MANILA, Philippines - TIME magazine has certainly caused quite a stir with its latest cover in line with the story on "attachment parenting."
The web has erupted with criticisms of the weekly magazine's May 21 cover, featuring a seemingly defiant-faced Jamie Lynne Grumet breastfeeding her three-year-old son, Aram.
The cover kicked up dissent even from Hollywood celebrity breastfeeding proponents like Alyssa Milano, who chided the cover concept via a tweet on her Official account (@Alyssa Milano).
"@Time, no! You missed the mark! You're supposed to be making it easier for breastfeeding moms. Your cover is exploitive & extreme," she reproved via Twitter, then recommended another article for people to read instead.
Model Joanna Krupa thought the magazine's cover was "pretty disturbing," writing on her account (@joannakrupa) that "Breast feeding a 3yr old is wrong! What's wrong with ppl [people]!"
A Los Angeles Times article posted on their website on May 10 explained that according to the news magazine's editors, they ran the provocative cover photo and a story on "attachment parenting"-or, according to the same article, the proverbial advice to parents to be "physically and emotionally available and responsive to their children"-to mark the 20th anniversary of Dr. Bill Sears' book on the subject, which helped "power the movement for moms to establish deeper, and more prolonged, physical bonds with their children."
Countless Netizens, some even breastfeeding advocates, were likewise bothered by the said cover.
A certain user going by the name "AngelKitten" commented on E!Online's article posted on May 10 discussing the cover and said, "I don't mind that she's breastfeeding, i do mind that she's breastfeeding a 3-year-old!!!"
While user "Pistol" attacked the concept of attachment parenting saying that, "Attachment parenting and breastfeeding children old enough to open the fridge and get the milk out isn't about the child; it's ALL about the mother."
Joining the online discussion, user "RLB" said that although she's all for breastfeeding, the photo just screams of "child abuse" because "the 3-year-old does not still need to nurse for nourishment, this is meeting some inappropriate need for the mother."
Meanwhile, 26-year-old Grumet, via an interview with Yahoo! Shine posted on May 11 even proudly confessed that she "knew exactly" what she would get herself into when she posed for the magazine.
But she quickly backpedaled and expressed her sympathy to those who got "upset" about the cover.
"I understand some of the breastfeeding advocates are actually upset about this," she was quoted as saying in the report. But according to her, "This [the cover] isn't how we breastfeed at home. It's more of a cradling, nurturing situation."
She even proudly related that she herself was breast-fed by her mother until she's "six-years-old and until I self-weaned."
Apparently, TIME photographer Martin Schoeller also shot three other families, breastfeeding on the same day he shot Grumet.
