Question:
I am 3 months pregnant with my second child and am pretty determined to nurse this child to well after one year. I was given more pressure from family to quit nursing our first child (at 5 months) than I was to continue. My husband has already said he would be quite uncomfortable if I were nursing a toddler. How do I make my husband understand and be more supportive of the natural choice to continue nursing our second child?

Answer:

You are right to want to nurse your child well into toddlerhood. Yet, because extended nursing is not the cultural norm, your spouse and relatives may not be informed or supportive of the long-term benefits of extended nursing. Here is some ammunition to win over these non-supporters:

Science is on your side. New studies indicate that the longer babies are nursed, the smarter they are. You can say to your husband, "Of course, dear, we want to do everything we can to have a smart child." How can he argue with that?

Consider the medical benefits of extended nursing. Children have fewer doctor's visits and fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections.

Bring up the financial rewards. Besides lower medical costs, there are other financial benefits of extended nursing. If you plan to work outside the home when your child is a toddler, studies show that breastfeeding mothers miss fewer days of work because breastfed children get sick less often.

Find out just why your husband is not supportive of extended nursing. Convince him that toddler nursing is becoming the norm, that more mothers are doing it, that it's sort of the modern thing that parents "in the know" do. Perhaps your husband may feel that extended nursing makes baby so dependent on you (and you dependent on baby) that he loses out. It's up to you to show and tell your husband that this won't happen. Perhaps he has seen situations where toddler nursing is carried to the extreme and it becomes a control issue where the child controls the mother "puppet-like" by continually pulling mommy's strings.

Extended nursing makes discipline easier. Remember, nursing is not only the delivery of nutrition, but it's a comforting tool. Experienced breastfeeding mothers will tell you that they experience fewer discipline problems (such as "the terrible twos" and temper tantrums) if their toddlers are breastfed.

Extended nursing helps child spacing. Many families who practice natural child spacing according to "the rules of the game" (mainly unrestricted night nursing) have delayed fertility.

Finally, quote the doctors. Former Surgeon General Dr. Antonia Novello, when asked her opinion on extended nursing, replied, "Lucky, I feel, is the child who is breastfed for at least two years." As an added perk to win over your relatives, say: "My doctor advised me to continue nursing because it's good for our whole family." In this case, you can use Dr. Bill as your doctor.

A helpful resource for much of the supportive science behind extended nursing is found in our newest book, The Breastfeeding Book, published by Little Brown.