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...

I've heard a lot of women(especially the younger ones)that are educated to a lesser degree(please don't shout at me) say no to bfing with utter disgust on their faces/in their voices. ' No! my tits are sexual objects, not for feeding Dc's'. ' They are for bf/dp's' etc...I have heard this first hand too, so please don't start on me for that. I have, so many times tried to encourage bfing. I think if just one does it, their friends/sisters/cousins etc may just try it. They may even enjoy it.

Yes, and bizarrely, in developing countries it's completely the other way round: low-income people with little education are breastfeeding, while wealthier and better-educated people look down their noses at breastfeeding and see ff as being superior and something to aspire to.

Weird isn't it? I can understand it though, because if you haven't got the money/clean water to make up formula, then you'd have to breast feed. Over here there are benefits/milk vouchers for the 'poorer' people(well, those that don't work, because I know that there are a lot of poorer people that do work but don't get help)and that probably sounds totally different to how I mean it

I think people, wherever they are in the world, will tend to value something more if they have to pay for it. If it's free it can't be any good.

that, and not losing her figure, was why my grandma didn't bf. it was aspirational.

I just know that I have enjoyed feeding both my Dc's and now that I am coming to the end of my time with Dd, I am quite sad, but almost relieved in a way. My health is not good and it has started to exhaust me.
I do know though, that even if formula had been free, I would still have bf as - for me, there was no other way. I'd always promote it to others if asked(and often if not asked.

God, bfing was the only way I got back any semblance of a figure... (top tip - don't start out with much of one. What you've never had you don't miss>.

Just musing on the Delhi paper again, and on Chukky's first post: I don't get the impression that the babies were weaned late simply because the family couldn't afford food. I think money was the reason why they were getting poor quality food when they did start, but the reasons given for starting late were more along the lines of "the baby couldn't eat before that age".

Of course all of that could have been face-saving on the part of the parents, not wanting to admit to poverty, so I don't suppose we as outsiders can really know what was going on.

But it's noticeable that in other parts of the world where people are extremely poor, that doesn't stop them from weaning babies early. They'll wean anyway but use the cheapest possible food.

What I'm gradually getting at (sorry, thinking aloud really) is that it looks as if (on a worldwide scale) everyone believes they're weaning according the baby's needs - yet people's beliefs about what a baby needs are heavily influenced by where they happen to live.

I suspect that when "the truth" is discovered about when babies should wean, we'll find quite a big individual variation - but that range should be reasonably constant right round the world.