by STEPHANIE HANES
Time Magazine style breastfeeding a global goal
Time Magazine has upped the debate about breastfeeding – and in particular, the sort of extended breastfeeding that health organizations say should be a global goal. Save The Children and others say mothers should breastfeed their children for at least two years.
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Now, we have our own opinions about whether Time’s cover is helpful for what should be a national conversation about breastfeeding. (As we noted last week, the US ranks last among 36 industrialized nations in support of breastfeeding, with only 35 percent of moms exclusively nursing when their children are three months old.)
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In the southern African country of Malawi – one of Save The Children’s top ranked developing countries for moms – 77 percent of children are still breastfed at age two. That number is even higher in Bangladesh, where 90 percent of children still nurse, and in Nepal, where the number is 93 percent. Moms in India nurse 77 percent of their two-year-olds, and mothers in Rwanda are still breastfeeding 84 percent of theirs.
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There are good reasons for this.
Breastfeeding until age two, according to Save The Children, is one of the clearest steps that mothers in developing countries can take to ensure the health of their children.
Christian Science Monitor for more
Breast-feeding a 3-year-old is normal, anthropologist says
by ELIZABETH WEISE
Despite a breast-feeding brouhaha kicked off last week by a Time magazine cover photo of a mom nursing her 3-year-old son, that’s actually the norm worldwide, experts say. But in the United States, breast-feeding children that old is practiced among a tiny sliver of mothers.
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When Dettwyler studied 1,280 U.S. children whose mothers nursed them for more than three years, she found they were “perfectly fine and they didn’t need therapy and they didn’t think they were having sex with their mothers.”
The children were nursed between three and nine years, with half being weaned between ages 3 and 4. The mothers tended to be middle- and upper-class women, the majority of whom were highly educated and worked outside of the home.
“This is not the stereotype of the Earth Mother nursing the child until he’s 5, and she also grows her own cotton and weaves her own diapers,” Dettwyler says.
Multiple studies show that breast-feeding is beneficial for both mother and infant. Breast milk contains immune factors that protect children against infection while their own immune system is still developing.
USA Today for more