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Time magazine’s latest cover photo was the talk of the town this morning. The magazine, which hit stores today, features Jamie Grumet, 26, breastfeeding her three-year-old son Aram on the cover as a teaser for an article in the magazine on attachment parenting.
Attachment parenting in it’s most intense form includes being with one’s child at all times day and night. This includes breastfeeding one’s child beyond what most people would call a normal time frame and allowing one’s child to sleep in bed with his parents rather than in a separate room.
“It’s not extreme,” the father of attachment parenting and author of The Baby Book, Dr. William Sears, told MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie on the TODAY show. “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 to give your baby the best investment you’ll ever give.”
For many young people, parenthood is just around the corner if not already a reality. While wrong ways to parent are often obvious, no right ways to parent truly exist.
Grumet, who was breastfed until the age of six, told views of the TODAY show, that regardless of which parenting technique new parents choose to take, their child will most likely turn out fine.
“You need to do what’s best for your baby and your own family,” she said. “You can take some of Dr. Sears attachment parenting philosophies and maybe not others, and it’s OK.”
Likewise, Sears says of his parenting philosophy, “These are tools and not rules.”
Let’s be honest, the question on every reader’s mind who’s not a parent is, “How has Grumet’s approach to parenting affecting her . . . personal life?”
Grumet says attachment parenting has actually made she and her husband’s bond stronger.
“I don’t feel like that takes away from my own personal life, you know my relationship with my husband is very,very important to me and I think that it gives my children a strong bond, too,” she said. “I think a lot of people say you can’t really be intimate with your husband if you’re co-sleeping, but those are kind of myths.”
Grumet went on to say that the Time cover is a sensationalized version of what attachement parenting is actually like.
“I feel like they don’t show the nurturing side to attachment parenting, which is … this isn’t how we breast-feed at home, it’s more of a cradling, nurturing situation,” she said. “I do understand why Time chose this picture because … it did create such a media craze to get the dialogue talking.”
In March, Red Alert Politics wondered Are We Immune to Anything? after an Elle cover featured a naked, pregnant Jessica Simpson. Today we’re asking readers for their opinion on this week’s cover of Time.
Does Time’s latest cover go too far? Vote in our poll.
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