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Dear GoodJoan,
How do I discourage my almost 13-month-old from wanting to nurse so much? I'm not ready to wean him, but he's still nursing 6-12 times a day!

GoodJoan Says
Stand up! Literally! He's old enough to not need to nurse every 2 hours as well as old enough to understand "not right now" and "wait a minute." Start putting limits on when and where you nurse and start asking him to be patient and wait until you are ready. With my 24/7 nurser I first limited WHERE we nursed. We could only nurse at home. If we were out, he'd have to wait till we got home but in the mean time I'd offer him a snack. That was easy enough because while we were out, it was easy to distract him. After a while we just didn't nurse when we were out and he didn't even ask. When we hit that stage I started limiting where in the house we nursed. We could only nurse on the couch or in bed. If I was busy or in another room, he had to wait for me to come to the couch and sit and then he could nurse. If I was sitting on the couch already I was fair game. When he got used to the couch routine, I started spending a lot of time standing up, or in another room and making him come to me and ask me to come and sit on the couch. Then I could ask him to wait a while or let me finish cooking or doing laundry or whatever. I'd have plenty of snacks and drinks handy in case he was really hungry. By this time his nursing consisted of a good morning and evening nursing and a lot of 30 second refuels during the day. He's zoom into the room, climb into my shirt (he ripped 2 shirts and one bra!) suck twice and then take off again. I knew those nursings weren't so much about nutrition, but just to make sure I was still there. The plan was to then limit him to just in bed and morning and evening and eventually let him wean himself but we ended up weaning when he was 18 months old because he went through a vicious biting stage and I just didn't trust him not to hurt me! I am glad we managed to reduce how often he was nursing before then because once we did go cold turkey, it wasn't a very hard transition for him. He had a couple of rough nights going to bed and then started sleeping all night instead of waking every 2 hours! I, on the other hand, could hardly see over my huge, engorged, sore breasts for weeks!!

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