Among the Dahomey, mothers regularly carry the infant about with them and the infant seldom has other nurses. Close bodily contact and suckling is continued for two to three years. There is no cohabiting between husband and wife during this period if the man has other wives. (Herskovits, 1952, p. 259ff). To what extent the infant becomes a "lover" surrogate in such long absences from marital coitus is a moot question. Infant and mother frequently stay in continuously close sensory contact in many societies characterized by late weaning.
Besides the suckling encounters, in a few primitive societies,
adults participate actively in the erotic stimulation of infants and
young children. This is less common in contemporary American society,
but does occur as will be indicated later. Among the Kazak, adults who
are playing with small children, especially boys, excite the young
one's genitals by rubbing and playing with them. Autogenital stimula
tion by the young child is accepted also as a normal practise. (Ford
and Beach, 1951, p. 188).
Among the Balinese, play and teasing with the genitals is common. A
mother will pat her baby girl on the vulva and exclaim, "Pretty!
Pretty!" (Bateson and Mead, 1942, p. 26, 32, 131). A boy's penis will
be stroked and rubbed. After he has urinated, he will be dried by a
flick of his penis. As he grows older, his penis will be pulled and
stretched and ruffled, and he will often attempt to keep his balance
when learning to walk by holding on to it. Babies are comforted and
quieted by manipulating their genital organs. In fact, in Bali, a baby,
especially a baby's genital, is a toy with which to play. There is much
delight taken in stimulating and playing with the baby to watch him respond.
There has been a strong taboo in the United States on suckling an
infant in public or even reproducing photographs in magazines of infants
suckling; whereas bottle feeding in public and pictures of bottle
feeding infants are acceptable. Thus, in America, a young mother
often starts suckling her infant without having once observed another
woman suckling an infant. She is ignorant even if she is interested.
There are marked national differences in breast feeding even in
Western countries as was found in a cross-national study involving London,
Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, and Zurich mothers. (As reported in
Newton and Newton, 1967).
Not only were the overall incidences different,
but significant differences in the type of weaning curves were observed.
Higher breast-feeding rates were associated with high social
status in Zurich and Stockholm, but not in Brussels and Paris where no
hint of class differences in breast-feeding was noted. British and
American studies show high social status to be associated with favorable
attitudes toward breast feeding. Sears found that only about two-
fifths of the infants in their American study were breast-fed, the
large majority for less than three months. (Sears, et al, 1957, p. 7174).
The commonest reason given for not suckling the infant was that
the mother was physically unable to do so. Twenty-six percent of the
whole group gave this reason.
Lactation failure or the inability to suckle infants fluctuates
greatly over short periods of time, suggesting that it is triggered by
psychological rather than physiological factors. For instance, national
surveys indicate that the rate of breast-feeding of infants in
the United States fell by almost half during a ten year period. Likewise,
in the course of twenty years in Bristol, England, the number of
three-month-old breast-fed infants dropped from 77 to 36 percent. In an
obstetric clinic in France the proportion of babies not suckled increased
from 31 to 51 percent in five years. This change is so rapid
that it cannot be attributed to hereditary factors and major physiological
changes in function would be unlikely in the absence of radical
stresses such as starvation or epidemic disease. (Newton and Newton).