Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Time Cover Photo: Breast Feeding or...

Foxnews has a very good column about it today. He looks at it from 2 angles. 1st is how screwed up Mama is. Then he contends that the kid will spend the next 15 years being picked on by his schoolmates about it. I agree.

Time magazine cover -- forget the breast, what about the boy?

By Dr. Keith Ablow

Published May 11, 2012

FoxNews.com

Time's latest cover, for a story on extreme parenting, is sparking a debate over the image as much as the parenting.

Jamie Lynn Grumet, the 26-year-old mother featured on the cover of Time magazine breastfeeding her 3-year-old son, has done more this week than become the poster woman for �attachment parenting,� the sometimes laudable movement that advises parents to be physically and emotionally available and responsive to their children. She has shown the limits of such a concept, and the ways in which it can be twisted into a bizarre, contemptible caricature of itself.

Grumet is a model, and models have to have at least healthy dose of narcissism (television journalists like me, too, by the way). But I fear Grumet has more than what�s healthy.

Because she thought nothing of becoming far more famous than she ever was or ever would have been by getting naked on the cover of Time using her son as a prop�letting him, in fact, look right into the camera and be completely recognizable while sucking her nipple. He may never be better-known for anything than for being a breastfeeding 3-year-old on the cover of a national magazine.

Ever.

When he enters school later in his young life he may be ridiculed for it. And these realities hint at a woman who could (and I have not evaluated her) have very poor boundaries and be willing or likely not only to nurture a child, but to absorb him, deny him his personhood and render him no more than her appendage.

The truth is that what Time magazine may have unwittingly captured and been party to was a grotesque form of psychological abuse�the parading into public of an intimate moment (intimate for mother and child) at the sole direction of that child�s mother, who didn�t stop to think that her child may not be able at the age of three to know what he thinks about the whole thing, much less to stop it, if he wanted to.

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In short, it is not at all clear who is the �parent� in the Time magazine photograph. Is Grumet responding to real and healthy needs emanating from her son�s psyche, or is he responding to her potentially outsized needs to be the center of attention and the object of desire (if only for warmth). Who, we can legitimately ask, is feeding whom?

See, Grumet loves being photographed. And she apparently loves having her son breastfeed. And she loves attention. And she�s happy enough to get naked in front of other people (which there may be nothing wrong with�for her). But that may or may not be the case for her 3-year-old boy, which seems not to have mattered to her�at all. And if his will was bent to hers in order to have him suck his mother�s nipple in front of a photographer and makeup artist and art director and all of America, then it stands to reason that his will may be being bent to hers in all sorts of ways�including protracted breastfeeding.

The truth is that what Time magazine may have unwittingly captured and been party to was a grotesque form of psychological abuse�the parading into public of an intimate moment (intimate for mother and child) at the sole direction of that child�s mother, who didn�t stop to think that her child may not be able at the age of three to know what he thinks about the whole thing, much less to stop it, if he wanted to.

Grumet has stained the attachment parenting movement by documenting how easily it can go wrong, when used as an excuse for poor boundaries and manipulation.

In a way, while looking at the Time magazine cover, we are all Grumet�s son and may know something of his possible plight: finding her a compelling and dramatic presence, seduced by her combination of sex appeal and motherhood�unable, in fact, to detach from her.

Talk about a prescription for psychological disaster.

This is self-centeredness at its worst, sold as good parenting. And this is an act of media violence against a child, committed by adult journalists who also commandeered his will (as did his mother), for sensation and profit. Rarely do we get such evidence of how wrong parenting can go, how poorly journalists can behave and how slow we can be to recognize ugliness when it is disguised as something beautiful.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. Dr. Ablow can be reached at infokeithablow.com.

Ummmmm...didn't she sorta try to make it everyone else's business?

Dr Ablow is spot on..... I have not read Time Magazine in years due to their hard left slant..... I believe this lates stunt to get more readers will be a major nail in their coffin.....

With any luck...

Breast feeding is fine - but NOT depicted that way on the cover of any major magazine..

Guess they're desperate for sales...

Hahaha Alan, yer killin' me here ....

and now...................(drum roll please), is Ms Grumet's reply. Note that she brings the abused child along, to further insure his life will be ruined.
This is a seriously disturbed woman. One can only imagine how [bleep] up her husband must be.
Looks like she advocates 'intimacy' with the child in bed with her, as well.

link to article

Maybe but I think it's more likely she really believes she's doing good for her children and just wanted to put it out there for consideration. The magazine no doubt put it out there to stir controversey and sell magazines.

Well, I'm not a professional shrink, but it looks like the majority opinion of those cited is in agreement with what I posted earlier:

�When you give a child the feeling that the whole world revolves around them, it�s not good training for the real world,� said psychotherapist Dr. Robi Ludwig. �The whole world doesn�t revolve around anybody.�

Paul

Maybe but clearly the majority here are [bleep] up immature, perverts who can't look at a picture with a partly exposed woman's breast without their sick minds going immediately into the pornographic/sexual sewer mode. As to the "experts" you cited from the article, keep in mind these are the same "experts" who have been telling us how to deal with/raise children at home and in schools for the past 30 years and look at where that has gotten us.

BH, if you're going to quote me to make your point, please cite enough of it to keep it in the context I intended.

I said nothing about the motivation or mindset of the observers, but about the potential effect on the child's development and future adjustment.

Paul

Where's Freud when you need him.

This has been one of the funniest threads I've read in a while.

I would not put up with that sh1t if she were my wife!

One of the best things we ever did was get the kids sleeping in their own bed, straight through the night.

Either the parents are going to be in charge or the kids are going to be in charge. I pity those sorry folks who can't step up and be parents. They have the moral fortitude of a wet noodle. What is right is usually the hardest decision for these moral jellyfish to carry out.

I'll vote in favor of us all getting a good night sleep every time. I'll worry about their widdle fee-wings in the morning.

24hourcampfire calling Sigmund Freud, Sigmund are you there?

http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/p/sigmund_freud.htm

http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/p/sigmund_freud.htm

Anyone care to wager whether mommmy dearest is a vegetarian? She's just trying to fight global warming guys.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/scienc...ning-helping-speed-the-spread-of-humans/


Meat-rich Diet Lead To Earlier Weaning, Helping Speed The Spread Of Humans
April 19, 2012


Diets rich in meat helped early mother�s wean their babies at an earlier age and allowed them to have more children, behaviors that may have helped humans spread more quickly across the world and had a profound effect on human evolution, according to new research.

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden, publishing their work in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, found a clear connection between eating meat and weaning at an earlier age. They discovered that all mammalian species stop suckling when their brains have developed to a particular stage, with carnivores reaching that stage more rapidly than herbivores or omnivores.

�Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,� said Elia Psouni, lead author of the study. �This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.�

Because human mothers wean their young so quickly, they �can potentially contribute a larger number of individuals to the human population during their reproductive years,� Psouni told LiveScience. �We are suggesting that this has had a very big impact on the survival and spreading of the species and the way it happened.�

Among natural fertility societies, the average duration of breast-feeding is 2 years and 4 months. This is a very small timeframe compared to the longevity of our species, more than 100 years. [bleep], humans� closest living relatives, which have a lifespan of around 60 years, suckle their young for 4 to 5 years.

[bleep] only receive about 5 percent of their calories from meat, compared to about 20 percent in humans.

To find out if the dietary shift from fruits and vegetables to meat is important in determining weaning age, the Lund team compared the developmental characteristics of 67 different mammals, including humans, apes, mice and killer whales. Using computer models and other analyses, they found that a combined body size, brain size and diet accounted for about 90 percent of the reasons for time of weaning.

�We are much more used to thinking of humans as aligned with other great apes in many aspects,� Psouni told Jennifer Welsh of LiveScience. But according to the study findings, she explained that �humans ought to be put together with tigers and killer whales,� because all these �animals wean their offspring sooner� than most apes.

Researchers in the past have tried to explain the relatively shorter suckling period seen in humans based on social and behavioral theories of parenting and family size. But the new research has shown that suckling stops when the brain has reached a particular developmental stage. And that stage is reached far sooner when the energy content of the diet comes from meat.

�That humans seem to be so similar to other animals can of course be taken as provocative,� Psouni noted. �We like to think that culture makes us different as a species. But when it comes to breast-feeding and weaning, no social or cultural explanations are needed; for our species as a whole it is a question of simple biology.�

Psouni added that it doesn�t matter if the meat is cooked or not, since the same early weaning trend is seen in lions, tigers and even killer whales. The confusion surrounding early human weaning only comes about when you compare humans to great apes, species of which are not carnivorous.

The early weaning seen in humans could have helped with human evolution and the spread across the world, the researchers said.

�The access to a diet that is rich with animal protein is what makes it possible for that species to (over many generations) shorten the time between births,� Psouni added. �You wean faster, you can become pregnant faster and give birth to more offspring.�

Psouni cautioned that the research should not be received as a sign of what humans today should or should not eat.



Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports


Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/19A09)

Some sites on breast feeding.

http://www.womenshealth.gov/breastfeeding/

http://www.babycenter.com/0_how-breastfeeding-benefits-you-and-your-baby_8910.bc

http://www.breastfeeding.com/breast...t-are-the-benefits-of-breastfeeding.aspx

http://www.nrdc.org/breastmilk/benefits.asp

http://www.motheringfromtheheart.com/Benefits.htm

http://breastfeeding.hypermart.net/breastmilkadvantages.html

And Time:

http://www.babycenter.com/0_how-breastfeeding-benefits-you-and-your-baby_8910.bc

That's enough for now.

I think for this crowd, you need to highlight the sites with pictures... just as a public service.

John

Seems to me there are two main groups who still hold to Freudian theory:

Psychoanalytic therapists who have invested large amounts of time and money in their own didactic analyses. Used to be pretty much a requirement for psychiatrists, but that was in the past, and most have probably long since retired. Don't know for sure.

English teachers or professors who really like all the symbolism, sex 'n stuff. I could always count on an "A" in English lit by writing up some BS psychoanalytic analysis of a story.

Oh yeah, and liberals. As evidence I offer their use of the term "homophobic", which has its roots in Freudian or psychoanalytic theory. Of course, they accept it at face value, never questioning its validity.

Paul

I am very fortunate.

That boy is old enough for a binky.