I promised in the last post about so-called "self-weaning" that I’d describe how I’ve twice exploited a child’s natural, probably temporary, situation-specific decrease in interest in nursing in order to practice situational weaning. I’m doing so here, in order to give an example of something that might seem to qualify as "self-weaning," but really does not.
(By situational here I mean restricted to a particular context: in neither case was I hoping to completely wean my child, but only to stop most of the nursing in a certain circumstance. In fact, I never even thought of the situational weaning as part of a process of weaning the child — it is not the same thing as, for example, cutting out one daily nursing session with the goal of eventually cutting out all of them.)
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The first example was weaning from nursing in public. When my first child was a little bit past two, I began to feel uncomfortable nursing him in most public places, e.g., the grocery store, church, meetings with my graduate advisor. (N. B. I don’t have this problem anymore with my second two-year-old. N. B. B. I also don’t have a graduate advisor.) I began to think about restricting nursing to home, friends’ homes, and places where we could feel reasonably private.
A few months after his birthday, as many toddlers are wont to do, he became more and more interested in walking instead of being carried in the sling. And I started to get used to having him down instead of up. I started putting him to ride in the grocery cart instead of the sling, too. One of the results of this is that he wasn’t as proximate to the breast, so he asked to nurse less; and he was looking at many interesting things that had never been quite near enough before, so he became very easy to distract.
He still did ask to nurse from time to time, though. Without even being really conscious of what I was doing, I learned that he would actually accept being put off momentarily with "Not right now" or "Wait till we get back to the car" or "We’ll have milk when we get home" or "Here, look at this interesting object instead." And I didn’t really want to nurse him in the grocery store anymore. So I did try to put him off, except, say, when he was wailing inconsolably from bonking his head on something. And it wasn’t too long before we never nursed in public anymore.
I think that if I had continued to offer milk in those places, eventually (when the newness of being out of the sling wore off) he would have returned to public nursing, at least until much later. So I don’t say that he "self-weaned" in public, even though that weaning was accomplished (1) with few tears and (2) in response to a developmental leap that he made.
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The second example is just completing right now: night-weaning of my 28-month-old, that is, stopping nursing after bedtime and before morning awakening. (Don’t confuse this with cutting out the nursing session that in many families precedes tucking baby into a cot at bedtime. To night-wean or not is primarily a question for co-sleeping families.)
We forcibly night-weaned our first child at about this age, when I felt sleep-deprived because I was pregnant with my second and trying to finish my thesis. Happily, he went along with it fairly easily, accepting midnight banana smoothies from his bleary-eyed daddy, and in about two or three weeks he was sleeping through pretty well — we had planned to go much more slowly than that, but were encouraged by his not-too-traumatic response. And I admit that when the baby came, I was very glad not to be tandem nursing at night.
So when I became pregnant, a few months ago, with our third baby, I began wondering whether or not I should night-wean the second, who had just turned two. He was six months younger than my first had been at the conception of the next sibling, and a bit more attached to milk than the first. And I was sleeping pretty well this time around. But I had been very glad to have the toddler night-weaned by the time the baby came — I felt comfortable with that. I went back and forth for a while and finally decided that I wouldn’t forcibly night-wean him, at least not unless I started feeling in the moment that I needed to (rather than worrying that I might later wish he was night-weaned).
And then one morning not too long ago, I woke up and realized that he’d slept all the way through, without rooting to nurse, for the first time ever. A week or so later, it happened again. And then it happened again. Most nights he did nurse, but he was sporadically sleeping through. One evening he fell asleep on the other side of his dad during the bedtime story; we left him there, between dad and big brother, and he slept peacefully all night. The next night, I nursed him well before bed, and we encouraged him to go to sleep between dad and big brother. Amazingly, he did — he didn’t need to nurse to go to sleep.
After that, I nursed him once before bed, and then he went to sleep without nursing to sleep. He would still ask to nurse occasionally in the middle of the night, and Mark would switch places with him, putting him next to me, so that I could nurse him. But after a while that stopped. We moved him back next to me (because big brother missed sleeping next to his dad) and he still slept through.
Once, after a long string of nights with no waking, he woke and asked for milk, and Mark didn’t wake me; he took him downstairs for a glass of cow’s milk and then took him back to bed. I think that was the last time he woke at night, maybe a week ago. I’m pretty sure he will be fully night-weaned in a few weeks.
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If you met me on the street and asked me about when my kids weaned in certain circumstances, if I perceived that you didn’t want to hear many details or if I had little time, I might just say: "Oscar stopped nursing in public at age two. Milo started sleeping through the night at 28 months." And you might think I was describing a true self-weaning. You might imagine that Milo spontaneously stopped nursing at night, or that Oscar on his own lost all interest in nursing in public.
Or I might equally say, "Well, we weaned Oscar from nursing in public at age two. We night-weaned Milo at 28 months." And you might think I was describing a forcible weaning, that I refused a child who was asking to nurse until he stopped asking. (I know the difference, especially with the night weaning, because I did forcibly night-wean Oscar.)
What really happened, as you now know, was more complicated than that. It takes a long time to explain. Which is one reason why terms like "self-weaned" or "child-lead weaning" should be used carefully — and maybe hardly at all.
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