This Cover Doesn't Promote Breastfeeding. It Exploits it.

*Cross-posted from Notes from the Asylum.*

Seriously?

What the heck is up with that "Are you MOM enough?" headline? And, for that matter, what would possess Time Magazine's editors to pair such a shamelessly Mommy Wars-baiting kind of question with an intentionally salacious (not maternal, not nurturing) image of a nearly 4-year-old boy, who's identified by name, standing on a chair with his mouth on his slender, tank top attired twentysomething mother's exposed breast?

This cover is not about provoking a rationale discussion or even a lively debate about the pros and cons of attachment parenting or extended breastfeeding, two subjects certainly worthy of intellectual dissection. The cover isn't, as the editors claim, simply promoting the lead story inside the magazine which profiles America's leading attachment parenting advocate, who happens to be a seventysomething pediatrician. It's about titillation. Yeah, I said that.

Once you get past the cover, the magazine's lead story is entitled, "The Man Who Remade Motherhood." The accompanying articles (available for Time subscribers and on sale tomorrow on newsstands) are about Dr. Bill Sears and his attachment parenting philosophy which includes the promotion of extended breastfeeding through at least the first year of a baby's life and beyond, co-sleeping with the baby, not letting a baby "cry it out" and wearing the baby around in a baby sling. Other articles include a woman's tale of extended breastfeeding and a token analysis of attachment parenting and comparing its tenets to what science has discerned by studying its practice. Again, I think that these are important subjects to assess, particularly when it comes to tension between attachment parenting and the ability of women to work outside the home.

However that cover does a disservice to breastfeeding and flouts what breastfeeding advocates repeatedly say about it: It's not sexual and we need to get beyond seeing breasts as sexual objects and recognize that they're purposeful, functional parts of the female anatomy after a woman has a baby.

I'm a very low-key breastfeeding advocate, having nursed my babies for a long time, and think women should be able to do it wherever and whenever they and/or their babies need to. But this cover isn't about all of that. It's about newsstand sales. The magazine's editors should be embarrassed by their craven exploitation of this woman and her son, whose friends will be able to Google this image of him, at almost 4, suckling his mother's breast. Did anybody think about the impact of this photo on the kid?

Image credit: Time Magazine.

Couple of Parent-Centric Columns: Lessons from 2011's TV Parents & Why Moms Should Run for Office

Lessons from 2011's TV Parents

It's been quite the year for parents on the small screen.

We've been entertained by the hijinks of the Modern Family's Claire & Phil Dunphy and their bedroom door that should've had a lock on it before their kids surprised them at inopportune moment.

We've seen Parenthood's Adam and Kristina Braverman try and fail to ban their teen daughter from dating an older man who had his own apartment.

We witnessed The Middle's Frankie and Mike Heck declare themselves to be free from their children's unreasonable demands which reduced them to little more than unpaid, disrespected servants (although the self-declared freedom was short-lived).

We laughed as Up All Night's new parents, Chris and Reagan Brinkley, tried in vain to prove that they're hip and cool and able to party it up on weeknights, even though their baby isn't sleeping through the night yet, they're sleep deprived and Reagan needed to work in the morning.

My recent Pop Culture and Politics column details these child-rearing lessons that I gleaned from watching TV parents during 2011.

Why Moms Should Run for Office

In another recent Pop Culture and Politics column I extended an invitation to women who are raising the next generation to run for public office because, all too often, women's voices are not heard or represented in our elected bodies.

The advocacy group She Should Run offered up this dour data on the state of women in American politics:

• "Women hold only 17 percent of the seats in Congress."
• "State legislatures only have 23 percent women."
• "Only 6 out of 50 states have a female governor."
• "The United States trails behind the rest of the world -- ranking 87th in the number of women in our national legislature."
• ". . . [W]omen are 50 percent less likely than men to seriously consider running for office, less likely than men to actually run for office and far less likely to run for higher office."

As one of the founders of The White House Project (whose goals include electing a female commander in chief) said in the powerful documentary Miss Representation, when it comes to our daughters, "You can't be what you can't see."

Image credit: She Should Run.

Fairy Tales with a Feminist Twist & Parenting as Performance Art

Image credit: ABC

Got a couple of new columns on parenting and pop culture that’ve been keeping me busy these days . . . One piece is about a new ABC show that I’ve been watching with The Girl, Once Upon a Time,  which takes traditional fairy tales and turns them on their head. The latest episode notwithstanding, the drama has been giving its audience smart, strong women instead of ones who are simply looking to be rescued and to don wear multi-tiered frocks and tiaras. (I’ve been reviewing Once Upon a Time over on CliqueClack TV.)

Meanwhile, did you hear the story about the woman in New York who gave birth in a Brooklyn art museum as a piece of performance art a few weeks ago? After she had her baby in the museum, the new mother announced her plans to now turn parenting this baby boy into another work of performance art.

When I gave it more thought, I realized that while I’d venture to guess that no one else is likely to deliver their babies in front of a paying audience, we all parent in public, whether we like it or not.  And in that respect, this performance artist is hardly alone. Thus my column on parenting as performance art.

Image credit: ABC.

A Plea for Reason: Locker Chandeliers . . . Why?

*cross-posted on Notes from the Asylum*

I'm not one who's fond of picking fights with people. Usually I'm a live and let live kind of gal. But where I do get my knickers in a twist is when someone else's actions start putting pressure on me to adhere to their over-the-top standards. Then I get testy.

What sort of standards? The kind I read about in a series of three articles last week:

First, I read an article about parents who go to their children's middle schools and decorate the youngsters' lockers with rugs, wallpaper and even locker chandeliers. Yes, LOCKER CHANDELIERS. (The article described how the lockers are now seen by those in the middle school set as a reflection of the students' personalities and has an impact on how that child is perceived by her peers.)

Second, I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about how parents (re: moms) can craft A+ lunches for their kids by tucking elaborate, inspiring, Dale Carnegie-esque notes inside their children's lunchboxes every day, perhaps mixing things up a bit by gift wrapping their offspring's sandwiches or occasionally decorating their kids' pieces of fruit so that the fruit has a face. (The piece said the note writing has become competitive in some circles with disappointed children chastising their mothers if another student receives a hipper lunchbox note than they did.)

Finally, there was the story about a woman who was 39 weeks pregnant yet ran a marathon, delivered her baby only a few hours later and then proclaimed she wasn't tired. After reading this, I readied my white flag of surrender. Reading about these women simply exhausted me.

However I decided against waving the flag of surrender and instead opted to launch a counteroffensive, declaring these parental actions simply batty. Therefore my Pop Culture column this week over on Modern Mom calls for the moms who are raising the parenthood bar to extremely absurd heights to consider the plaintive cries of we mere mortals who have neither the time nor the inclination to install a chandelier in our children's lockers to please, for the love of God, dial it back a bit. In the words of fellow blogger Jen Singer, of MommaSaid, "You're ruining this for the rest of us . . . Knock it off."

Image credit: Locker Lookz.