Night Weaning Part V: Everything No One Ever Told You About Night Weaning

When I read about night weaning, my main fears were that the weaning itself would be traumatic, that we’d have to move Cavanaugh out of the family bed or he’d never stop nursing at night, or that once partially weaned, Cavanaugh would wean completely. The books and websites introduced more fears I hadn’t even thought of yet. As usually happens, when I started talking to my mama buddies, they told me a lot the books had neglected to mention and they reminded me that different kids have different personalities thus the process will not be the same for everyone, no matter what the books say.

So to compile this list, I asked the mamas what they wish they’d known, both positive and negative, when they were considering night weaning:

General advice:

• Some kids just won’t night wean themselves and the goal of child-led weaning just makes for an exhausted family and a resentful mama.
• “Listen to the little mama voice in your head saying, ‘It’s time.’  Often you will hear it before you actually do it.  Don’t wait too long.  Make the change before you desperately need the change.” Rhonda
• Make sure your child is not hungry in the night. Though s/he doesn’t need food in the sense that his/her stomach is big enough to hold enough for a full night’s nourishment, s/he is used to snacking every couple of hours or so. To help with the transition, big bowls of oatmeal, yogurt, an English muffin with nut butter or some other before-bed snack can help.
• The advice to wait until all of a child’s teeth come in assumes the child wakes a lot because of teething or that all of their teeth will come in on schedule. Many toddlers don’t even notice their two year molars coming in and delaying weaning until after they arrive may means months of interrupted sleep for no good reason.
• You can make up your own rules for night weaning. My friend Emily decided she just wasn’t nursing between bedtime and 4 a.m. A few months after that, they dropped the before bed nursing, then they dropped the 4 a.m. nursing.
• Without nursing, you will need to develop other sleep associations so your child can fall back to sleep without milk. You’ll also need other tools to comfort your child when s/he’s sad, scared, or sick in the night.
• Come up with a plan for what you will do instead of nursing your child back to sleep. Suggestions from Jaimee include holding, rocking, singing, wearing tight fitting clothing, walking, offering snack/water, offering book/movie, partner helping, driving, baby carrier, sleeping in another room, etc..

Exceptions to the Rule

• Some kids are all or nothing folks. They may not understand getting to nurse in the day but not at night. It is possible to completely wean a child in order to stop the night nursing and then at some later point reintroduce milk only at certain times of day as my friend Rhonda did. “starting at 18 months we tried everything to nightwean and ended up completely weaning at two years because uma wasn’t able to incorporate the idea of only nursing during the day.  ~two months later (26 months) we started nursing again in the morning and after nap.  she self weaned two weeks ago (2.8 years.)”
• Some kids just wake up more if someone is next to them. If you want to limit night nursing, you may be able to do so just by moving the child to her own bed rather than having to fully night wean. As my friend Lisa explained,  “Our night weaning occurred as a side effect of moving Lexi out of our bed and into her room at around 12 months.  She was nursing every 45 minutes, all night long, and I couldn’t see how it would be possible to night wean, or even to decrease it, while co-sleeping.  I wasn’t actually planning to night wean.  I was just not getting any sleep at all with the non-stop nursing at night.  After the crib transition, we went very quickly from nursing once in the middle of the night, to going a 5 hour stretch and then 7 and then to all night.  This happened over the course of a week or two.  We didn’t really actively, intentionally night wean.  If she woke, I went in and nursed her and put her back down to sleep.”

Pros of Night-Weaning:

• Once the toddler knows there’s no more milk in the night, they will actually cuddle with you instead of wanting to suck from your body.
• The night wakings stop. Your child will (almost) immediately begin to sleep for long blocks, if not the whole night.
• You and your child will sleep more deeply and will actually begin to have dreams again.
• The night-weaning process is a very short period of time in a long nursing relationship and the relief and rest you feel on the other side are so worth it!
• Once a child is night-weaned, co-sleeping is not a problem for most kids. They know the milk isn’t available and they don’t ask.

Cons:

• Most likely, “There will be tears for a few nights – yours and theirs. ” Rhonda
• Sleep might get worse before it gets better.
• The length of time spent in bed is likely to shorten. When kids are getting more  and deeper sleep because there are no longer night wakings, they don’t sleep as long. Many of my friends noticed a one – two hour shortening of sleep. Essentially, that 6 a.m. nursing that bought you one more sleep cycle is likely to turn into a 6 a.m. wake up.
• Depending on the temperament of your child and how established night weaning is, you may have to night wean all over again if you need to make exceptions for illness, vacations, or other temporary setbacks.

If there’s something you wish you’d been told about night weaning, help another mama out. Tell her here.

Guest Post: How I Night-Weaned My Daughter

Breastfeeding did not come easy for me in the beginning. It took lots of hard work and lots of pain before my daughter and I were in a truly wonderful breastfeeding relationship. So it was not an easy decision for me when I decided that it was time to night wean Emma.

For the first few months after Emma was born, she slept in our room in a bassinet. Then around 4 months of age I finally discovered the benefits of co-sleeping and she moved into our bed. I loved snuggling with her and not having to get up all night long. Around 6 months, Emma began turning over and learning to roll. This made sleeping together more difficult, as she was constantly disturbing me and waking herself up. So my husband and I decided to move Emma to her own crib in her room. I was really sad to have her so far away, but we all immediately began sleeping much better. When she woke up during the night I would go into her room to nurse her. Most nights she only woke up twice and I was able to manage this pretty well.

When she was about 9 months old, she started sleeping through the night the majority of the time. She’d sleep for about 10-11 hours each night. Over the next few months she woke up during the night on occasion, and I would breastfeed her right back to sleep. But around age 14 months, Emma began waking up much more frequently during the night. I believe some of this was due in part to her teething and a cold. Even after the teeth had arrived and the cold was gone, she continued to wake at night. Usually it was just once, and she would very quickly go back to sleep after nursing. I might have been able to continue with this schedule, but her night waking became even more frequent, sometimes she would wake up 3-4 times during the night. I was growing very tired, and resentful that my baby no longer slept through the night. I was feeling extremely frustrated during the day, and I was not able to enjoy time with my daughter.

So I decided that it would best for us both if I night weaned her completely. It would allow me to be more rested during the day and more present in Emma’s life. No one wants a grumpy mama to play with during the day!

Emma turned 18 months on June 30, and on that night I resolved that we would nurse at bed time, and not again until the morning. I did explain to her as I nursed her at bedtime that everyone was going to sleep now. Emma would sleep, Mommy and Daddy would sleep, and the milk would go to sleep. I really don’t think she understood what I was telling her.

When she awoke during the early morning hours I went into her room and tried to comfort her without picking her up. I tried to get her to lie back down in her bed but she became very upset. So I picked her up and took her to the rocking chair. She wanted to nurse so much but I just rocked her. She cried, and cried, and I was frustrated, questioning if I really wanted to do this. But I remained strong. I rocked her, walked her, offered her water, and after about 30 minutes of crying she went back to sleep as I rocked her. Over the next several nights she woke up to nurse but I just sang, rocked, walked, and did anything else to get her back to sleep.

The worst time was on the third night, she was awake for 2 and half hours crying. That was very difficult and I almost nursed her many times. I even brought her to our bed to go to sleep with us, but that didn’t work. Eventually she did go back to sleep and has really adjusted well. After the first week, she hasn’t woken up during the night at all. She’s even sleeping a little longer, from 11-12 hours a night. It was a tough time for us both but now we are getting more rest and I know that she is doing fine without the night time nursing.

Ronda Smith and I met at AP meetings sometime in 2008, maybe 2007. With the kids around it’s hard to think about years anymore. We just count ages and time in months. She and I have crocheted together, chatted about parenting, and watched our kids get much taller. As it turns out, she night weaned when her daughter was six months younger than Cavanaugh, so I thought you mamas with younger kids might like the chance to read her story.

She blogs at http://craftyknittykitty.blogspot.com/

Let Go the Latch

My friend Martha is recording her progress as she weans her daughter from being latched on all night. It’s not exactly night weaning in the sense that Martha’s happy to nurse for night wakings. She just doesn’t want to be that attached a parent. Besides offering helpful strategies, Martha’s funny. Give her Weaning the Human Pacifier series a read.

Photo “Remember III” by theladyportico

Night Weaning Part IV: Crying Over Unspilled Milk

Nighttime is when our kids get fevers, have nightmares, or otherwise need our help–even though we are sleeping and wish they were too. The key to night weaning is that once you stop offering milk as a panacea for night waking, you need to have some other tools for getting your child to sleep. I held Cavanaugh and sang to him. I bounced, rocked, and walked him. I reminded him that he knew how to sleep through the night, that I was still right there, that if he needed food or water he could have it. He didn’t want anything but breastmilk.

But I could not keep night nursing. I’d gotten to a point where I felt claustrophobic and wanted him off my body almost the moment when he was latched on. I would find myself nursing with my fist clenched (though he couldn’t see it). I wanted to move, to scream, to throw something–including him. I didn’t do any of those things, but my growing distress made me know I had to stop.

I had to psych myself up so much that I spent about fifty hours preparing to lead a meeting on weaning for our local AP chapter. (See the handout here.) Doing all of the research was my way of trying to understand the myriad ways weaning could happen in our household. For a long time, if I even thought about Cavanaugh being weaned I would tear up. I was afraid that if I night weaned him, he might wean himself completely–as some of my friends’  kids did after various forms of partial weaning.  I was attempting to make peace with the possibility that if I ended night nursing, it wouldn’t be long before he wasn’t nursing at all. I had gotten to the point where night nursing was so uncomfortable for me that even if it meant the end of our breastfeeding relationship, I had to stop it.

Reading about weaning helped me understand that the attachment parenting principle of feeding with love and respect didn’t include feeding with resentment and impatience. I was giving Cavanaugh a mixed message by offering him something that I didn’t really want to give. Martyring myself is not an example I want to set for my son, nor do I want him to ever feel guilty for taking something I am giving him–especially breastmilk. And I couldn’t just reframe the situation or change my expectations. I did not want him to nurse during the night and the thought that our beautiful nursing relationship of two years would turn into something negative made me determined to make a change.

I had originally resisted the Jay Gordon method because he explains that your child may not like being night weaned and might cry, scream, and otherwise protest the process. Luckily, he also explains the difference between crying-it-out and having a crying child. Nevertheless, it was painful to feel Cavanaugh’s desire and not meet it, to feel his sadness and not offer what he was asking for. The idea of “crying-it-out” was getting in the way of my letting Cavananugh cry. He had every right to be sad and to express his feelings of loss around night nursing.

If I had just tried the Gordon method initially and dealt with all of these tears, I could not have continued, but since I had originally said “no more milk” one night out of desperation and he had been night weaned so easily before all of the exceptions, I knew this was not a need he was expressing, it was a want. I didn’t just want to stop night nursing. I needed to. So there were tears at our house, negotiations. Cavanaugh tried asking “for just a little bit” of milk, or saying “milk not sleeping.” Some nights included an hour awake at 4 a.m. while he cried, fell asleep on my shoulder, woke up and cried some more. Other nights, he nursed to sleep and slept through the rest of the night. Though Gordon tells parents that after a child is night weaned you can nurse if circumstances call for it and then spend a night or two getting back on track, that wasn’t the case at our house.

We night weaned. Cavanaugh cried some. So did Mike and I. But we didn’t stop being nighttime parents and Cavanaugh knew that even though I was saying “no” to him about breastmilk, he could still trust me to be there and to meet his needs. I explained to him through nights and tears that we both needed to sleep through the night, that this was a big change, but we could both do it. And we are doing it. And it was so worth it!

Next up, last in the night weaning series Part V: Everything No One Told You About Night Weaning

Night Weaning Part III: Milk Bar Closed Unless…

Originally uploaded by molossoidea

Night Weaning is not a one way milestone, accomplished and never thought of again. Backsliding and challenges will complicate your child’s major accomplishment, will interrupt your newly found full night’s sleep. Teething,  illness, house-guests, the teenager across the street blaring hip hop from his souped up car speakers, repainting your bedroom and needing to sleep in the spare bedroom for a few nights (yes, I realize this was ill-advised) all complicate night weaning.

After Cavanaugh was initially night-weaned, if he woke in the middle of the night with any kind of extenuating circumstances, the voices in my head told me that all those antibodies in my milk would help the virus go away faster, that if Cavanaugh was sobbing because I wasn’t giving him milk, the cold was traveling into his chest and lungs. They said that his poor little mouth was aching from molars trying to push through his gums and my milk would comfort him. I did not want to be up for an hour in the middle of the night because a house-guest flushed the toilet at the exact moment Cavanaugh was transitioning between sleep cycles. Nor did I want to wake up everyone else in the house when he cried because I refused his request for milk. So on each of these occasions, I made myself into a liar. The milk I told him was sleeping was now awake–even though the sun was not.

Now Cavanaugh knew not to believe me when I said the milk was unavailable. He figured if he just asked enough times or cried loud enough, the milk would wake up. The adrenaline rush of panic I experienced in thinking he might not go back to sleep or that he was crying and I was not somehow making it stop kept me from going back to sleep even when he did. Nights when he offered a loud protest but then rolled over to hug his pillow and close his eyes left me reading a book by lamplight, hoping the sound of pages turning would not wake him again.

So, just as I advised in when I first started writing about night weaning that you evaluate your reasons for night weaning or extra sleep disruptions before you get started, I would recommend that you make a plan for what happens when your night-weaned child is unable or unwilling to go back to sleep. Will you offer milk in emergencies? What will you do the next night when the emergency is over but your child still wants to nurse to sleep?

Sleep disruptions (that wouldn’t have been a big deal if you could just whip out your boob and suckle that child into slumber) morph into trials in which you will take the testimony of your crying child and mount your own argument, the one that offers evidence of how much better a mother you are when you are rested. You will tell yourself (and your child) how much more energy you have to run after him while he plays, or that you didn’t get that impatient tone when she refused to have her diaper changed. Your resilience is back. You don’t need a video in the morning to keep your child occupied while you ingest caffeine. You are having dreams again, reaching an REM state you haven’t seen since those pregnancy naps that felled you in your second trimester. You don’t want to go back.

But your child is crying. If you are an AP mama who swore never to use cry-it-out techniques, life has become incredibly complicated. If I’d known that an exception here or there would actually be harder on my son (and me and my husband) than refusing milk and using alternate means to get Cavanaugh to sleep, I might have stayed the course. Or I might have given in to my desire to help my sick or hurting or awake son by nursing him back to sleep and still had to deal with the horrible nights that followed.

Next up, Night Weaning Part IV: Crying Over Unspilled Milk

Night Weaning Part II: What Happens After You Tell the Boy to Sleep Through the Night

After I told Cavanaugh that he, the milk, and I were all going to start sleeping through the night, it took less than a week for us to start getting full nights of sleep. The first night, I started weaning without having planned it in advance. Cavanaugh woke at 3:30 and wanted to nurse for a long time. I was so tired of nursing at night. I said the milk was sleeping and he panicked, so I said the milk would wake when the sun wakes up so he could drink more milk when it was light outside. He rolled over and went to sleep. What? He’d never gone to sleep during the night without nursing before. I realized I’d never told him that sleeping through the night is an actual goal or that if the milk goes to sleep it’s not going away forever. I lay awake wondering if it was possible that I’d suffered through night waking for months and it really could have been this easy all along.

The next night Cavanaugh slept an eight hour block. When he woke at 5:30, I said the milk was still sleeping. He asked to eat. I figured that he might really be hungry since he was used to the milk but was afraid he’d wake up all the way if we went downstairs to eat. I nursed him, said the milk needs to go to sleep now, and he rolled over and went back to sleep. He woke at almost 7 and it was light out. He nursed but would not go back to sleep. Oh, the downside of saying we could be up with the sun. That day I told some friends while we were at a birthday party that Cavanaugh was practicing sleeping through the night and letting the milk sleep through the night. Throughout the party, he kept pointing to the sky, saying “sun” and “sleep.”

Our third night, Cavanaugh slept six hours then woke at 3:51 nuzzling to nurse. He said “eat eat” and I asked if he wanted milk or if he was hungry. He was hungry. We went downstairs, got a bowl of yogurt by frig light, brought the yogurt up to the bedroom to eat by lamplight. I was so afraid he’d wake up fully. When he finished his yogurt, he got back in bed. I reminded him the milk was still asleep until the sun woke up. He rolled over and went to sleep without nursing! On top of that, he slept until 9 a.m. The Promised Land!!!

Our fourth night, Cavanaugh told his Daddy about sun, sleep, milk, and practicing. Cavanaugh didn’t go to sleep until 10:45. Was it because we didn’t get home from errands until 7, were vacuuming before bedtime and he was excited, or because he’s upset about milk sleeping?  He woke at 3:45. Was upset milk was sleeping. I told him I had water by the bed if he was thirsty or crackers if he was hungry. He wanted to go back downstairs for yogurt. I do not want to establish a new middle of the night meal. I want Cavanaugh to learn to eat more during the day and right before sleep.

Cavanaugh loved the middle of the night yogurt. It was this special time where he got carried downstairs in my arms, sat in my lap while I fed him the yogurt. He was too sleepy and it was too messy and I didn’t want to deal with changing pajamas. This was not a good practice, none of it. If I had it to do over, I would have planned for the middle of the night hunger and had a banana or a piece of bread that Cavanaugh could have eaten if he insisted he was hungry in the night. I would not have created a sleep association where we had to go anywhere for food, turn any lights on, or share something that could be felt as a special nursing time he might get attached to. He reacted with more sadness to the loss of yogurt than he did to my initially having said the milk was sleeping.

Stay tuned for Night Weaning Part III: Milk Bar Closed Unless…

Night Weaning for Attached Parents and Other Sleep Deprived Mamas Part 1

I mentioned night weaning in a post recently and a reader asked for any help or advice I might have to give. As she pointed out, all kids are different, so I offer this knowing that what worked for us may not work for you. But I offer this series of posts on night weaning in hopes that it will help keep mamas from being resentful night nursers and children from having a hard core night weaning experience because his/her parents are so exhausted they  just can’t take it anymore.

A week after Cavanaugh turned two, I started night weaning. A lot of my friends did it earlier, but I wasn’t as disturbed by night waking as many mamas I knew. We were bedsharing so Cavanaugh never cried when he woke up and I never came to a fully alert state. Beyond that, he usually only nursed for five minutes so I could fall back to sleep pretty quickly. But then he went from waking every 3 -4 hours back to his previous pattern of waking every 1 1/2 – 2 and I got cranky. I felt like I wasn’t being as good a mom to him during the day because I wasn’t getting enough sleep at night. So I decided to night wean. It was actually my second attempt.

When I first tried to night wean, Cavanaugh was 13 months old and was waking hourly and nursing for long stretches. I was so sleep deprived that I didn’t take full stock to realize it wasn’t the night nursing that was making it feel as if my breasts were about to be sucked off my body. It was Cavanaugh teething (something new since he didn’t cut his first tooth until right before his first birthday). So, my first piece of advice is that if you’re thinking of night weaning, analyze what my be causing sleep disruptions besides nursing. Even if my attempts to night wean had been successful at that point, he would have been waking up just as frequently because he was in pain.

Now Cavanaugh was two, wasn’t teething, and many of his friends had quit night nursing when my mama buddies used the Jay Gordon Method. I read it and couldn’t imagine it working for our family. The seven hour block seemed arbitrary, especially since Cavanaugh can’t tell time. I decided that anytime before I actually got in bed and fell asleep myself (since Cavanaugh usually went to sleep at least two hours before I did), I would nurse. Once I was asleep in the bed next to him, however, there would be no more nursing until daylight.

One of the things I found most helpful was the assurance in The Baby Sleep Book that once my child was past 18 months old, his receptive vocabulary would allow him to understand more of my explanation of what we were doing and why. The first thing I realized was that I’d never told Cavanaugh that sleeping through the night was even a goal. So, I explained that though we’d been waking up during the night his entire life, his body was bigger now and his belly would hold enough milk for him to sleep through the whole night. Instead of milk in the night, he needed to get big blocks of uninterrupted sleep so he’d have enough energy to play and grow. (Maybe too much explanation, but he was listening so I kept talking).

The other big communication piece was explaining that the milk needed to sleep too. I made the mistake of telling Cavanaugh the milk was going to sleep without telling him it was going to wake back up. He experienced a panic akin to separation anxiety. It worked much better when I explained that the milk was sleeping at night just like he and I were sleeping, and the milk would wake up when the sun woke up and it was light outside again. He clung to “sun woke up” as a call to nursing throughout night weaning. He sometimes still says it.

Stay tuned for Part II of Night Weaning: What Happens After You Tell the Boy to Sleep Through the Night

My Inner Athlete

Listening to some of the worst muzak ever in the lobby of an oil change place, I am cooling down from my group cycle class at the gym. I’ve been looking for a low impact cardio class and failing to find anything that fit somewhere on the spectrum between a nice stretch or a heart attack. What I wanted was something to change my body, make me into the athlete I’ve always imagined myself to be. Okay, maybe I should say here that I believe on some other quantum plane I am actually a member of Stomp. I have rhythm. I am strong, a dancer. And I can drum.

On this quantum plane, I have always struggled with my body. When I was a kid, I had colic, then I got ear infections every time I cut a tooth, I had croup. My parents’ memories of  my early childhood paint me unhealthy. When I tried ballet, I was big-boned, uncoordinated. Soccer or flag football and I sprained my ankles so often and badly that I was on crutches and eventually found out I had extra bones in my feet that had to be surgically removed. At 14 I was diagnosed with kidney disease and told I might not ever have children. I spent high school as the designated driver because a couple beers might land me in the hospital. I kept trying to find some way of having a healthy and fit body. I tried cycling and was scared of the cars on the road. Then in college, I got a mountain bike and made the mistake of riding down a mountain in Placitas, NM with my dad. At full speed, I accidentally used a rock as a ramp and the landing was not smooth. I cracked my helmet and broke a bunch of veins in my legs for the largest most colorful bruise I’ve ever seen. Mountain biking lost its appeal.

The irony is I love exercise. I loved jazz and modern dance classes, lifting weights at the gym, running laps with my college roommate, Erin, the best workout buddy I’ve ever had. I love to dance, to sweat, to release all those endorphins that keep me sane. I have spent my life trying to find a form of exercise that makes me look and feel the way I see myself–until I look in the mirror or at photos. There I resemble a stuffed sausage. I want to wear a girdle and suck my cheeks in. But my inner athlete is solid muscle. I am hard-core healthy, glowing. I run marathons, dance as long as I like the songs and never sit down because I’m short of breath.

Overall, I was doing okay though. I weighed about the same amount from the time I was 19 until I was in my early thirties. Then I had two miscarriages. Then I gained 70 pounds while I was pregnant, ten of which came before I even got a positive pregnancy test and were all in my chest. I couldn’t figure out why my shirts were gapping and my bras didn’t fit. Apparently, my hormones react to pregnancy (and breastfeeding) by trying to make me into an Earth mother. I do not want to resemble a goddess statue.

I just haven’t done a great job of figuring out how exercise fits into being a mom. I know a lot of moms do it. I walked through most of my pregnancy and for the first six months of Cavanaugh’s life, but when he learned how to crawl, he didn’t want to be strapped into a carrier or stroller anymore, so I stopped going on walks. I joined the gym and went to Bodyflow classes that are a combination of tai chi, yoga, and pilates. They’re good for my mental health. They keep some of my muscles strong, but they’re not cardio classes and they don’t burn enough calories. I tried Bodyjam, a dance class thats’ a modernized version of jazzercise, and even though I gave myself permission not to jump or kick as high as everyone else and tried to ease myself in, my body sent every message it could that I did not belong in the class. No jumping for my bad feet. My heart needed to get stronger before it pumped that hard. I kept trying to figure out how to get a cardio workout without running or jumping or having to be in a pool–because I hate water in my eyes.

So I tried a spin class. Serendipitously, my first one was on the 4th of July, my inner athlete’s Independence Day. When I’m in there, standing up on the pedals, sprinting, riding up imaginary spin class hills, I sweat into my ears, heart pounding whatever rhythm blasts over the speakers. I don’t feel like screaming at my husband or my kid. I can think clearly to write. Eventually, I’ll get there. My inner athlete is coming out baby. She’s ready.

Mom Told Not to Breastfeed at McKenna Children’s Museum

Check out my friend Jennifer’s blog post about her friend who was just told not to nurse her daughter in the public area at McKenna Children’s Museum in New Braunfels. Anyone up for a nurse in?

Weaning in Context of AP Principles

My son Cavanaugh is a little over two now and we recently embarked on night weaning. Night weaning then researching weaning for our API meeting last month got me thinking about breastfeeding in the Attachment Parenting  community. So many of the AP mamas I know were planning on child-led weaning and many of them are changing their minds as their kids move further into toddlerhood. But a lot of us have mixed feelings about weaning, whether we decide to partially, gradually, or abruptly wean or to nurse as long as our kids feel like they need it.

So here’s how I’ve been thinking about weaning in relation to the Eight Principles of API

1. Prepare for Parenting: Preparing for weaning includes considering goals for nursing plus different types of and strategies for weaning. I created a list of weaning resources I hope will help with this.
2. Feed with Love and Respect: If mama is feeling exhausted, angry, or impatient while nursing, even if she doesn’t voice those feelings to her child, she is not respecting her own needs, nor is the child getting a clear loving message during feeding.
3. Respond with Sensitivity: Being able to meet child’s needs and respond to child’s feelings with sensitivity doesn’t require breastfeeding.
4. Use Nurturing Touch: Many of the mamas I know who have weaned are experiencing even more cuddles with their kids. Moms are being able to relax because they’re not anticipating being asked for milk or having their shirt pulled up at any moment. The children receive other forms of touch like hugging, massage, holding hands, having their backs drawn on, sitting on parents’ laps, and fun play like airplane, tickling, and gentle wrestling.
5. Ensure Safe Sleep, Physically and Emotionally: At some point, children benefit physically from sleeping through the night (and mamas really appreciate it). Emotionally, sleep is safer if moms don’t go to bed dreading the next time they’re going to be woken up, which results in children getting to experience more emotional safety too.
6. Provide Consistent and Loving Care: If one’s feelings about nursing range from loving it and wishing it would end, the message to the child may not be consistent. “Particularly if nursing is for comfort, the emotional quality of the exchange is of great importance. …you are protecting your child from the mixed messages and resentment that can build up when you say yes, but really mean no.” Adventures in Tandem Nursing, p. 175.
7. Practice Positive Discipline: Setting loving limits for nursing can help keep the relationship rewarding. Toddler nursing doesn’t need to be on-demand all the time. Teaching children nursing manners and limiting nursing can make breastfeeding a time that is calm, sweet, and nurturing for both mother and child.
8. Strive for Balance in Personal and Family Life: Balance between meeting children’s and parents needs can be one of the greatest challenges of AP. Whether weaning is partial or complete, the process of being able to exercise control over the breastfeeding relationship, rather than feeling at the mercy of one’s child, goes a long way towards helping familes achieve balance.

Weaning can feel like a loss or wonderful milestone depending upon how it’s approached. As Dr. Sears says, “If you resent it, change it.” Changing it doesn’t necessarily have to mean ending it. Setting some limits may allow a breastfeeding relationship to continue for months or even years longer.