Did Time sexualize breastfeeding with its 'Are you mom enough' cover?

Time cover-model Jamie Lynne Grumet intended to portray extended breastfeeding as normal. But many thought the controversial picture of Ms. Grumet and her son sexualized the relationship.

|
Time/AP
Time magazine cover photograph of Jamie Lynne Grumet breastfeeding her son for a story on "attachment parenting."

What would Sigmund Freud say about Time magazine’s provocative breastfeeding cover picture showing a 20-something mom, hand on hip, as her large son suckles?

The famous psychiatrist posited in 1905 that weaning a child either too early or too late could lead to destructive oral fixations in adulthood. He also wrote about the Oedipus complex, where a son’s attraction to his own mother could lead him to want to kill his father.

While Freud’s ideas have been challenged and even debunked over the years, his theories about human development certainly underpin a widespread backlash to the picture, which illustrated a story about “attachment parenting” where parents sleep with their children, coddle them before they cry, and, sometimes, extend breastfeeding into kindergarten.

Are you a Helicopter Parent? Take our quiz!

To be sure, even some breastfeeding advocates took issue with the picture, especially Grumet’s challenging, hands-on-hip pose and the boy’s quizzical peek at the camera as he’s attached to his mom.

But those who know Grumet say she’s a great parent whose children – she also has an adopted son from Ethiopia – are well-adjusted and not clingy.

“Jamie has a heart the size of Texas…. But I think Time did Jamie a disservice by photographing her in an unnatural position in a calculatedly provocative pose in order to sell magazines,” writes Shannon Bradley-Colleary, who knows Grumet through a Los Angeles moms’ group, on Huffington Post.

But in a country that in some ways remains Puritan, and where women recently have held breastfeeding rallies in retail stores to protest policies against public breastfeeding, the picture crossed a broader decency divide for some Americans.

"How do I erase this from my computer?" wrote JoshuaW from Charlotte, North Carolina, in a comment on Yahoo. "If the feds raid my place, I'm looking at five to ten."

“I think people are mainly reacting to the age of the child, and to see sort of a little boy attached to his mother’s breast is unsettling to people,” says Joani Geltman, a child development expert in Cambridge, Mass. (Grumet’s son in the photo is nearly 4 years old.) “To some people I think it seems almost pornographic.”

Grumet acknowledged in an interview with Time that she has experienced backlash in her private life over her decision to breastfeed her large sons, saying people have threatened “to call social services on me or that it’s child molestation.”

But such incidents, she said, inspired her even more to speak out on the topic. "People have to realize this is biologically normal," she said. “The more people see it, the more it'll become normal in our culture. That's what I'm hoping. I want people to see it."

Others likened the provocative photo to child endangerment, where a child is being exploited to aggrandize his mother. Time “may have unwittingly captured and been party to a grotesque form of psychological abuse,” writes Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist, on Fox News.

Reflecting perhaps a more moderate assessment of the cover, retailers showed no signs of pulling the magazines from their shelves as it appeared on Friday. And Time’s editor, Richard Stengel, offered no apologies in an interview with the Indianapolis Star.

"Part of our job as journalists is to provoke discussion and provoke thought," Mr. Stengel told the Star. "It's becoming a story in and of itself. People are talking about it, and I think that's valuable, too." 

Are you a Helicopter Parent? Take our quiz!

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Did Time sexualize breastfeeding with its 'Are you mom enough' cover?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0512/Did-Time-sexualize-breastfeeding-with-its-Are-you-mom-enough-cover
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe