them sexual?

I don't get this. They feel nice to be touched but that is so a mother is encouraged by her biology to bf her baby not so her partner can have a fiddle with them. Any feelings during sex are BECAUSE they are filled with nerve endings to facilitate bfing not so they can be used in a sex act.

Oh and I though the more taboo a subject/item/body part was the more likely it was to be turned in to a fetish so surely the only BM fetishists are those who were denied BM not those who grew out of bfing on their own.

Sorry about formatting, there....:)