Extended Breastfeeding?

The term "extended breastfeeding" is used constantly online and in parenting books. It isn't meant to be offensive, it is merely used to label breastfeeding a baby past their first birthday. If you pay careful attention to the power of the words chosen to describe this parenting choice, you might be surprised. When something is extended, it goes on past it's normal stopping point. Breastfeeding past the first twelve months is normal. There is evidence from the fields of anthropology, biology, zoology, archeology, and evolutionary biology that tells us how long human beings were meant to nurse our young. This isn't a case of being able to find a study to back up whatever your particular stance is on a topic. There is no evidence that humans should only be giving our children our milk for twelve months.

Kathy Dettwyler, an anthropologist who has studied this topic in depth, says that the minimum duration for human breastfeeding is two years. The normal length of nursing is between two and four years. In anthropologist Meredith Small's latest book, Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Young Children, she discusses the theories on the origin of the human childhood. It turns out that no other animal has a childhood stage between the infant and juvenile ones. She points out that it is thought by some to have come about because biologically, we should be nursing for seven to ten years! That would get our offspring from birth to being juveniles. We started nursing for the shorter two to four years so that we could ovulate and produce more babies over our lifetimes.

Based on the work of these two women and countless other scientists, how can we call nursing past the first birthday "extended"? I think we need to reframe the issue and stop using words that imply we aren't doing something normal. What about calling anyone who breastfeeds for less than two years a premature weaner or partial breastfeeder? Can't you just see the internet firestorm that would cause if you suggested it on a bulletin board? I don't advocate that, but I do believe that if enough of us refer to ourselves as mothers or breastfeeders, without the qualifying terms, we might help phase out the not-so-harmless extended breastfeeding.