A woman has been nursing her third child nonstop for more than ten years. She says she will keep doing it until he decides to stop, even if he is nine years old.
Temeaka Tate has dealt with internet trolls and had pictures of her breastfeeding her 4-year-old daughter, but she doesn’t care what other people say.
Ms. Tate said of her nursing daughter Bianca that she took a lot of pictures because she was happy that she had transitioned from being unable to nurse to exclusively breastfeeding.
Each one of them was noted as child abuse.
Claims that the 34-year-old was pressuring Bianca to keep nursing after she turned four were denied by the woman.
Regarding those who questioned her breastfeeding, Ms. Tate said it wasn’t about their bodies or relationships. Nobody was forced.
If anyone has ever tried to force a child into doing something they don’t want to do, she asks the audience. She is unable to force a child to eat.
Ms. Tate, who is from the New South Wales border town of Howlong, said her nursing journey hit a roadblock when her son Stuart developed tongue knots and she was forced to pump exclusively for six months.
She instructed them to “watch her” because she had been told she wouldn’t be able to pump for that long. For the first four to six months, it occurred every two hours.
She had a feeling it would be the best thing for him. He was allergic to dairy and soy and refused to drink any of the safe formulas.
Ms. Tate had hoped to tandem feed her second child, Bianca, but when she became pregnant 15 months later, her milk dried up.
Bianca, now seven, nursed her mother’s third pregnancy until the night before the birth of her baby brother Linton.
She said she was desperate to tandem feed with her.
The night she was in labor, she made sure her daughter had been breastfed before going to bed.
She asked if she still wanted milk from the day he was born, and she replied, “No, it’s his milk now, mom.” The mother was devastated, but it was her decision.
Ms. Tate stated that she intended to ‘manage’ how Bianca appeared and if she still required breast milk when she reached school age.
She explained that if she wanted to go to school, she would have had to do so before and after.
Ms. Tate stated that she was unconcerned about feeding her children in public.
She also hoped that nursing in front of Stuart’s nine-year-old friends, who had never seen a newborn nurse, would help them understand how natural it was.
One child asked if he could give Linton a bottle, to which Ms. Tate replied, “They don’t use a bottle,” so I had to describe nursing to someone else’s son.
Ms. Tate was happy to report that she had been nursing for nine years and had supplied milk to nine other babies during that time, despite not being able to fulfill her dream of tandem feeding.
She stated that she would continue to nurse Linton, who is two and a half years old, as her aunt’s child for as long as he desired.
Ms. Tate denied that the prolonged nursing had any effect on Bianca.
Bianca explained that she is as strong-willed and well-adjusted as her classmates. She’ll tell her friends that she drank mom’s milk until she was four.
According to Pinky McKay, a lactation and parenting specialist, while Australians thought of nursing as primarily for newborns, the average age of weaning was between two and seven years.
According to Ms. McKay, extended breastfeeding may be rare in their culture than abnormal.
It is not strange because one is not used to seeing a child that age nursing. It’s a two-way street, and one must let the child make the decision.
People assume that when mothers nurse for an extended period of time, the infant is meeting the mother’s needs, but there is no way to force a child to breastfeed beyond their needs.
Ms. McKay stated that there were numerous benefits to continuing to breastfeed.
She claims that the nutrients have passed their expiration date and that it is an excellent soothing tool. It contains hormones such as oxytocin, which can help calm a young child who is sad or injured.
It’s like having superhuman abilities.