The mother breastfeeding her nearly four-year-old son on Time magazine's latest cover appeared on the Today Show and made everyone feel a lot better when she confirmed that the suckling situation shown "isn’t how we breast-feed at home, it’s more of a cradling, nurturing situation."
One person said of the cover pose, "I don’t see anything wrong with breast-feeding but I think the picture itself on the cover is pretty awkward and terrible. But that’s just because the picture is bad, not because breast-feeding is offensive and something to be ashamed of." Grumet explained, "I do understand why Time chose this picture because…it did create such a media craze to get the dialogue talking."
Time's feature is really about attachment parenting and Dr. William Sears, the pediatrician turned parenting guide guru, who has been preaching that parents should keep their children as close to them as possible (by breastfeeding longer, by co-sleeping with them, and wearing babies in slings). Of course, there are critics who say his suggestions can kill parents'—especially moms'—confidence and point to his previous statements against working mothers.
Sears was on the program and emphasized, "I’ve never yet seen an attachment-parented baby who’s become a school bully. If you were on an island, and you had no mother-in-laws, no psychologists, no doctors around, no experts, this is what you would naturally and instinctively do." But who cares about that debate when there's huge photograph of a lady's boob with a kid attached to it on a national publication!
Grumet, a Los Angeles resident who blogs about attachment parenting and transracial adoption (she was able to breastfeed her adopted son from Ethiopia), also said, "You need to do what’s best for your baby and for your own family. You can take some of Dr. Sears’ attachment parenting philosophies and maybe not others and that’s OK; you’re not a bad parent. Your child will still be OK."
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