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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine
Helen Neumann remembers running into her parents' bedroom during a nighttime thunderstorm and climbing into their bed. Four years old, she opened the snaps of her mother's flowered flannel nightgown and nursed. "I remember it as warmth," explains Helen, who lives in Iowa City. "The flannel was soft; I felt safe there."
Although her older sister weaned herself at 11 months, Helen continued to nurse at night until she was about five years old. Now, at age 30, with a baby of her own, Helen is still close to her mother, talking to her on the telephone almost every day and visiting frequently. Helen's daughter, Irene, was born blue and floppy, after more than 40 hours of labor, and was immediately taken to the Neonatal Unit of Mercy Hospital. Still, Helen had the wherewithal to insist on nursing: she picked her tiny newborn up out of the incubator, IV and all, and put her on the breast.
Some babies, like Helen Neumann's sister, wean themselves easily and spontaneously. Other children, like Reed Carr, don't voluntarily stop nursing until they are toddlers. "Reed nursed before he went to sleep and upon waking," recalls his mother, Catherine Carr, a Hardwick, Massachusetts, La Leche League leader. "After his last nursing he turned to me and said, `Thank you, Mom,' and that was it."
Catherine, who had never met anyone who had nursed a baby for longer than a few months, had hoped to be able to nurse for a year. She quickly realized that weaning at a year didn't make sense for her children. "At that point they are still babies. I couldn't imagine stopping. If it was right for them, it was right for me."
Despite the overwhelmingly positive memories of children who breastfed long enough to remember nursing, American culture has a clear and categorical bias against nursing older children. (1) "If they are old enough to ask for it, they're too old to be nursing," is an oft-repeated adage. It's as if Americans fear that if a child is cognizant--able to speak and remember--there's something inappropriate, even obscene, about nursing.
Like infants, older children benefit in countless ways from nursing. Women who nurse their children for extended periods cite many advantages to continuing the breastfeeding relationship: Nursing helps to create a strong bond between mother and child, provides comfort and nutrition when a child is sick, quickly soothes a frustrated toddler or helps a child regain composure after a fall, makes nap time easier, provides physical contact and psychological comfort, and helps ease sibling rivalry when a new baby is born. (2)
Nursing older children sometimes has unexpected benefits as well. Tracie Yautz, from Harmony, Pennsylvania, nursed her first two children until they were...
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