Lead
"We weaned at seven months." "She turned one so we're stopping now." "We're still nursing at night but that's it." Scroll through any parenting feed and weaning updates flow past daily — individual households reporting decisions made in private, clipped into a sentence. Enough of those sentences in a row and something shifts: the pace of your own household suddenly feels either too fast or too slow, and you are no longer sure on what grounds you were confident before.
Weaning is a domain where medicine and social expectation do not converge on a single answer. The World Health Organization recommends continuing breastfeeding to age two or beyond [1] — but this is a population-level public health guideline, not a directive addressed to any individual family. The reason different sources give different answers is not that there is no answer. It is that the answers operate at different scales of resolution.
This article suggests a reframe: moving the question of weaning out of the "success or failure" register and into the register of "is this sustainable for this household right now?"