Anyone fancy weaning at 2 years old?

[welliemum]

This paper is great.

The authors are paediatricians in a big hospital in Delhi. The paper isn't a research paper strictly speaking - it's an observational study. Whenever they saw a child aged 6 months to 2 years in their outpatients clinic, they asked the mum if she would mind answering a whole lot of questions about weaning.

They found that 63.5% of the babies were exclusively breastfed to 6 months, and 17.5% had started solids at 6 months.

Are the paediatricians delighted with these figures? No, they're very concerned, because the ones weaning at 6 months were the earliest ones to wean. The rest were weaned later, and 16% had still not had any solid food at 2 years. The average age of weaning to solids was just over 13 months.

The authors rather sternly conclude that more education is needed.

I'm enjoying imagining the local equivalent of MN. The OP posts very indignantly to say "I took DS to the clinic with his rash and the doctor told me off because he's not been weaned yet. He's only 18 months old fgs!"

And the other posters on the thread say "Just do what your instincts tell you, you know your own child best" and "I weaned all mine at 2 years and they're absolutely fine" and "Just ignore the doctor, it's only guidelines, they change all the time. Before you know it, it'll be back to 13 months again."

Same planet, different worlds...

Not an expert in any of this...

But I thought that baby's iron reserves ran out at 6 months and they needed some food (green veggies/meat/fortified cereals) to keep them healthy?

In fact I just read the whole paper, and I don't understand your point. The paper says that starting to include foods other than milk is recommended from 6 months by WHO. Paper is worried that women are not including other foods from 6 months and so babies may be nutritionally compromised.

I guess the subtext is that women in India in some areas don't introduce other foods because they haven't got enough food to go around, and the baby can survive on milk.

Have I missed something?

he was sleeping through, so i didn't wean him until he was 5... when he started waking up in the night.

Aitch, I am sure you gave your DS some food other than breast milk before he was 5? If not I guess you had little time to yourself!

It's not about weaning from the beast in general, it's about feeding exclusively from the breast. 2 years of mummy milk only is I'm sure not right.

i think you're taking welliemum's post seriously and she is clearly making a joke, you twit. the problems in india are amusing because they are a mirror image of the ones that we face here wrt the WHO line.

how about 'oh, yes, the six month guideline, my HCP told me that was only for developed countries.'?

that makes interesting reading doesn't it?
scary that some aren't giving enough milk either though

'course i haven't actually been arsed to read the paper...

My point really is that we can't claim to "know" instinctively that our child is ready for food at 4 months, when mothers elsewhere in the world "know" instinctively that their children don't need food before they're a year old. It's all cultural.

I would imagine that a lot of those children are missing important nutrients by being weaned very late, especially if the mums are also eating a poor diet. Not ideal at all to wean too late - but it's not good to wean too soon either, which is what is happening in the Western world.

I think this is where good quality research really is crucial - it can strip away our cultural blinkers to show us what is truly best for our children. I don't think we can get there on our own.

Oh right.

Embarassed.

I thought I was very eloquent in my indignation though! Shame it was wasted

My dad is Indian and he was bf until 4 years, but I don't know at what age he was weaned - I'll have to ask him.

Aitch has got it

Although I think there's a serious point in there as I elaborated in my last post!

you were magnificent, chuk.

I'd be very interested to hear about your Dad, solo - although of course India is huge and no doubt people do things differently from place to place.

The way they selected children to study - by recruiting them from outpatients in a public hospital - ensured that they selected the poorest, least healthy children in the area.

I'd also be very interested to know what wealthier/more educated/more westernised people Delhi do - anyone from there or have rellies there that they could ask? I bet they wean earlier.

Very eloquent, Chukky

Wellie if we're going to strip away cultural blinkers we need the Queen spouting breast is best. Then Grazia etc doing BF issues including "slebrity" mothers Jordan, Kerry K and all the page 3 lovelies BF their kiddies happpily.

Then we might see some change.

At the mo things are a nightmare. At 11mo there are only 3 out of 15 of my post-natal group still BF. And my mother, a doctor who BF us, is making a lot of comments about weaning DD "now she has teeth" and "now she's a big girl".

If this is the best we can do even for the stereotypical middle classy lentil weaving nicey nicey read all the books types then we've got a long way to go.

Although I expect you realise this already!

Going to take my eloquent indignation to bed now.

If DD wakes in night for mummy milk, I am going to take her round to my mum's to deal with. She can offer her a banana or something instead!

I agree, Chukky. My mum - who like yours bf her children and has a string of letters after her name - has clearly been uncomfortable that I've bf for so long (although is struggling womanfully to hide this).

It would be lovely if bf was culturally normalised in line with the natural, physiological pattern. Instead, there's huge tension between the 2.

What I'd like to see personally in terms of sleb endorsement is HRH going on TV to tell stories about how her breast pads started leaking through her coat just as she was about to start Trooping the Colour, or how Prince Charles would only feed from one side for several weks so she looked all lopsided in her diamond-encrusted evening gown, etc etc.

Not sure it would do much for bf rates but it would make great television.

A friend from Pakistan weaned at 6 months. She weaned her first ds at 4 months. Well educated - dh a lawyer.

They had a selection of articles from Mother & Baby magazine arounbd the world recently in the UK version. the indian one quoted a mum as saying that indian babies are weaned from 4 months starting with apple juice.

don't know how widespread this is, but thought I would share.

And just to be pedantic, in babies born at term, and weighing over 3kg at birth, they do not run out of iron at 6 months. In fact this paper shows that babies who are exclusively breasfed to 6 months still have plenty of iron being absorbed from breastmilk at that age.

wellie, my dads family are highly educated, westernised and were wealthy back then, they even had servants. I don't know if it was because it was the 1930's and it was just the done thing.

Chukky, my mum has been saying for a while that I should be giving up too. She did the same with Ds and although I didn't 'listen' to her the first time, I did take it in and did give up at 18 mos. I was very ill at the time though and I think it probably was the right thing at the time for me.
This time when she's said it, I let it go a few times and finally told her ' Mum, you keep saying it but, I don't want to give up yet, it's not time, so don't keep on'. She hasn't mentioned it since...she couldn't feed me beyond 6 weeks as she didn't have enough milk. I'm not one that would go beyond two years - that's not for me, but at almost 18 mos, Dd still wants my milk and although I was planning to quit by the end of June(and I have cut it down a lot)I don't know if it's going to happen.

i dont like the references to breast feeding beinglinked to intelligence.

I dont think that a string of a levels will make a mother want to bf,as nursery nurse working for the social services years ago we visited mums who were so weak themselves they could barely stand and yet they still 'tried' to breastfeed for many weeks a woman i recently spoke to has about 6 children is from what she would call a 'rough family' and she breastfed all her children and is still bf the youngest at 3-why would i do anything else she says i love knowing every piece of cheese i eat every banana the goodness is going straight into my milk-why did she bf? cos she knew the cost of a box of cow and gate would have serious financial implications to her budget.

I didn't wean to solids until 25 weeks and I did consider not doing it for a while after that, but kept being asked by the HV etc, so kind of felt pressured into it. It would've only been me being a bit lazy tbh, but I did it anyway due to outside influences...

But a bottle of cows milk isn't as one off as expensive as formula and formula/breastmilk isn't(it could be argued)necessary at 3 years if they are eating the cheese/bananas themselvesis it?!
I thought that the link with breastmilk/intelligence was to do with the baby getting the breastmilk, not the intelligence of the nursing mother...or were you thinking that the women that have a string of A levels are more likely to bf?

solo the children eat v well i assumed she bf only at night now???

i was told by my own mw that generally educated women choose to bf-i think its down to personal beliefs and social factors.

I think it's pretty well established that (in industrialised countries) there's a strong association between educational level and breastfeeding. Obviously there will be lots of exceptions to that general rule too.

Intelligence has naff-all to do with it as far as I can see. Educated women (for various reasons) tend to have more choices available to them, and given that most women choose to at least start off breastfeeding, you'll naturally see more breastfeeding amongst the people with the most choice and support.