When my youngest, Miss A, was just over a year old she would wake up from her nap with a dark cloud over her that could only be fixed by one thing – nursing.  (She’s 13 now and she still wakes up VERY cranky.) I would walk into her room and her scowling face would soften as she stretched out her arms. “Would you like a little na na [her word for nursing]?” I would ask her.  One day she broke into a smile and replied, “No little na na.  Big na na!”  And from that day forward she has always referred to nursing as “big na na”.

I nursed my oldest child, Mr. T, until I choose to wean him just past his third birthday.  My second child, Miss E, self-weaned a bit after she turned two.  It amuses me that so many people thought I nursed her an excessively long time while, to me, two years felt short. It’s not without challenges, but I will freely admit that I liked nursing a two year old a heck of a lot better than nursing a two day old. 

Much has been written about the benefits of nursing a child past infancy.  Despite that, many people are, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, downright hostile towards nursing a child past one year.  Because of those attitudes parents who are nursing a toddler or an older child often stay “in the closet”, quite literally hiding their nursing from the public, their doctors, their friends, and even their family members.

Several months ago, I saw a mother in the postpartum unit who had given birth to her fifth child just a few hours earlier.  As I watched her baby breastfeed, I heard the baby swallowing every time he sucked; quite literally guzzling milk.  This amount of milk is unusual just a few hours postpartum; typically mothers have about a teaspoon of milk at this stage.  I asked the mother how old her other children were.  When she told me that the youngest was two I smiled and asked, “And are you nursing him as well?”  The mother was hesitant to answer, she looked around the room to see if anyone else was present, and then smiled and answered “yes”.  I smiled back and reassured her, “I did the same with my children.”  It surprised and saddened me, that a mother would be hesitant to tell me, a lactation professional, that she was still nursing her older child.

When I see parents I ask about previous breastfeeding history.  My mentors that I trained with told me that in the past they only saw a handful of parents very year that had nursed a baby or older toddler.  Now I see at least a couple of parents a week who tell me that they nursed their previous children to 18 months, 2 years, while they were pregnant with their next baby.

When I teach a class I include in my introduction that I am the mother of three children who all breastfed past infancy. In addition to expectant parents, I teach classes for nurses and WIC employees and every single time I teach a class at least one person (and often more) comes up to me and quietly tells me that they nursed her child until they were two or three or four.  In some cases women that work together find out that they have each nursed toddlers or older children but never talked about it with each other until I brought up my own children.

Whenever it’s remotely relevant in a conversation I make a point of sharing that I nursed my kids past infancy.  Not out of a sense of competition or pride (although I am proud), but to work to normalize breastfeeding an older child.  With each parent that I share with and each parent that shares with me – we are pushing open the door of the nursing closet.  I hope that one day we stop calling breastfeeding past one year “extended nursing” and just call it what it is – nursing.  I would love to see a world where parents can all feel a sense of open pride at nursing their babies for how ever long they wanted to; whether that be three days or three years.  Our society might not yet “approve” of breastfeeding past one year, but we can change social norms; one person, two breasts, at a time.