May 10, 2012 | 11:47 AM |

Big Kids Breast-Feeding: This Week’s Startling Time Cover

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, attachment parenting, breastfeeding
Time on attachment parenting: Has it gone too far?

Time on attachment parenting: Has it gone too far?

Time magazine this week asks some important questions about attachment parentingand whether its practitioners’ relentless concerns with long-term breast feeding, co-sleeping and “wearing” their babies for constant comfort is rational or insane.

But more than the stories, it’s the cover photo that will grab your attention whether you’ve got your kid in a sling 24/7 or not.

It shows Jamie Lynne Grumet of Los Angeles, baring her breast for her three-year-old son (who seems like a particularly large child) to suck on. There are more pictures inside. These are startling images, even for someone like me, who nursed my kids past the two-year mark.

Readers, please weigh in here. Do you find these arty photos of moms breastfeeding their three-year-olds discomfiting or empowering?

Slate’s Hanna Rosin finds the whole concept alarming, as she writes here:

Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. So, it’s not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience “breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.” And it’s not enough to snuggle—you have to snuggle enough to achieve a spiritual high. As Badinter has said, once women were just expected to tolerate their babies, Betty Draper style, but now they are expected to experience “jouissance,” loosely translated as “orgasm.” And this is what makes the movement truly oppressive.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

  • H_grodman

    This picture is a bit provocative, and I wonder if it is real. 
    Firstly, breast feeding is wonderful at least through the first year, after that, not sure about benefits.
    Secondly, Jamie Lynne Grumet’s breasts don’t look like they have been nursing much. 

  • PeterFarran

    That was annoying, it was my comment, but my husband’s facebook account and now he will be annoyed that this was put down as him speaking…I didn’t even hit a submit button!