TIME Magazine Cover - Mother Breastfeeds Son Stirs Controversy
A provocative cover on the latest Time magazine has whipped up a storm of controversy about so-called attachment parenting.
The image shows an attractive 26-year-old mother Jamie Lynne Grumet, fully clothed and looking at the camera while her three-year-old son Aram stands on a chair suckling her breast.
The image has stirred a new debate on attachment parenting, which is provoking strong reactions. Many women find the cover “exploitive and extreme” saying TIME was making mothering choices even harder.
Attachment parenting is based on the idea that babies develop a strong emotional bond and feel more secure the more they are held.
The approach includes using baby slings, sharing beds with young children and breastfeeding - sometimes through toddler-hood.
Grumet blogs about how she is using the attachement method not only for Aram but also to his 5-year-old son Samuel, who she adopted from Ethiopia in 2010. As the TIME magazine cover catapulted her to become a household name, her blog crashed due to sudden spike in traffic.
One post features a picture of Aram being breastfed at the the Playboy mansion with the caption: “I’ve breastfed Aram at the Playboy mansion. I actually felt it was the most appropriate place on earth to do it.”
TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel admitted that the image is “provocative.”
“We’re posing an interesting question about a subject that couldn’t be more important — how we raise our children. People have all kinds of mixed feelings about that,” he said.
