There will come a day when mothers will not receive derogatory comments or value judgments for the way they feed or raise their children, and I say mothers because the parents, as they already consider us unfit, to the minimum that we get the child to be calm and far from suffering a fatal accident, they already give us good parents.
Until that day comes, there will still be many occasions when women who breastfeed their babies will hear this question at some point: Do you still give it a tit?, which will come from a friend, from a family member, from some stranger even, or worse, from the pediatrician, doctor or nurse's office.
The question is, above all, because the decision to breastfeed more or less time is of the mother and her baby, but also because there is no age limit from which to stop breastfeeding. There isn't, as there isn't in other animals like the orangutans, that apparently they are breastfeeding for more than eight years without anyone urging them to leave it anymore because "it doesn't contribute anything anymore".
They share 97% of the genome with us
Orangutans are not the primates that most resemble us, because in the evolutionary line they separated from us before others, such as chimpanzees, whom we resemble more. But nevertheless, we share 97% of the genome, we are also mammals and our young behave exactly the same: looking for the mother at all times to feel safe and secure with her, until they grow, they gain autonomy and let go.
All this means that their natural behaviors can serve as a reference for what we, as humans, we would do if we still lived in a wild time; if we had not evolved to our times, times in which, in many respects, we have gone from braking to the point of damaging, with our way of life, the natural development of babies. Or is there still someone who believes that in our western society babies have a place? If we have them, it is because we decided to have them, with hardly any financial help, with some ridiculous casualties and some labor and social dynamics that make it impossible for parents to reach everything.
Orangutans nurse eight years
It is what they have discovered in trying to understand how they grow and evolve as a species. As we read in La Vanguardia, orangutans are in danger of extinction and it is estimated that in 20 years they could have disappeared as a free species. Deforestation, lack of food as a consequence and its low reproduction rate is causing less and less population. They are solitary animals that make life in trees, which makes it more difficult to study their habits, data that could be useful to help them survive as a species.
One of the studies carried out was intended to know their diet from birth, and by analyzing the dentures of some samples of zoological museums, it was observed that they are the primates that receive breast milk the longest, even more than they thought.
And is that the first 12 months make them exclusive breastfeeding. From that age, they are alternating times of greater and lesser lactation, depending on the availability of food, and this remains until beyond 8 years, and in some cases even more.
And what does this have to do with us?
Well, because it shows us how the mammalian species that most resemble us when they live in freedom behave, without a social functioning in which mothers and babies separate when there is still an exclusive breastfeeding in between, without a food industry that is waiting eager for your baby to become a new consumer and without a lot of people around the parents who tell the mother that her milk is already aguachirri, that her baby has vice, that she is not a better mother for breastfeeding longer and that they do not know what she is doing, if it is total, she can live without milk maternal
And yes, you can live without breast milk as you can live without fruit, without vegetables or without bread, and yet nobody says that "why do you give fruit, if you can live without it". Let all the children be breastfed for as long as they and their mothers want and worry about fighting for their health and well-being in another way: signing, for example, to extend the casualties so that parents can spend more time with their babies and mothers in addition can breastfeed the first 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding recommended before starting to offer complementary food.
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In Babies and more | From when it stops making sense to give breast milk because it is already like giving water ?, The AEP publishes a report in favor of breastfeeding in older children (yes, those who already walk and run), Why breastfeeding is advised maternal up to two years or more
