Time cover shows mom breastfeeding 3-year-old
By BETH J. HARPAZAssociated Flock
NEW YORK (AP) - Shocking or no big deal? A woman breastfeeding her 3-year-old son is the cover photo of this week's Era magazine for a story on "attachment parenting," and reactions ranged from applause to cringing to shrugs.
The photo showed Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, a hamper-at-home mom in Los Angeles who says her mother breastfed her until she was 6 years old. She told the magazine in an interview that she's settled up reasoning with strangers who see her son nursing and threaten "to call social services on me or that it's child molestation."
"People have to actualize this is biologically normal," she said, adding, "The more people see it, the more it'll become normal in our culture. That's what I'm hoping. I craving people to see it."
Some questioned why the magazine used the photo of Grumet, a slim blonde pretty enough to be a beau id, to illustrate a story about a style of childrearing that's been around for a generation. The issue includes a profile of the admiration parenting guru, Dr. Bill Sears, who wrote one of the movement's bibles, "The Baby Book," 20 years ago.
