All or Un-Natural! See Why This Mum Still Breastfeeds Her 5-Year-Old

Adele Allen, a 32-year-old mother of two from Brighton, UK, who feels strongly about full-term breastfeeding, has insisted on breastfeeding her five-year-old son, Daily Mail reports.

According to the report, Allen and her 33-year-old husband, Matt, believe in an all-natural approach to bringing up their children and refuse modern medicine, traditional schooling and encourage full-term breastfeeding.

This means that both their five-year-old son, Ulysses,  and one-year-old daughter, Ostara, are still breastfed, have never visited a doctor and will not attend a mainstream school, sources say.

The mother told Daily Mail, “Ulyssess does still nurse from time to time. Since the baby came along it has decreased rapidly and we had to come to a mutual understanding that it needed to graduate down a bit, but then I wasn’t willing to say ‘no you need to stop now.

She added, “I think its up to him to decide when he wants to move on from it. It’s something that’s just as natural as a hug is, it’s a connection.”

The Allen children have never seen a doctor or received vaccinations, besides a trip the couple made with their son to the hospital after an asthma attack.

Their mother, who distrusts modern medicine, insisted, “I don’t really see that there’s any need other than using breastfeeding to supplement them. I don’t see any need to inject any foreign substance directly into the blood stream. That’s not how children will come into contact with a germ naturally anyway, be it in the mouth or another way.”

According to her, squirting breast milk in her children’s eyes to cure eye infections and serving them lemon juice to cure a cold were preferable natural methods of treating her children’s ailments.

 “If you use plants and herbs you target the bad without attacking the good bacteria as well,” she said, adding that the couple’s parenting method is known as “Off-Grid Parenting”.

“Off-grid is moving towards self-sustainability and being a bit more free range and less institutionalised,” she explained, with her husband adding, “We did collect a lot of information but essentially it was just this feeling.”

With only her husband by her side, she gave birth to both her children completely unassisted and with no medical intervention.

She recalled, “The thought of giving birth in a hospital just didn’t appeal to me because of many reasons, mostly the observer effect. Also, the interventions I think can be gently nudged on you when you are in a very vulnerable state.”

The couple also had ‘lotus births’, which means they did not surgically remove the placenta and umbilical cord at birth. Adele waited for the placenta to fall off naturally by carrying the attached placenta in a cool bag, scattered with salt and rose petals to disguise the smell.

She said, “With both my births it took six days for the umbilical chord to fall away naturally. You wrap it up and keep it clean and it falls away and forms a perfect belly button.In my knowledge, it’s perfectly safe and it worked beautifully for us. I don’t know of any known cases where it’s gone wrong.”

Continuing, she stated, “I very much honour the postpartum-period and I didn’t go out at all during that first week. So it was just a matter of transporting it to the toilet or to the kitchen.”

Photo credit: Barcroft Images