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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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Anthropologists, including Margaret Mead, have probably helped the most in developing our understanding of weaning. They have found that women wean at the time and in the way that their cultures prescribe, and that peaceful, cooperative societies tend to have longer breastfeeding periods and gentler weaning methods. Anthropologists haven't demonstrated, however, a cause-and-effect relationship between the way a child is weaned and her later personality. Few scientists of any sort have examined how weaning affects children's minds, either immediately or in the long term. Nor have scientists considered how weaning affects mothers' minds -- or their bodies, for that matter.

Weaning methods and ages vary greatly among traditional societies. In some, women don't initiate the close of breastfeeding at all, but let their children go on nursing as long as they like -- for as long as fifteen years (Wickes 1953). In other societies, breastfeeding ends in the second year or even earlier, and children may be scolded, slapped, teased, and frightened into leaving their mothers' breasts alone. But both of these examples are extremes. In most societies, mothers don't even begin to work at weaning until the child is between two and three years old, and if weaning is abrupt it is also without cruelty (Whiting and Child 1953, 71). The median age of complete weaning worldwide has been variously estimated as between three and five years.

Western confusion about weaning stems partly from the fact that our heterogeneous society has no rules about when and how to wean. In the 1960s it seemed that weaning from the breast would soon no longer be an issue at all -- bottle feeding from birth was apparently becoming universal in our society. Since the mid 1970s, however, a far greater proportion of mothers have breastfed, many for longer periods than their great-grandmothers did. Although many women today wean in the first few weeks after birth, often in preparation for a return to work, others nurse for two years, three years, four years, or longer.


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