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Tandem Nursing in Today's World
By Virginia Gilbert
In the past 30 years or so, breast milk has replaced formula as the preferred feeding choice for infants. While both the medical community and society now encourage women to nurse their babies, those mothers who breastfeed through a subsequent pregnancy and the birth of a second child may find a lack of information about or even bias against "tandem nursing," or breastfeeding siblings who are not twins.
"I think society values breastfeeding as something for newborns," says Fran Jaffe, a Los Angeles-based lactation educator and dietician consultant. "Once the baby gets to a size where she is eating foods and being verbal, there is a stigma put on the mom to stop breastfeeding. I think tandem nursing is more common than reported, but women are not talking about it."
Laura Gray, a spokeswoman for the La Leche League West Los Angeles group, says doctors don't talk about tandem nursing because they haven't done the research. Unlike La Leche League, which has watched thousands of women tandem nurse successfully, "the medical community is just now catching on to the idea that breast milk is a good thing," Gray comments wryly.
Jane *, a 33-year-old mother of two who lives in Los Angeles, felt frustrated by her obstetrician's unenthusiastic response to her desire to nurse her firstborn through her second pregnancy. "My oldest son was only seven months old when I got pregnant [again] and I wasn't ready to [wean]. My obstetrician expressed doubt about my nursing through my pregnancy, but was unable to give me any hard evidence or reasons to cause me to stop," says Jane. "I think the information given out about tandem breastfeeding by doctors schooled in western medicine is, for the most part, inadequate."