Jamie Lynne Grumet Photos Prompt Are You Mom Enough Debate

 

 

ST LOUIS (LALATE) – Jamie Lynne Grumet photos are prompting an “Are You Mom Enough” debate this Mother’s Day. Jamie Lynne Grumet appears in the controversial Time Magazine Breastfeeding cover this week for the news story about attachment parenting entitled “Are You Mom Enough”.

But after Jamie Lynne Grumet spoke to news this week, the controversy wasn’t done. Grumet defended her side of the debate. And supporting her was the man who inspired the movement. Dr William Sears Author of the Baby Book first wrote about attachment parenting in 1992. That book, and its approach dominated news debate this week.

 

Yet, when Grumet and Sears appeared on the TODAY show this week, the news program called the Time Magazine cover “more fuel for the fire”, “an eye grabbing cover”. The news telecast explained that critics call attachment parenting an “intensive approach” involving a family bed, wearing your baby, and attending your child around the clock.

One critic said that attending to your child every waking moment from birth to toddler years does not prepare the child for the real world. “The whole world doesn’t revolve around anyone” said the critic.

 

Ironically, as soon as the TODAY news anchor asked Jamie Lynne Grumet a question, her son interrupted her mom speaking and began his voice his own desires, in the middle of a national news broadcast.

Jamie Lynne Grumet said that “We understand what we were going to get into” by appearing on the TIME cover. She also told news “I thought like our family was one of the better ones to handle [the debate], because my mom’s, our personal breast feeding …”, but then was interrupted by her son.

 

Grumet then was able to continue. “I don’t feel like that takes away from my own personal life, my relationship with my husband is very important to me. It gives my children a strong bond too. I know some people claim you can’t be intimate with your husband if you are attachment parenting.”

Dr William Sears, author of the Baby Book, also defended the idea. He claims that attachment parenting babies never become bullies. “If you came in my office as a new parent, and I want a parenting pill that will turn …a super baby, that … gives you eye contact… I have never seen an attachment parenting baby who has become a bully.”

He also told news “We put balance, it is not extreme. .. this is what you would naturally and instinctively do to give your baby the best investment.”

Q&A with Breast-Feeding Mom Jamie Lynne Grumet

Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, is a proponent of attachment parenting

 Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26-year-old mother of two in Los Angeles, is on the cover of TIME this week breast-feeding her son Aram, who turns 4 next month. Kate Pickert, the author of the accompanying cover story, “The Man Who Remade Motherhood,” spoke with Grumet about attachment parenting, adoption and breast-feeding, topics Grumet writes about on her blog, I Am Not the Babysitter.

It’s clear from your blog that you’re into attachment parenting. Are you a fan of Dr. Bill Sears?
He’s great. I’ve read all his books. He has a very gentle spirit, and I find what he’s saying to be nonjudgmental and relevant to what’s happening today and what we’re finding out about some of the issues that are popping up with our children’s health. I feel like he really is doing this because he knows this is best. And the way he does it is graceful and educating rather than condemning.

Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, is a proponent of attachment parenting

How old are your children?
My adopted son is 5, and my biological son will be 4 next month.

Tell me about becoming a mom and breast-feeding your children.
We were starting the process of adoption when I got pregnant. We weren’t expecting our biological son at all. He was born two months early, and preemies that age don’t have a sucking reflex. The nurses in the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit] — they kept trying to put him on formula. I couldn’t see him for three days because I was so sick. I was basically passed out from the medication they were giving me. My husband is so great — he would bring the equipment in and actually do the pumping while I was asleep. It was a full family effort. My mother breast-fed me until I was 6 years old, until I self-weaned. Her encouragement to breast-feed is why we were so successful.

Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, is a proponent of attachment parenting

And your adopted son?
We were able to bring our son home in November 2010. I know so many amazing women who have induced their lactation, but I had milk [from feeding my biological son]. I had one of the easier situations as far as adoptive breast-feeding is concerned, but it was considered extended breast-feeding. And it was transracial. And he was adopted. I was ready for attack as soon as I posted one of the pictures [on my blog].

Being able to give him that [comfort] with the trauma that he faced was really, really important to me. But I didn’t realize how much it would help my attachment to him. When his English improved, because the connection was there, he didn’t do it as much. So now he’ll do it maybe once a month.

Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, is a proponent of attachment parenting

Why did your mom breast-feed you for so long?
She wasn’t a hippie. Everyone thinks she must have been because we lived in Northern California. My dad did go to Berkeley, but he was a nutritional scientist. He got his master’s there and his Ph.D. My parents were really into nutrition, that’s why.

Do you remember breast-feeding?
Yes.

What’s that memory like?
It’s really warm. It’s like embracing your mother, like a hug. You feel comforted, nurtured and really, really loved. I had so much self-confidence as a child, and I know it’s from that. I never felt like she would ever leave me. I felt that security.

Extended breast-feeding is one of those attachment-parenting things that can be really challenging for moms who work. Are you a stay-at-home mom?
I stay at home. I blog from home. And I homeschool. I think if [attachment parenting] is working for a family, that’s what should matter. If it’s too hard on the parents, it’s in vain if there’s an emptiness about how they’re living their life.

What do you say to people who say breast-feeding a 3-year-old is disturbing or wrong?
They are people who tell me they’re going to call social services on me or that it’s child molestation. I really don’t think I can reason with those people. But as far as someone who says they’re uncomfortable with this, I don’t think it’s wrong to admit this. But people have to realize this is biologically normal. It’s not socially normal. 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.

There seems to be a war going on between conventional parenting and attachment parenting, and that’s what I want to avoid. I want everyone to be encouraging. We’re not on opposing teams. We all need to be encouraging to each other, and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job at that.

Archive for the ‘Jamie Lynne Grumet Blog’ tag

 

The front cover of the newest issue of Time Magazine shows a mother breastfeeding a boy who appears old enough to make himself a sandwich. The caption on the bottom right hand corner of the photograph seeks to clarify the boy’s age as it reads “Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, and her 3-year-old son”. The assumption that the boy is too old to be breastfed is the taboo that the magazine is addressing head on with this photograph by Martin Schoeller. The Washington Post writes, rather cunningly, ‘Time cover milks shocking image’.

The Time cover is of course not the first product of visual culture that seeks to provoke the viewer in such fashion: the Australian hit TV show ‘The Slap’ similarly portrayed a young mother feeding her 4-year-old boy. The boy’s constant nagging for his mother’s breast milk creates an intriguing subplot in which the husband feels increasingly ostracised and alienated from his wife. The alcoholic father seeks to overcome his jealousy with a different type of oral fixation by continuously drinking beer throughout the entire eight part series. Crucially, in a brilliant portrayal of the deeply psychoanalytical (and Freudian) conditions unfolding in the show, the father is drinking beer straight from the bottle, not too unlike a child drinking milk from a bottle.

 

 

Rosie, played by Melissa George, breastfeeding her child in ‘The Slap’, 2011

In contrast to the quasi-documentary style of ‘The Slap’ however, the Time cover is more ‘shocking’. But how? Firstly, the photograph seeks to confuse the viewer with regards to the boy’s age with one crucial detail: the boy is standing on a chair. The boy thus appears taller, and by extension, he appears older than he actually is. To illustrate that point I would suggest that the knowledge of the boy’s age is far less provocative than the photograph. In addition to that, rather than having his eyes closed or looking at his mother, the boy, rather creepily, looks towards the camera. This gaze back to the viewer implies an awareness of the camera, an awareness of a person looking at himself, and ultimately, an awareness of a person looking at himself sucking his mother’s breast. The boy’s gaze implies so many layers of looking that it could easily be confused with the gaze of an adult. This is the visual trickery in this image, that even though the boy is only 3-years-old, his height and his knowing gaze make him appear much older. His army style trousers and grey top, clothing perhaps associated with a teenager, further confuse a perception of his age.

 

 

I would suggest that the ‘shock’ lies less in the boy sucking his mother’s breast than it lies in the mother. The clue for this can be found in the headline of a blog on the Slate website: ‘Why Is This Attractive Woman Breast-Feeding This Giant Child?’ The headline implies that if the the woman was ‘unattractive’ then perhaps we wouldn’t be wondering why she is breastfeeding her child. The way the photograph was taken ultimately feeds into the perception that this woman is not simply a woman, but she is an attractive woman: her clothes accentuate her slim body, she hold her right hand on her hips much like a model in a fashion shoot, and, like her son, she looks knowingly straight into the camera.

 

 

Visual references of mother and child, at the cover shoot.

Three behind the scenes photographs from the shoot supplied by Time’s Lightbox blog indicate that the magazine and the photographer studied classical representations of breast feeding. In spite of the visual references taped on the wall of the photo studio, the photograph that was eventually chosen for the cover has few similarities with any previous form of representation: the mother does not look lovingly at her child, she does not hold her child, nor does the child hold her mother. Standing tall, the mother does not adopt a bodily position associated with nursing a child. Ignoring all these signifiers of motherhood, in the photograph, the mother does not look like a mother. This is perhaps the real ‘shock’ in the photograph: it lacks a history of representation, a history of visual references or precedents. The photograph is, in the true sense of the word, iconoclastic: it metaphorically breaks the classical and idealistic image of mother and child.

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