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Home › Articles › Weaning › The Nursing Mother's Guide to Weaning

The Nursing Mother's Guide to Weaning

Part 1

By Kathleen Huggins, R.N., M.S. and Linda Ziedrich

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INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to wean a child? Wean is a very old word meaning to accustom a child to a loss of her mother's milk. But today the word is usually used metaphorically; we wean ourselves from television, for instance, or from some other habit. The original meaning of the word is getting lost in an era when most babies, at too young an age to protest much, are simply given the bottle instead of the breast. Since this practice seems safe enough, and often easy, few of us understand weaning as the great and dangerous passage it is known to be in most of the world's societies. But when we ignore the dangers and difficulties of weaning, we risk our children's well-being, and sometimes our own.

The Nursing Mother's Guide to Weaning Scientists have done little to enlighten us on the subject of weaning. Most are confused about how to define the term: Does weaning mean introducing foods other than breast milk into a child's diet, or does it mean stopping breastfeeding altogether? Some writers have assumed that the two events occur at once, although at no other time or place than in twentieth-century Western society has this been so. Other writers have assumed that women in traditional societies were weaning when they gave their babies small amounts of ritual or medicinal foods. Some researchers have written treatises on weaning that concern only giving up the bottle, and don't even mention the breast. Physicians and nutritionists have tried to generalize about all mothers and babies from studies of malnourished mothers and weanlings in countries suffering from Western colonization and industrialization. Psychologists and psychiatrists have insisted that weaning methods largely determine personality, and a few have actually compared adults who were weaned in the early months with those weaned later, finding the early weaners to be pessimistic, aloof, insecure, and unhelpful (Goldman 1948, Slome 1960). Generally, though, psychological and psychiatric writings on weaning are almost entirely speculative.


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