Extended nursing
My husband alerted me to this article in today’s Washington Post (requires a couple of marketing questions):
There was good evidence that nursing beyond a year has health benefits to babies and mothers,” says Lawrence Gartner, chair of the AAP’s Executive Committee, of the section on breast-feeding. Specifically, for the baby, the benefits are nutritional, immunological and developmental. For the mother, they include a possibly lower rate of premenopausal breast cancer. Nursing also can calm an agitated toddler.
Some studies suggest that if babies were left to wean naturally, the normal weaning age for modern humans would be between 2 1/2 and 7 years, says Katherine Dettwyler, a noted anthropologist and author who has been conducting research on culture and breast-feeding since 1981….