ABSTRACT
The cover of Time’s May 21, 2012 issue features a startling image and provocative headline. A young, slender woman stands with one hand on her hip, gazing serenely at the viewer. The other arm is draped around her three-year-old son, who stands by her side on a small wooden chair. The child is nursing at his mother’s breast. “Are You Mom Enough?” the headline demands, presumably referring to the sight of a child still breastfeeding beyond infancy as an index of the mother’s fortitude. Inside, readers are invited to pass judgment on “attachment parenting,” a philosophy that advocates cultivating deep emotional bonds between parents and children through practices that emphasize physical closeness, including co-sleeping arrangements, carrying children in arms or slings, and extended breastfeeding. According to author Kate Pickert, the rise of attachment parenting “over the past two decades has helped redefine the modern relationship between mother and baby” (par. 5). Time’s story was part of an ongoing and heated debate, waged largely over the internet, on the concept of modern motherhood and the merits of so-called “parenting philosophies” in general (Slaughter; Allen; Rosin; “‘Case Against Breastfeeding’ Overlooks”). Motherhood, in particular, is often touted as a selfless act (the “toughest job in the world”) as well as a singular source of happiness. Jennifer Senior, whose book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Motherhood addresses the disparity between reality and ideologies of parenting, argues that raising children demands that we “redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is.” (241). The image of cover model Jamie Lynne Grumet nursing her three-year-old son seemed to strike a nerve, however, since the practice of breastfeeding a child older than one-indeed, breastfeeding at all in an age of readily available infant formula-has become an opportunity for judgment on everything from a mother’s class, race, and religious beliefs to her feminist bona fides. The “Are You Mom Enough?” cover clearly means to shock with the image of a beautiful mother offering her breast to a boy who does not look like a baby. Of course, breastfeeding into toddlerhood is nothing new. The shock of the Time cover is lessened when we remember that one of English literature’s most celebrated and recognizable heroinesShakespeare’s Juliet-was also still nursing at age three.
