Breastfeeding an 8 year old...

This mother from England still breast-feeds her almost 8-year-old daughter. Allow me to illustrate my sequence of reactions when I watched this video.

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:o
@_@
O.o
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Now allow me to share it with you, and let me tell you it gets progressively weirder as it goes on.



Every comment I can think to make just seems to completely inadequate. This speaks for itself.

This is probably a weird thing to say, but if these girls are so fascinated with breasts now, I wonder what they're going to do when they get their own...I mean 8 and 9? They're only a few years away.

I never even thought about anyone doing this. I always thought the general cut-off was whenever the baby started getting teeth, sometime before a year, not when they were getting their second set of teeth. Turns out pediatricians recommend doing it for at least a year in order to build up the kid's immune system and prevent diseases later in life.

I watched a few other related videos after this one (American women whose children are five or six), and supposedly the international average age to stop breast-feeding a child is four. I also read that this is an insignificant statistic because it doesn't account for cultural factors. It did say though that in societies where the children self-wean, most stop around three or four, which is supposedly the natural age.



They all made an interesting point that the United States and I guess Western culture in general made breasts a sex symbol, and that whole belief is a learned social construct that makes people uncomfortable with breastfeeding. Nevertheless, society dictates what is appropriate and inappropriate, so it might be difficult for these children to adapt to what is considered normal if they were raised that way. I would be beyond mortified if I was one of those children.

I spent seven hours at school today and the most useful thing I learned was from watching Cracked TV on YouTube.

Love,
Juliana