Infant Agency and Its Implication for Breast-Feeding Promotion in Brazil

Studies indicate that early weaning and supplementation (before six months) are widespread problems in Brazil. To arrest and reverse this trend, national, local, and grassroots organizations have implemented a number of breast-feeding promotional campaigns. While these campaigns employ a number of different strategies, many incorporate education as a key component. Often these programs share a common assumption about infant feeding and decision making. Specifically, these campaigns frequently conceptualize the decision to breast-feed as a unilateral one, with mothers making feeding decisions and infants passively accepting and complying with these decisions. While health care professionals may assume that mothers share this model of breast-feeding decision making, this may not always be the case. This paper presents a case study from the urban Amazon where mothers attribute agency to their infants. As such, mothers state that successful breast-feeding is the result of bilateral decision making; both mothers and infants must decide to breast-feed. This bilateral model shapes observed patterns of early weaning in the community. When asked why they terminated breast-feeding, 42 percent of mothers stated it was their infants' decision. The implication of attributing agency to infants for breast-feeding promotion is discussed.