When to wean a breastfed baby

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When to wean a breastfed baby

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There are a lot of advantages in nursing a baby through toddler years. Some parents really don't know the right age to wean. There's one anthropologist named Kathryn Duttweiler, who's done extensive studies with primates; seeing how they gestate, how they nurse, when their primary teeth come in. She created a system to try and figure out how long a human should nurse. What she came up with was somewhere between two and half and seven years. It's a very, very wide span and there are a lot of variables. In other words, how long a human would nurse. In our culture, we tend to nurse much less than that. What I'd like to say to each family is that they need to look at the reasons why they want to wean and look at the other factors in that family that might be causing them to ask that question. Sometimes you do something called "child lead weaning." Sometimes the families are doing weaning based on the parent's needs or even the needs of the other children in the family. Any of those reasons are valid reasons. The family needs to do what's right for them. Be informed, but do what's right for that family.

See Nicole Peluso, IBCLC, CD's video on When to wean a breastfed baby...

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Nicole Peluso, IBCLC, CD

La Leche League Leader

Nicole Peluso, IBCLC, CD, has been a lactation consultant and La Leche League Leader since 1997 in Los Angeles and Connecticut. La Leche League is a non-profit organization that serves as the foremost authority on breastfeeding issues throughout the world. Nicole earned her lactation certification from the International Board of Lactation Examiners and earned her doula training through the National Midwifery Institute. She holds a BA in English from Boston College with a concentration in Women’s Studies, studied literature at l'Universite Paris-Sorbonne, and spent her college summers working as a paralegal in a Connecticut law firm.

She has assisted thousands of mothers on their birth and motherhood journeys. She is regularly asked to speak to large groups on parenting issues. Recent speaking engagements include Los Angeles County Health Services, Los Angeles and Culver City Unified School Districts, The Maple Counseling Center Beverly Hills, Los Angeles City College, Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, The LA Gay and Lesbian Center, and The Los Angeles Airforce Base. She has also been interviewed in a nationally televised segment by Katie Couric on the benefits of co-sleeping with your baby. Nicole is the mother of three children whom she breastfed and parented with attachment parenting techniques. Nicole runs her private lactation practice through The Sanctuary Birth and Family Wellness Center in Los Angeles and her private doula practice through The WOMB in Mar Vista.

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