It’s 2025, but some people seem to still have lots of opinions about breastfeeding. Given that people can be pretty judgmental when it comes to how moms feed their own children, it’s no surprise that a grandma faced backlash when she decided to breastfeed her grandkids. She says her family didn’t mind it in the slightest, but she lost friends because they found the whole thing too “disgusting.”
In a piece for the Daily Mail, grandma Jane McNeice, 49, admitted that people might find her actions “controversial,” “odd,” or inappropriate. But after breastfeeding two of her daughter’s children and providing expressed milk to another, Jane has no regrets.
A few months after her daughter welcomed a child, Jane found out she was pregnant.
In her piece, Jane explained that she’s “always had a strong maternal instinct” and welcomed her daughter Laura years ago. At age 15, Laura revealed that she was pregnant. Jane recalled feeling “devastated” at first because she had imagined her daughter going to college, starting a career, getting married, and then having kids. Although teen pregnancy was not what she imagined for her daughter, she wanted to support her.
Laura welcomed her first child, Evie, in 2012. Seven months later, Jane found out she was also expecting.
She found that she ‘adored’ breastfeeding.
When Laura was a baby, she “just couldn’t latch on,” which made Jane feel like “a failure.” But when Jane welcomed her son Oliver in 2013, she “could breastfeed from the start.”
“I adored it, from the closeness it created between us to the awe I felt at what my body was capable of,” the grandma wrote. Meanwhile, her daughter Laura could not breastfeed, so she used formula to feed her baby.
One day, baby Evie unknowingly drank her grandma’s breast milk. Jane had put her breast milk in a bottle for her son, but Evie grabbed it and started drinking it. Later, Jane told her daughter about what had happened. Laura didn’t mind. They both agreed it “wasn’t weird at all,” and could even come with health benefits for Evie.
Later on, Jane and Laura both welcomed more children.
And Jane started breastfeeding her other grandchild as well. One day, when watching her second granddaughter, Bella, Jane decided to breastfeed the 13-month-old because it felt like “the most natural thing in the world.”
She hadn’t asked Laura about it beforehand and acknowledged that some people might think she crossed a boundary there. But she felt confident that her daughter wouldn’t care.
“I breastfed Bella three more times over the next few months on occasions when I was looking after her,” Jane wrote. “Laura and I hadn’t discussed that this would be the case; it just felt right.”
She later breastfed Laura’s third child, Violet, as well.
Though her family didn’t think anything of it, other people did.
This arrangement worked for the family. When Laura was available, she’d breastfeed Bella and Violet, something she hadn’t been able to do for her first baby. But when Jane was watching the grandchildren, she fed them herself. In 2016, she casually mentioned this to one of her friends. The admission ultimately ended their friendship.
“That’s disgusting,” her friend said at the time. Though Jane felt judged by her friend, she knew that the decision felt right for her and her family. Defending the decision, she wrote, “Why is it deemed OK to feed a child cow’s milk, or a formula designed by chemists, but not milk from a relative?”
