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In the television series Game of Thrones, one of the more disturbing scenes in the first season happened when Catelyn Stark's sister, Lysa Arryn, whipped out her boob and breastfed her son, Robert, in court. I'm not against breastfeeding at all. I think it's a perfectly natural thing to do, and if I had my choice, TJ would've been breastfed (my wife's vote counted a lot more than mine in this matter). I also have no problems with it being done in public. We, as a society, are way, way, WAY too ashamed of our bodies, specifically our sexual organs, for good measure, and the fact that exposed breast for feeding is scandalous shows how screwed up we truly are as a people. So, why was that scene disturbing? Her son in the scene was seven years old.
You'd think that would be too old even for the staunchest defenders of breastfeeding, but apparently, more and more people in this country are staying attached to their kids to extreme lengths. Football foodie and Outside the Squared Circle episode 3 guest Sarah Sprague noted on Twitter that she once saw someone breastfeed her first grade daughter at the table at Thanksgiving. Clearly, people are taking that scene in GoT at documentary levels. However, as with anything that the people at large might find quirky, those who are among the eccentrics usually have great reason in their minds for it.
While I do think it to be creepy, I also have to wonder what lengths I can go to to blast something as being unnatural, especially something that a woman freely does of her own body. We're having this debate in America right now with gay marriage and why anyone should have the right to legislate a ban between two members of the same sex getting the same marital benefits that heterosexual couples get. Opponents of it claim that homosexuality is weird at the very least. More likely, those opponents think it immoral, sinful even, using religious justification to try and pass laws that the First Amendment of the Constitution was set up to make a framework where laws were supposed NEVER to have it in the first place.
I guess the point of this post is though that whether by choice or otherwise, the reason why I find such older kids breastfeeding so creepy is that it ends up fostering unnatural attachments, or at least could foster said unnatural attachments. I have no research to back it up, but my intuitive claim is that if a child is enabled to keep feeding at the teat, then it might encourage him or her to continue engaging in destructive behaviors with their parents unable to stop enabling them. That is a Fox News level of jump, I admit, but I'd think that the bond of dependence between mother and child needs to be gradually broken over the 18 years where the parents are responsible for the care of their offspring. The first thing in that gradual decay should be from the breast and it should be from an early age. What age is right though? That's the thing, I have no clue, which might make this whole post moot anyway.
I don't know what the right answer is except that sometimes, parents need to learn how to let go. It's tough to really know when and in what ways. I'm not advocating that a parent totally drops all support of a child, even after 18, but there are ways that they can teach how to be independent while still providing a different kind of nurture. To me, breastfeeding into grade school is not a healthy way to foster that attitude.
