Breastfeeding is Beautiful!

Nursing Toddlers & Extended Nursing

March 27, 2002

Nursing Toddlers & Extended Breastfeeding

Mothering Your Nursing Toddler - Homepage for Norma Jane Bumgarner's book. Lots of great comments from other moms who are nursing older children.

Why Nurse Toddlers - A great page from Nurturing Magazine. Almost every mother who has breastfed a child past the age of one has been asked at least once, "Are you STILL nursing?"!! Check out the special issue they devoted to nursing toddlers.

A Natural Age of Weaning - Katherine Dettwyler looks at the various "life-history" variables in non-human primates and how these variables correlate with age at weaning in these animals. These are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom who share more than 98% of their genes with humans. Through her research, she came up with a number of predictions for when humans would "naturally" wean their children.

Why Nurse Toddlers - Katherine Dettwyler's thoughts on extended nursing.

Benefits of Extended Breastfeeding - A discussion of both the nutritional and psychological benefits of extened nursing.

Breastfeeding as Baby Grows - Information regarding nursing from birth to the end of the first year.

Nurse a Toddler: Why in the World? - Why is nursing a child past 6 months to one year many times still questioned and even frowned upon? Are there actually benefits to nursing this long? Will allowing a child to nurse into toddlerhood cause him to be too dependent?

Extemded Nursing, Breastfeeding Beyond the First Year - The world wide average age of weaning is around four years old. In Western culture however, one year seems to be the magical moment in time that turns the natural act of providing comfort and nourishment of your child into a debatable issue. Why is it that most pediatricians, main stream parenting literature and our culture at large have decided that mothers should wean their babies by the age of one?