Mum defends her decision to breastfeed seven-year-old son

A single mum has hit back at critics who say breastfeeding her boys, aged seven and four, was “sick” and “creepy” at their age.

Single mum Lisa Bridger has breastfed all five of her children for the past 27 years.

But it is the feeding of her two youngest boys, seven-year-old Chase and four-year-old Phoenix, that is proving hard for some to swallow.

“I still breastfeed my seven-year-old and I’m far from ashamed,” the Adelaide woman told Today Tonight.

“Apparently I should be ashamed. It should be classed as ‘child abuse’, ‘paedophilia’. [I’m told] I should pump it in a cup – I don’t respond to pumps.

“It’s either that they don’t understand breastfeeding [or] they couldn’t breastfeed and it’s their own form of guilt or grief, why they get so nasty about it.”

Her two youngest both boys are autistic. They don’t have milk for every meal, but only when they need it for comfort.

“It’s the connection more than anything. Chase just says it’s warm, it’s cuddly, he’ll snuggle in. Same with Phoenix, he likes to just snuggle right up and cuddle right in.

“It’s what they’ve known, they’ve never had dummies or anything like that,” Ms Bridger said.

“If one of my older boys came up to me and said ‘Mum, can I have a hug?’ and I said, ‘No, you’re too old for that now, you can’t have a hug’, that would be the same as saying to Chasey, ‘No, you can’t have your milk’. To him it’s not different, it’s that comfort.”

According to the 46-year-old, it has also provided her children with hidden health benefits as her boys have only had two colds in their lives.

“Medical professionals, a lot of them say six to 12 months is all you need, that there’s no benefit after that. But it never loses it’s benefit.

“You get cancer patients feeding on breast milk, you get bodybuilders buying donated breast milk to boost their own systems.”

But online, people are not as positive.

“She needs to be locked up either in jail or the nut house. This is SICK there needs to be a age limit on this, where it’s a crime after a certain age (sic),” one opinion read on Facebook.

Another person wrote: “This dude will be seriously screwed up as a teenager.”

The Adelaide mum said the comments used to hurt, but these days she tries to either give the critic more information, or just ignore them.

“I respect my children, their needs come before a stranger out in the public. If they can’t look away, I’m not going to say, ‘Sorry kids but those people can’t look away and they’re uncomfortable’. My kids’ comfort comes first.”

Social commentator and mother-of-two Lisa Oldfield disagrees.

“I would describe this as beyond odd, it really sickens me,” she told Today Tonight.

“I think someone needs to sit down and explain to her she’s seriously stifling her children’s personal development, I think she needs some psychiatric help.”

Ms Oldfield said she was not anti-breastfeeding and admitted she enjoyed breastfeeding her own babies, but she said nursing a seven-year-old was unsettling.

“I think this woman is actually doing damage to the breastfeeding cause because we really want to encourage women to breastfeed,” she said.

“But when you hear horror stories like this, young mums sit there and think, ‘Ewww, God that’s creepy’.

“She has to draw a line in the sand and go, ‘Look, no more. Boob is going away. You need to grow up, you need to become independent’. Find something else that’s going to calm the child.”

While 96 per cent of mothers initiate breastfeeding, only 15 per cent continue to exclusively do so up until six months of age, according to the Australian National Infant Feeding Survey.

That figure drops dramatically as the child gets older.

General practitioner Dr Ginni Mansberg said there was no age that children should stop being breastfed.

“We would like it if you can go a full year, in terms of health benefits for the baby, but also for the mum. But not many people make it to that stage,” the doctor said.

“We haven’t studied breastfeeding of children who are older, we don’t really know what it does, because I can’t imagine there would be any harms that would come.”

While Ms Bridger does not have any plans to stop breastfeeding Chase any time soon, nature could play a part.

“He’s lost four teeth now. His molars are starting to come, his adult molars, so his latch is getting harder and harder to obtain,” she said.

“So within the next, I’d say six months, he will have weaned and that’s his choice.”