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 on to 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 mom 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’.
“I wouldn’t say to someone that I think breast is best unless they asked me why I was breastfeeding. Everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves.”
Amanda - who is on maternity leave from her work as a children’s party entertainer - is, however, well aware that she is in a very small minority.
The UK has one of the lowest rates of breastfeeding in Europe, with only two-thirds of new mothers attempting it. Many women start out valiantl, but their determination fades as they run the gauntlet of sore nipples, poor milk flow and screaming babies.
And 80 percent of those who do get over the early hurdles only breastfeed for six months before giving up. Yet both the department of health and World Health Organisation recommend exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, followed by breastfeeding with other foods for those “up to two years of age or beyond”.
A string of studies have endorsed the benefits of breastfeeding, which is said to protect against a host of ills, including obesity, eczema and ear, chest and tummy bugs.
Of course, the government is in the process of introducing controversial new legislation encouraging firms to provide breastfeeding facililties for mothers at work. (Whether or not those would extend to breastfeeding a six-year-old in the office is another matter).
But for all the advice and statistics that Amanda can quote, she very nearly didn’t breastfeed at all and admits that her own decision was based on something far simpler: economics.
“We were skint,” says Amanda. “We had my husband Roy’s income as a warehouseman but out of that we had to pay for food, the mortgage and running a car.
“We used cloth nappies as we couldn’t afford disposables and when it came to feeding we couldn’t afford the formula. It just made financial sense.”
Not that Amanda found it an easy option; she had difficulty feeding Jonathan and spent five days in hospital.
“I was a first-time mom, I was 23 and I was panicking,” she says. “I tried really hard, but I had cracked and bleeding nipples and I was really struggling. The nurses ended up giving him formula on the last day.
“Then I got home and my Mum gave me some formula. It was in the cupboard, but I never made it up - even now I’m not sure why.”
Because of the pain she was in, Amanda expressed milk for two weeks, feeding Jonathan with a bottle. Later, he continued to have the occasional bottle, enabling Amanda to return to work, but most of the time she breastfed.
“I think I’m quite lazy,” she says. “I’d have gone crazy having to sterilise all those bottles. Breast milk is always the right temperature, right consistency and it’s always there, on tap.
“At first I thought I would only do it for four months then it was six months. He started walking at nine months and then he was a year, but he was still enjoying it, and I was too, so I just carried on.”
And on, and on. But it’s quite a leap from one year to six years, isn’t it?
Amanda shrugs.
“I didn’t set myself any deadlines for stopping,” she says. “It seemed normal, nobody said anything to me, I’m not sure whether people even noticed. It wasn’t until he was three that I thought ‘maybe this is a bit weird’.
“I had seen a friend of mine breastfeeding her son when he was about three and my eyes popped out - but it was shock, not disgust.”
Of course, not everybody is so open-minded. Amanda is, you might think, rather lucky not to have suffered any adverse reaction to her breastfeeding a mobile and talkative toddler.
All the more so, given that she is quite open about where she feeds: “We’ve done it on a plane, on a train, in the middle of town, walking, talking, in shops, even in the car.”
Listen to Amanda and it seems the only negative reaction she has had was a few weeks ago in a shop when a sales assistant asked her to feed baby William next door.
“He meant in the toilets,” says Amanda. “I said to him: ‘Would you eat your dinner in the toilet?’”
When Jonathan was three Amanda did decide - briefly - that enough was enough.
“I explained to him: ‘This is the last time you can breastfeed.’ He was like ‘yeah, all right Mom’, and went to bed. When he came to feed in the night, I said: ‘You’re three now, you don’t breastfeed, you’re a big boy.’
“Then he had a tantrum and I felt sad, but I’m a firm believer that once you’ve said no, it’s no.”
Remarkably, it was her husband, Roy, who encouraged her to keep going. “I talked to him and he said if you’re not ready to stop then don’t, just carry on.”
So she did. Albeit, no longer in public, at little Jonathan’s behest.
“We were in the library and he was upset and I said to him: ‘Do you want some lellow.’ He said: ‘No, Mummy, give me a cuddle.’ So I did and from then if we were in public he would sort himself out with a hug.”
But once they were back home occasional feeding continued. And when baby William arrived, Jonathan was even more keen to keep going, requesting breastmilk more often.
Amanda insists Jonathan is not jealous, but simply saw a reminder of what he was missing. “If you’d not had cake for three years and someone put a slice in front of you, you might want to have a bit,” she says.
Amanda knows she has chosen a route that many may disagree with. “There are people who find it hard to understand,” she says, “Including my mom and dad, but they respect me for standing up and being counted.”
What, though, of the longer-term psychological impact on her eldest son? You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to fear that such physical intimacy at such an advanced age may cause emotional issues later on.
But Amanda is adamant that it is simply an occasional treat rather than any kind of dependency.
“Jonathan is a very confident little boy,” she says. “He’ll go away for a fortnight with his nanny and grandad, he doesn’t depend on me too much, which is a fear.
“I think that if anything being breastfed has made him more confident as he knows he can always come back to base. If you believe the research, breastfeeding benefits me as it lowers the risk of breast cancer, it helps the children as it gives them immunity, it helps anxiety levels and it’s natural. Breasts are there for a reason. They are there for babies, not for sex. And, no, it hasn’t affected our sex life.”
As for any concern about the lasting impact such memories could have on Jonathan, she insists there is no need to worry.
At this point Roy, who has been listening carefully, says: “I think it’s a subject that can be over-analysed.
“We hear the Government giving out advice on this and that, saying this is good, this is bad.
“But people lose sight of making decisions for themselves.”
So the question is, how much longer will Jonathan be allowed to keep feeding.
Will he still be having his “lellow” aged seven, eight or even beyond?
“My opinion is that you should carry on until the child doesn’t want it anymore, within reason,” says Amanda. “I would like him to grow out of it.”
Then with a burst of laughter, she adds: “If I thought he would still be breastfeeding now I probably wouldn’t even have started.”
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY
Dr Sandra Wheatley, a psychologist specialising in parenting and families, says: “In the long run, Amanda is not doing Jonathan any favours.
“She is teaching him to rely on somebody else for comfort, which is not going to be helpful. I wonder, is the breastfeeding for his benefit or for hers?”
Pamela Morrison, certified breastfeeding consultant, says: “Breastfeeding happens slowly, so a six-year-old who breastfeeds on occasional mornings would seem normal to me. The ‘right’ time for a young child to stop breastfeeding is when he no longer asks to breastfeed.
“The only ‘wrong’ would be to deprive a young child of breastfeeding if he indicated that he still needed breastfeeding for food or comfort.”
The National Childbirth Trust says: “No health agency puts a formal upper limit on the age beyond which it is appropriate or desirable to breastfeed. Worldwide, it is still not uncommon for children to be breastfed beyond infancy and toddlerhood.” - Daily Mail