Hellobee Boards

Mine was old enough to talk about it. I think the main moment came for her when we were talking about the new baby. In preparation for tandem nursing, I had started talking with her about how when her sister was born, the baby would be depending on my milk for all of its food. I explained that there might be times when I needed to ask her to wait because she was old enough and big enough to do that patiently. She seemed to start to think more about nursing being for babies, and she decided she wanted to be, "big enough to not do that [nurse] anymore." Don't offer, don't refuse is often a great beginning to gentle weaning. When they are old enough to be getting the bulk of their nutrition and calories from another source (age one or thereabouts), it is very appropriate to adopt a strategy of only nursing when the child asks to. They are also getting old enough that it is fine to place limits on public nursing if you feel you want to or need to. I chose not to place any limits of that sort until she was three, at which point she could nurse in public, but she had to help me find a quiet place to do it. She rarely did.

As for the uncomfortable latch, I've found that toddlers will move in and out of that phase. As my girls got teeth, they would have to re-learn periodically, it seemed. So they would go a week or two with a lousy latch and then seemingly fix it on their own. And the latch and nursing interest/behavior can certainly change as they move from using it as their main food, towards using it for other reasons.

We had a slight lull in nursing closer to 12 mo (might have been more like 8-9 mo) that could have been confused as signs of weaning (if you check out Kelly Mom this is a common misconception around that age), but we nursed through it and he was right back to being a boob monster.

Up until the day he self-weaned at 21 mo he was nursing 4-5 times/day and 2+++ times/night. When he actually self-weaned it was sudden. He just didn't nurse to sleep one night and never asked for it again. He would still drink BM from a cup until our freezer stash we ran out 3.5 months later.

A lot of what @Mrs. Twine said holds true for us too. LO is 13 mo and does seem to have to re-learn his latch periodically. At 11.5mo he was starting to get a little handsy with me so we started pushing for him to sign for milk. Now when he wants milk he will stop what he is doing and 'ask' In a matter of days we went from nursing 6-8 times a day to 4-6 times. Now there are days where he jsut wants to nurse at wake ups/naps/bed and others where he wants to do drive bys. I just try and follow his cues.