breastfeeding my 2 year old

Blackie was that aimed at me? Not the bottom part

 

Extended breast feeding is good for your kids.
People telling you it's weird are probably the ones who immediately give their kids the formula crap from day one.

 

Now being supportive of breastfed toddlers is all sweet and appreciated I'm sure but maybe I speak for some when I say some toddlers might really be too old for it. I have experienced both "keep doing it" support and strange looks in my circles for breastfeeding my 19 month old still. The fact of the matter is though, I feel I need to stop! Not for her health (though stopping would not be
BAD for her health), but for mine, mental and physical. Perhaps also for her mental development, so she can make a clearer transistion into kidhood. See, she has equated the region under my shirt with her personal playground-- she tries to grope, to pinch and for lack of an unconnoted word to fondle those guys just as much as she drinks on them, and with my sensitive glands, I have to actually hold her arms back, you know, not in a mean way, but just "mommy doesnt like that". She doesn't bite but she slooowwwly closes her teeth against the nipple until it dawns on me how much it hurts. She has an older brother and I know she comes over to nurse sometimes just to show him up, especially right after he won't share a toy. I also cannot go on a fast like I want to because I don't want all my toxins going through the milk, and I can't enjoy some of the substances I might otherwise, including I don't do cold medicine. I haven't IN FOUR YEARS and it's affecting my marriage! A little bit, cause I get cranky when my hubby can do anything he wants. I truly believe she is done needing it, nutritionally and emotionally but she hangs on because she is afraid. I know she has no need to be afraid and I can take her through this and the only things holding me back from being done with it is this thought that if I were a good hippie mom I'd nurse until SHE was done. But she might just be one of those beings that would go until puberty? Wouldn't I rather get the trauma over with now, when I know she doesnt need it and I'm DONE! I've said before one is bigger than the other in addition to all the other reasons I want it done. I want to give the girl all the love in the world I'm jsut done with it being under my shirt. By the way, so is my hubby, because I jsut want to punch him if he tries to play with them after a long day of that. *sigh*
So I'd like to hear a big, "Yes, you can stop!"

 

Or the ones who breast feed their kids for 4 weeks and then give them formula until age 3... and then think that breast feeding at 2 is disgusting.

Would someone mind explaining that one to me?

 

Sounds like the problem isn't breastfeeding at 19 months, the problem is she needs some manners.

 

With my first kid I had too much cholesterol in my veins or something...I felt like my entire being was being sucked out when I was breast feeding...my heart would feel strained and would thump rather painfully..it was a whole physical ordeal and I kept it up because of all the formula-is-bad stuff.
I thought I was doing the right thing then, but ya know...that's been the M.O. of my relationship with that kid ever since..our entire relationship is a surface of nice with this huge undercurrent of struggle...and I swear it all started from my nursing when it wasn't right for us.

I took it alot easier with my second child, supplemented with formula so my body never went under that huge strain of being the sole food source, and nursing wasn't a living physical hell....and she's about the mellowest, easiest kid to be around. I think she learned alot of that while drinking her milk from whatever source...kids pick up on vibes and when they're that little that's really all they have to grow by.

Sometimes you've gotta put away all the opinions..whether they're from pro-breastfeeding specialists or anti toddler feeding socialites...and go for what's best for your children and your relationship with them.

 

It's true. I gaurauntee, when she's in 7th grade, your breast is the last thing she will want her friends watching her sucking on. lol. seriously tho . . . .

 

As a Lactation Consultant and researcher I NEED to clear up some very common MYTHS about breastfeeding.

1)You certainly CAN take cold medicine while breastfeeding. Some feel the pseudofed may have a slight, temporary effect on supply with older babies, but this is FAR from being proven. I took Nyquil when I got a bad cold. Never had any effect on my milk or my baby. All the drugs taken for colds are APPROVED by the AAP for use in breastfeeding mothers.


2)Breastfeeding does NOT cause anyone to have "too much cholesterol" in their veins. Some womyn have higher cholesterol levels after pregnancy (and during) but this has NO EFFECT on the womyn's health in ANY way. There is NO link between expected higher cholesterol counts in pregnancy and post partum and heart or circulatory disease.

3)Even in cases of famine breastfeeding is NOT "draining." It is MUCH less energy consuming than pregnancy or even menstruation (YES menstruation "Takes more out of you" than breastfeeding does.) In cases where womyn feel "drained" it is either a SERIOUS case of anemia (which does NOT go away with weaning, as menstruation makes it worse.) You use the same amount of calories ect whether you are "part time" breast feeding and supplementing, or giving your child full time breastfeeding. If you "felt better" when you were supplementing and still breastfeeding, I am at a loss to find a medical reason that this was due to a physical cause. Looked in the data, the research, the archives, no link.

4) Fasting is best not done during lactation. There is a small risk of "toxins" being released. I get asked about fasting by some of my clients. The answer is to wait. It won't be until forever. Even my Muslim clients choose not to fast during pregnancy and lactation during the daylight hours during Ramadan, and the Q'ran specifically allows them the choice not to, and encourages them not to.

I've been debunking breastfeeding myths foor 18 years. It's my job to give the 411 on this stuff. The above are NOT "opinions" but medical facts.

Carry on.

 

i thought that moms breastfeeding older nurslings can go ahead and do religious fasts. http://www.summitsoftwaredesign.com/kelly/nutrition/mom/fasting.html there is the small risk of releasing toxins though, as you say, maggie.

 

lol.hey mag sug
I never said that breastfeeding raised my cholesterol.
I only spoke from personal experience on what I actually FELT while breastfeeding my oldest. nothing more, nothing less. Just EXPERIENCE.

And DO NOT speak to me about famine, something you know nothing about personally. I have literally starved in order to feed my children for YEARS out of my life, with a diet for MYSELF that consists of barely 1000 calories a day, if that, so that I have enough food left for my children to eat properly. Famine is not cute, not even American style. It doesn't make one bounce around and produce more than they consume.

Giving good advice is one thing, but minimalizing everything else to make it fit into your perfect theory is as bad as the drug companiees not telling us of the side effects of drugs commonly used in infants, or other such corporate atrocities.

Please keep it real. It's not all black and white...there is a world full of grays and rainbows out here.

 

Lama, I am not sure what you are talking about. I wasn't making "jokes" about famine. I said, simply, that breastfeeding is not "Draining" even in cases of actual famine (the studies I used were done in Somolia in the 1980s, where people were starving to death, yet womyn were still producing abundant milk, average intake: 250 300 CALs a day, with no detriment to themselves, and the benefit that their babies were the ONLY ones still alive in the effected villages. By the time releif workers got there, ALL the formula fed babies had been dead for a while......)

I don't understand how you "felt" your cholesterol being raised. It isn't something which has symptoms. I guess I didn't understand what you were talking about. It wasn't meant as a diss, just clarifying facts.

The biggest obstacle to successful breastfeeding are commonly beleived myths. I was simply providing fact. Now if you had said, "I didn't feel like breastfeeding full time." That would have been your business. But when it comes to CLINICAL medical reasons for not breastfeeding,(which I thought you were trying to give) my department is helping to define those. Neither "too much cholesterol in my veins" or BF being "straining," or "Draining" there is just no medical science behind those being caused by breastfeeding. It was not a diss to you. A lot of people read this site. I don't want some other womyn thinking, "Oh God, breastfeeding is going to raise my cholesterol and "drain" me. I better not do it." I wasn't just thinking about you when I posted what I did. I was correcting a MYTH.

If you were exhausted, it was due to something else, not the physical breastfeeding itself. Maybe anemia, (which as I said, less or no breastfeeding actually aggravates) or something else, which I have no way of knowing what that might be.

 

LMAO.
You realize that you just said that starving women were producing milk high in vitamins etc with NO DETRIMENT TO THEMSELVES.
Then why on earth are women told to drink milk or take vitamin supplements in the US while breastfeeding? Why are they told to keep their calcium levels high?

I'm done talking to you.
Like I said. You need to wake up and start accepting that not every experience is going to exactly match what you read in a book, especially not when you very selectively chose the books to back up your findings and utterly ignore common sense and other research.

I will say it again. WOMEN HAVE EXPERIENCES>>>DO NOT DENY THAT AND TELL THEM THAT THEY ARE WRONG AND DIDNT FEEL OR EXPERIENCE THEM JUST BECAUSE IT GOES AGAINST YOUR BELIEFS OR YOUR TEXT BOOK.

If that were true then every person on earth would need to eat the exact same thing, feel the same way, require the exact same layers of clothing...etc..etc.
Humans are unique , have unique problems and should be RESPECTED AS INDIVIDUALS, not mowed over no matter what the cause.

 

i started this thread because i was done with breastfeeding my 2yr old. after reading everything everyone has written and thinking about it. i guess she isn't done at all.

then today as i'm sitting here nursing her, she stops pulls away looks at my nipple and says, "LOVE LOVE!"
i think that says it all

 

She says "Love Love?" That is so cool. It is liquid love! You can't get that kind of love from anyone else in any other situation! Sage used to look up at me and say, "Mama, you're my life." I won't be forever, but I was for those four and a half years. It's great that you and the baby figured out that it isn't over yet. It will be, and when you both know it is the time, it won't be bad. A freind of mine, a mother of 7 (all BF until they weaned themselves) and an LC said, wisely, "When you can look in the mirrorm with eye contact, and say 'I am done breastfeeding and it is best for my baby because she doesn't want it or need it anymore' and not start crying or feel very sad or regret the decision or made excuses as to why you did it. Then you can wean with a clear conscience." She is a wise womyn.

Just going to address this one more myth, then I am done.

Neither are neccesary for breastfeeding. Some womyn are "told" these myths for the benefit of formula, vitamin and dairy companies, not for the benefit of themselves or their babies. (But many are told otherwise and learn the truth is otherwise.) Breastfeeding doesn't require any more vitamins than a normal, nonpregnant, non nursing womyn (in fact prenatals are NOT appropriate for bf moms, they are too strong, nursing moms require less than half the iron of a pregnant womyn, and the extra is hard on her digestive and circulatory tracts, and they don't need all the folacin, ect in prenatals. ) and dairy is NEVER neccesary for nursing moms. (Or anyone else for that matter.) In fact dairy causes more colic and allergy symtoms in the baby than any other food a mother can ingest. Again, a myth beleived causes problems.

I work in the field and myself, my colleges and the docs we work with never tell womyn to "drink milk" or take any extra vitamins. (unless she has a medical problem, usually unrelated to breastfeeding, which does require iron or mineral supplementation, and this isn't common. NO medical situation requires a patient to ingest the milk of an other animal, ever.) Again, when myths are beleived and not debunked a LOT of inaccuracies surface and problems occur. It is a mother's responsibility to learn what she needs to know about her body during her reproductive years. Everything from how her organs work to how pregnancy progresses to what a normal labor is to how to breastfeed in a non supportive society, and how to separate the wheat from the chaf in this non supportive society. (in other words to know how to weed out "information" that is innaccurate, inconsistant, dangerous or just plain nonsense.)

The mother OWNS her choices, though. That is a hard concept for a lot of mothers to accept. Many want to find a "reason why I had to stop bf" rather than accept "I just wanted to stop bf." It is rare that anyone needs to wean due to real medical problems. I've seen it a few times, but not a lot. I've seen thousands of womyn over the years, I have seen less than a dozen who required weaning for real actual medical reasons. Those reasons are rare and not seen often in the general population. Aside from those ALL the other premature weaning I have seen, despite many excuses to the contrary, were completely Volutional on the mother's part. In other words, she made a choice, when other options were clearly present. And that choice was something she had to learn to OWN. One HAS to own one's choices in mothering, the poor ones as well as the great ones. You make a decion, OWN it. It is the best thing one can do as a parent.

It isn't just "books" it is, in my case, 17 years seeing clients, seeing babies, seeing how the womyn's body works, doing research, and learning from every one. Of course people need to be respected as individuals, but MEDICALLY human bodies work a certain way. No one has a body which works totally contrary to medical reason, that is simply a fact. (Although talking to some non breastfeeding womyn, you would think half the population of post partum womyn have bodies which somehow defy medically known workings. ) There are abberations, but they are known and can be dealt with.

I try hard to OWN all my decisions. That is part of being an adult. And being an adult is neccesary to being an effective parent. And this owning of decisions goes way beyond breastfeeding......but often starts with it...

I have nothing more to say about this. This subject is not only my passion, but my life and my career. I can't sit idly by when things which I know to be true are misaddressed and misinterpreted. No good person could do so. Not one with passion and caring.

There are no hard feelings here. Just the need to stress reality.

 

I have a hard time believing you because of two reasons:

A)WIC provides milk and cereal for breastfeeding women to drink and I imagine that WIC was formed and maintained by people with degrees in the same and similiar fields. If a woman did not need to eat while breastfeeding I'm quite sure the government would not give her a free ride.

B)You said that starving women can produce rich milk during famine. Famine is generally a long term thing, not a week. So what you are saying is that a gaunt woman that eats 400 calories a day can produce 350 or so calories a day of rich milk for a baby for months and possibly years without any effects except for rainbows and unicorns.
I'm not belittling the benefit for the baby, but I have the distinct feeling that you put so much emphasis on the baby that you are forgetting the importance of the mother and objectifying her into simply a food source and not a struggling human being, not a womyn that desrves as much credit and care as her child.

 

WIC does provode food for BF mothers. Of course she is healthier if she eats a good diet. But dairy is NOT neccesary, and it is the largest allergen in children. In many states WIC will replace your dairy with other more nutritious foods. The Dairy Counsel also has a HUGE influence on goverment agencies, including WIC and the School Lunch program. I have been on the WIC group in my state, as a researcher and advisor. We have the ability to replace the dairy foods with other foods. The reaction from the Dairy Counsel was nothing short of threatening when we did that.

In famine situations, babies who are not breastfed all die. That is not objectifying the mother. It is FACT. WIC wants optimal health in many cases. We don't want anyone to starve or even be undernourished. But politics often dictates what is supplied by WIC and what isn't. The Dairy Counsel FREAKED OUT when the state made it legal to replace the unneeded dairy with other foods. In many states the Dairy people have even more pull, and even in allergy situations, you cannot choose anything more than the dairy laden diet WIC provides.

It is cheaper and easier and healthier to feed a breastfeeding mother than to supply supplements to the baby. Even in situations where their isn't food enough, the mother and baby do better when lactation continues. I didn't make this up, this is fact. Lactation is not a draining activity. A womyn's body uses calories, calcium and protein very efficiently during lactation. The old beleif that "you need 500 extra calories to lactate" has been disproven. Ideally, people should get all they want to eat, of course. But in a terrible situation, giving the baby an inferior food source, in the already precipitous health situation of famine or near famine is ill advised. Doing this doesn't help the mothers or the babies, as the babies usually do not survive. (I am talking real famine, like in Somolia.) In our society, where food is plentiful (especially if one has access to WIC and other programs) replacing human milk with an inferior food source is medically, ethically and economically ludicrous. It benefits no one.

I am very sorry if you were in a situation where you didn't have money for enough food. No one should have to live like this, but feeding mama is MUCH cheaper than the thousands a year that forumla costs, and the health risks in incurs. Formula, when it is not medically indicated, (RARE) results in a sicker child, and that is more expensive than buying food. One round of antibiotics for a preventable ear infection could buy the mother food for a week. ONE hospitlization for dehydration, could buy the mother food for OVER a year. Formula use makes less sense for the poor than anyone else. You couldn't buy yourself enough food, how did you afford the expensive artifical milk? It makes no sense to me at all.

 

Here is one of the BEST and most accurate and up to date articles on Maternal Nutrition during lactation.

Italics are mine.

 

Mag
If you were a real lactation expert instead of a studied extremeist passing yourself off as an expert then you would know the basic math involved in a US mother's formula subsidies in an equation where the baby is being breastfed half the time.
You are very book educated, no doubt, but you have very little real experience in the field or you would know that very simple very basic very in the field math.
With the time intervals that you leave between your posts it doesn't even appear that you have time to go out and work, so unless your "clients" are coming to your home please stop misrepresenting yourself.
I know you're doing it for a good cause,
but blatant lies like "starving women can produce milk without any repercussions (such as losing more weight or nutrients)" in order to get women to breast feed is WRONG. I thought it was much better when you finally admitted that it wasn't about the women but the children. Lying gets you nowhere fast and loses the trust of the people that you could have helped. You need to be honest and not extremeist if you ever want anyone to believe you. Mowing them over until they get annoyed or give in is NOT helping anyone, nor is it honest wholistic help. Tell the truth and the mothers will have the information to be healthier and actually be able to nurse their children longer. Be honest. Honesty is the only thing that will ever make this world decent, and we see little of it as it is.
The people on this site are smart enough to figure things out with honesty.
They don't need to be lied to in order for them to do the right thing.

 

......ignoring an ad hominem attack then

HUH? I have no idea what you are talking about. If you are refering to WICs allowance for extra food for breastfeeding mothers, it is NOT "the U.S." it is detailed state by state. In my state, if you ask WIC for formula your extra food is then replaced with the formula. There are no "subsidies in an equation" not that I am sure what that means. WIC's details are run by individual states, not exclusively the Federal government.

I don't see clients outside my home everyday, and yes I do see them in my home, quite a bit, as well as in theirs. Probably a ballpark average of about 20 hours a week. Sometimes less. Also a lot of my work is research, which I do at home. I spend at least 2 hours of research for every Pateint Contact Hour for each case hour I work. If you are looking so obessively closely at my posting history you'll see I often go a week or more without posting. My career is one of a lot of work at one time and then some down time. I can often go 5 days without seeing a client (this is not counting follow up phone calls) and then see 3 in 1 day. I have been in the field for 17 years. I have seen thousands of clients. However, I don't see them on Thanksgiving!

I have plenty of experience. Years and thousands of womyn and babies. My work schedule is erratic, so what? not everyone has to work 9 to 5. That is one of the joys of having a career where you make your own hours and own your own business.

I don't know what you mean by "field math" It isn't a term I learned or have run into in the field of Lactation, but a ad hominem attack about whether I have "time" to go out and work, and then implying I am not what I say I am is really unwarrented. I don't lie about my qualifications. Really stooping to this type of stuff isn't helping at all. I am kind of surprised, to tell you the truth. I was just trying to sort out some myths and misperceptions about my specialty.

This is becoming totally OT. The thread was about something else. I am done here. You live with your choices, I can live happily with mine.

End Transmission.

 

I just wanted to say that I do not go to WIC anymore in AZ. They got nasty with me when they found out I was breastfeeding my daughter past 12 months.


It just does not make sense. They want me to wean my daughter from human milk, and start giving her cows milk. People can be so ignorant at times.

"When will you start giving her "real" milk"?

I laugh and say "When she turns into a cow", and then explain to them that breastmilk is REAL milk, and is much healthier than bovine milk.