Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
Subject: LOL: Time shows mother breastfeeding 3-year-old Fri May 11, 2012 4:06 am
A startling Time magazine cover image of a mother breastfeeding her three-year-old son has sparked debate about the technique known as attachment parenting.
Under the headline "Are you mom enough?" Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, appears on the latest US edition's cover with her son Aram, 3, as he stands on a small seat to reach her.
Grumet explains in the story that she uses the same attachment method on her adopted five-year-old son Samuel, who she adopted from Ethiopia in 2010 and continues to breastfeed about once a month. She also says that her mother breastfed her until she was six.
She told the magazine she remembered being latched onto her mother's breast.
"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."
Grumet said being able to breastfeed Samuel after his adoption helped comfort him following the trauma he had faced.
"I didn't realise 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."
Grumet has written on her blog, which has since crashed due to increased web traffic, about how much Aram, who will turn four next month, enjoys being breastfed.
One post features a picture of Aram being breastfed at the the Playboy mansion with the caption: "I've breastfed Aram at the Playboy mansion. I actually felt it was the most appropriate place on earth to do it," the Daily Mail reported.
Social media news site Storyful compiled a collection of angry reactions to the story, with many women saying Time was encouraging parenting wars and making mothering choices even harder.
"I am mom enough regardless of my parenting philosophy. And so are you. And that's all I'm going to say about that," Alexis Hinde wrote.
Actress Alyssa Milano wrote: "Time, no! You missed the mark! You're supposed to be making it easier for breastfeeding moms. Your cover is exploitive and extreme."
Australian Breastfeeding Association spokeswoman, Meredith Laverty, said women should be encouraged to make their own informed choices about breastfeeding.
"What I think is at the nub of the issue is supporting mothers and their networks to get the right information at the start of breastfeeding so that mothers are able to go on to breastfeed successfully and stop whenever they choose," Ms Laverty said.
"Why would I or you get to say that we can tell other people what do to in the constructs of the family."
She said the latest Australian figures showed 96 per cent of women will choose to start breastfeeding, but those figures drop by 30 per cent when babies are one month old.
"Our whole system is not supporting 30 per cent of those mothers who started out wanting to breastfeed.
"I think that's where we need to be looking at improving our services across the board so that mothers can feel a little bit more supported."
The Australian Breastfeeding Association endorses the World Health Organisation's stance on breastfeeding - that babies should be exclusively breastfed in the first six months.
The Time cover has also already attracted a growing number of internet memes.
Attachment parenting, a phrase coined by US pediatrician Dr William Sears, was first suggested as a theory in the 1950s and has since developed into a method that has created some controversy - because of the age at which people continuing breastfeeding their children and the use of co-sleeping.
Retail chains including Target, Wal-Mart and Safeway did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether the magazine, which goes on sale Friday, would be displayed in stores.
Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel said he had not heard of any retailers concerned about displaying the cover. But he acknowledged that the image is "provocative. We're posing an interesting question about a subject that couldn't be more important — how we raise our children. People have all kinds of mixed feelings about that."
Subject: Re: LOL: Time shows mother breastfeeding 3-year-old Fri May 11, 2012 6:38 pm
Breast-feeding a 3-year-old is normal, anthropologist says
Despite the brouhaha over breast-feeding kicked off by a Time magazine cover photo this week of a mom nursing her 3-year-old son, that's actually the norm worldwide, experts say. But breast-feeding children that old is practiced among a tiny sliver of mothers in the United States.
Though some online are calling it "perverted" and "dangerous" to nurse a 3-year-old, "It's normal for our species. It's not perverted; it's not sex; it's not women doing it for some perverse need. It's normal like a nine-month pregnancy is normal," says Katherine Dettwyler, a professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Del.
Dettwyler has published numerous studies on breast-feeding and found that most children around the world are breast-fed for three to five years or longer.
That's a sharp contrast with babies in the United States. Numbers for 2011 show that about three-quarters of American babies are breast-fed at birth. By 6 months old, 44% are still being breast-fed and by 12 months just 24% are, says Laurence Grummer-Strawn, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's nutrition branch.
The number of moms who breast-feed two years and beyond in the United States isn't known because the data come from a survey done of 18-month-old babies. But Ruby Roy, a pediatrician at La Rabida Children's Hospital in Chicago, Ill., says it's more common than might be believed, moms are just hiding it.
"There's so much negative social attitude that we just can't know," Roy says. "But I have had many women in my practice tell me that they are breast-feeding to two or three years. They're doing a night nursing before the baby goes to bed, or in the morning — but they're not going to tell anyone."
The World Health Organization recommends breast-feeding "up to two years of age or beyond." The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that "babies should continue to breast-feed for a year and for as long as is mutually desired by the mother and baby."
When Dettwyler studied 1,280 U.S. children whose mothers nursed them for more than three years, she found they were "perfectly fine and they didn't need therapy and they didn't think they were having sex with their mothers."
The children were nursed between three and nine years, with half being weaned between ages 3 and 4. The mothers tended to be middle- and upper-class women, the majority of whom were highly educated and worked outside of the home. "This is not the stereotype of the Earth Mother nursing the child until he's 5, and she also grows her own cotton and weaves her own diapers," Dettwyler says.
Multiple studies show that breast-feeding is beneficial for both mother and infant. Breast milk contains immune factors that protect children against infection while their own immune system is still developing. There also appears to be a programming effect on the body such that babies who nursed have lower rates of disease long after they are weaned.
Overall, studies have shown that breast-fed babies have lower rates of ear infections, eczema, diarrhea, lower respiratory tract infections, Sudden Infant Death syndrome, obesity, leukemia and childhood diabetes.
Mothers who breast-feed have lower rates of breast cancer and ovarian cancer, says Grummer-Strawn. The longer they breast-feed, the lower their rates.
It's also possible that we evolved to nurse children until they're around 5 or 6, says Dettwyler. Breast milk is one of the only sources of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids that build brain tissue, she says. It isn't until age 5 or 6 that "95% of brain growth has been reached, and that's also about the time that the child's immune system is ramped up to full production," she says.
Subject: LOL: Time shows mother breastfeeding 3-year-old 
Fri May 11, 2012 4:06 am
