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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.

Every once in a while, I hear someone say, "My child weaned himself at x months," where  x  is something less than, say, 30.  Sometimes it’s 18, sometimes 24, sometimes even as low as 9.

"No, really," the mother will say.  "He didn’t want to have anything to do with me.  That was it.  He weaned himself."

Some breastfeeding-education sites claim that self-weaning can happen at almost any time.  See, e.g., this article at Breastfeeding.com:  "Left to their own devices, some children will wean themselves at 9 or 12 months, and some will choose to nurse until they are 4 – or older. "

I grant that there may be exceptions.  But generally, I don’t buy it.

The part that I don’t buy is "left to their own devices."  Nursing, and weaning, is a two-person tango; one that can theoretically be "led" by one partner or the other, but generally involves some leading and some responding from both.  To say that a weaning child is "left to their own devices" implies that the parents’ attitude, behavior, and language toward nursing remained rock-solid constant while the child stopped abruptly or gradually slowed down.  But that’s usually not what happens, and in the earlier cases — those before, say, age 18 months — I don’t believe it at all.

What I do know is that the frequency of nursing isn’t constant, nor does it decrease monotonically — even though a lot of breastfeeding educators seems to say that weaning happens, simply, by a gradual slowing down.  Instead, nursing frequency rises and falls irregularly, with the changing needs of a child who’s growing fast and exploring his world, for whom it’s sometimes food, sometimes comfort, sometimes connection, often a mix of all three. 

In late toddlerhood, nursing is mostly about the relationship, and it has slow times and fast times like any relationship. You might compare it, in a nursing toddler, to the frequency with which a young adult calls home to talk to Mom.  She might  call less and less as time passes and she feels more independent; more likely, she’ll go through times when she is feeling homesick, or concerned about her family, and she’ll call a lot, while other she’ll be so busy with her daily life that she’ll forget to call home at all; but she will, eventually call again more frequently when she feels the need.

The analogy  breaks down at the end of nursing, of course, because children are designed to stop nursing eventually, whereas adults are not designed to stop talking to Mom, although we can.  The point is that the "gradual slowing" of nursing can include dips and spikes, times of lots of nursing and times of almost  — or even nursing strikes, which are the sudden (usually temporary) refusal to nurse at all — followed by more nursing again.   

Weaning is not itself one of the dips and pauses in nursing.  It happens as these dips and pauses get deeper, longer, and more numerous, and eventually merge into a long, indefinite period of not-nursing that culminates in the child’s forgetting how to do it entirely and forming a self-identity as a child who "used to get milk from mommy."

My hypothesis is that the "early self-weaners" were not actually left to their own devices.  My hypothesis is that for many or most of them, this "self-weaning" began with a nursing strike or a slowing of nursing that would otherwise have proved temporary.  What cemented it into permanent weaning was probably the parents’ response to the slowing, and that in turn probably depends on how the parents valued nursing at that age.  Did the parents continue to offer nursing, assuming that the slowing was temporary?  Or did they assume that the slowing was the beginning of weaning and act, perhaps subtly, to reinforce it by offering less often to nurse, by substituting other foods, by changing the sleeping arrangements or schedules, or by verbal encouragement of weaning?

I’m not at all saying that parents who have decided to wean shouldn’t try to do it by simply acting to reinforce slowing in a time when the child has slowed nursing.  It’s probably a fairly gentle way to go about it, as weaning goes.  (Indeed, in another post today I’ll write about how I’ve exploited a natural pause, twice, to achieve situational weaning.)  What I am saying is that we shouldn’t call it self-weaning, or child-led weaning. It is parent-led weaning, done (for better or worse) when the parent perceives an opportunity to wean gently, or when the parent perceives (probably incorrectly) that weaning now is inevitable. 

Let me give an example of subtle weaning cues that even a very breastfeeding-positive parent can convey: "Child-Led Weaning:  The Way Nature Intended."  It’s the story of one mother whose nursing relationship with her child ended at 26 months.  The mother is positive about nursing, is saddened by the approaching end of nursing.   But she is also resigned that it will end around the end of her child’s second year.  Her language gives it away:  "I had to adjust to the limits she was setting."  When the daughter turned two, the mother writes,

she started to forget to nurse at night and would go to bed without giving it a thought. I was torn about offering. I wanted to remind her, to keep it going somehow. But, I knew it would be a detriment to the natural process. I had to trust her now. It was life come full circle.

Wanting to ask, "Do you need some milk before bed?" and stopping yourself, is (although subtle, and not disrespectful, and gentle, and a part of most weaning) a weaning behavior.   It’s called "don’t offer, don’t refuse," as in "I’m hoping she’ll cut out her bedtime nursing, so I’ve switched to don’t-offer-don’t-refuse."  There’s nothing wrong with it.   But it is a change of behavior on the part of the parent in response to the child’s slowing.   (Asking the daughter wouldn’t have shown a lack of trust; rather, it would have demonstrated a trust in the daughter’s ability to wean on her own schedule.  By not asking, she shows that she fears her asking will disturb the child’s weaning, called here "the natural process.")

When the daughter is 25 months old,

she stopped asking and started forgetting much more. We created a playroom next to her bedroom, and that – suddenly – seemed to be the end of our morning nursing session. At the close of that month, I knew the end had come. My baby was now growing up and had clearly decided for herself that she had nursed enough.

Was the playroom created specifically to distract the little girl from nursing, or was that merely a happy side effect?  It’s hard to say.  The author is very vague about how she "knew the end had come."  But I would say that, if it was clear to the mother that the baby had decided for herself that she had nursed enough, it was probably also made clear to the daughter that the mother believed so as well.

As I said, encouragements to wean can be very subtle and gentle.  But it’s not child-led.  Again, this is not to say that weaning must be child-led — only that we should call it what it is.

How long does truly child-led weaning take?  I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen it — or that it even really exists.  I think weaning is a dance between mother and child, no matter how gentle or even passive is the mother.    But I have seen three families in which nursing was valued highly even as a child grew past the fourth year, families in which nursing was seen as a way to maintain a close connection to a child through the birth and nursing of that child’s younger sibling.  Not that those families never used weaning behaviors — all three did, at times.  But none saw weaning as sure to happen before, say, age three, or even that weaning was desirable at age three or so.

How long did those kids nurse?  One, until she was about five.  Another, a few months before turning five.  A third, a few months past his fourth birthday.  The remaining small children are still nursing, at 44 months, 43 months, and 28 months respectively.  It’s anecdotal, but my hypothesis is that child-led weaning would see most kids wean between ages 4 and 5.  (Which, incidentally, is right in the middle of Katherine Dettwyler’s biologically-based theoretical range for the length of nursing in humans.)

Obligatory Kellymom link.  🙂

Part 2, in which I describe two experiences with situational weaning, is here.