Amanda breastfeeds her six-year-old in tandem with her newborn - horrifying or a loving bond?
By Beth Hale
Last updated at 9:56 AM on 9th December 2010
Another cold winter’s morning in the South Yorkshire village of Hemingfield and Amanda Hurst has a hungry son to feed. There’s a chill in the air, even inside the tiny stone-fronted house. So rather than get out of bed, Amanda cradles five-month-old William under one arm, lifts up her pyjama top and breakfast begins.
Then a sleepy-eyed little boy pads on bare feet across the floor and clambers onto the bed, asking in the precise tones of a child — not a toddler — whether he can have some ‘lellow’ too.
The little boy is Jonathan and he is six. ‘Lellow’ is a special made up word he uses for breast milk.
And instead of telling Jonathan he can have some milk from the fridge in the kitchen for his breakfast, Amanda happily pulls up the other side of her top and lets Jonathan lie alongside her and suckle from her free breast.
Yes, that’s right. She’s breastfeeding her infant son and her school age son. At the same time.
When Jonathan was three, Amanda, quite rightly, told him he was too old to breastfeed. But she found it hard to turn her son away, and his interest was only reignited when his little brother came along.
‘I know some people think it’s strange,’ says Amanda, 29. ‘But I think it’s perfectly natural. He’s doing it less and less and it’s only a morning thing. I’m feeding William, Daddy’s gone to work and it’s cold, so I don’t want to get out of bed.
‘I’ve only tandem fed them five or six times as it’s difficult. Jonathan has to lie alongside me and prop himself up.’
The love between mother and son is tangible. But there is something intensely uncomfortable about this scene — a child big enough to prop himself up to suckle, jostling at his mother’s breast with his infant brother.
William is a baby, completely dependent on his mother. Jonathan is a small person, rapidly becoming a bigger person, and at his age many little boys would grimace at the thought of suckling at mummy’s breast, let alone competing with a baby sibling.
Many mothers, too, will find Amanda’s decision to breastfeed a six-year-old and a five-month-old simultaneously shocking and even distasteful.
Yet when I arrive to meet them, this family could hardly seem more ordinary. When I’m introduced to Jonathan he looks up briefly, shows off his two new front teeth (yes, rather alarming), then lowers his head and continues playing with his Nintendo DS.
He’s a happy, healthy six-year-old boy, who likes going to Beaver Scouts, tap dancing, swimming and playing with his friends.
He has a seven-year-old girlfriend, who he holds hands with and who his mum insists ‘he’d rather spend time with than me’.
‘I don’t worry about what other children will say, because I know the children he hangs around with,’ says Amanda. ‘The only way they are going to find out is if their parents tell them.’
But surely Jonathan could mention it himself? Amanda pauses. She doesn’t seem to have considered that her son might discuss his breakfast drinking habits with his pals.
‘He would say lellow and nobody knows what lellow is,’ she says, adding that when children come across something they don’t know ‘they just ignore it’.
‘I do question the decisions I make and wonder whether I’m right or wrong. But it’s parenting, there is no manual, I don’t think there is a “right way”.
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