I can’t do my link Encyclopedia while I travel but do check out this post that I agree with completely. The journalists should not be allowed to engage in child abuse to make a catchy title. Is anybody going to look out for the rights of children already?
Forget everything I’ve ever written ever, and by the way forget anything else that is happening anywhere. If the people at TIME Magazine responsible for this cover did not actually Photoshop the kid into this shot then every single person involved should be arrested for child sexual abuse.
Yes I realize there’s nothing wrong with breast feeding and women’s boobs. But they’ve got a picture of a kid who looks old enough to be riding a bicycle without training wheels sucking on a woman’s nipple on the cover of their latest issue. I find that, to put it mildly, wrong. No point that TIME wanted to make about the pros and cons of attachment parenting warranted putting an actual kid sucking an actual woman’s actual breast on the cover of their magazine. I don’t care if it’s the real kid and his mom. I don’t usually advocate…
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Clarissa's Blog 
I think separating the child from the mother would be more psychologically damaging for him.
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Yes, at this point you have to figure out which damage would be the less harmful damage.
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I think people jump the gun too quickly on “take the kid away!” without realizing just how traumatizing that can be for a child.
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Oh he is so traumatized by this freak already that it’s too late to worry. You think she cannibalizes him in one way but leaves him in peace in other ways? Keep dreaming.
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Where is this weirdness coming from? There are many stages of psychological Separation from the mother a healthy human being goes through. And several of them occur long before the age this kid is. The sickly mommy is consuming the poor mud in this vile image and I’m disgusted.
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It is creepy, I’m not denying that. I’m just saying that taking the child away from his mother would be far worse.
You are disgusted by many things Clarissa. That does not mean you should have a say in taking children away from their mothers.
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Can you point me to a place where I said I should have a say in taking anybody anywhere?
It’s extremely annoying when people address weird ideas of their own instead of the actual text I wrote.
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You said “I agree completely” with the other blogger who was stating that everyone should be arrested.
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Everyone here includes the creators of the magazine cover. We are discussing a magazine cover that models pose for. There are no actual mothers involved.
Seriously, man, you’ve got to try to pay attention.
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He looks really old, but the kid is just 3.
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Other sources are saying he’s nearly four. In any case, if he looks too old to be breast fed, he probably is.
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Exactly.
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Yes, I wholeheartedly agree! I think anytime you get to the point where your child will most certainly have memories of suckling is very, very bad.
I just wanted to put anyone at ease who thought he might he might be 7 or 8 cus he is a really big kid.
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The damage of doing this to a 3 yo is incalculable. I want to remind everybody yet again that there are zero physiological benefits to breasted milk past 6 months. Zero. So why do you think the sickly pushes her breasted into the boy’s mouth? Because no other food is available?
And why should we be subjected to these diseased images?
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The thing I find most disturbing about the picture (besides the fact that a kid who looks like he’s practically Kindergarten age has been raised to be so dependent on his mother that he’s literally still suckling her teat) is the expression on the mother’s face. This is not an expression of maternal affection; it’s an expression of haughty defiance and casual dismissal of the child. It is a look which says “This worthless worm I’ve raised worships me like a goddess and I’m so far above him that I’m not even going to bother looking at him.”
It’s a repulsive image no matter how you slice it.
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Exactly. The creators of the cover have gone way too far.
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But why do you think defiance and dismissal are directed at the child? Maybe they are addressed to the readers? Or maybe to those not fond of this version of “attachment parenting”?
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If you really know that what you do is right, you wouldn’t need to perform defiance for some imaginary audience. I think the attitude is more like, “The kid is mine, I’ll eat him for breakfast if I so choose.”
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If you ever read Game of Thrones, there’s a character named Lysa who is a hysterical, insecure, paranoid creature who is convinced that the world is out to get her and her precious baby boy, and isolates herself from the rest of the world so that he can’t be harmed. When we first see her, she’s breastfeeding her son, who is 6 years old, and so intellectually and physically stunted that he comes across as being more like a toddler. That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw this cover.
The only plus side I can see to this cover is that it will hopefully be the final nail in the coffin to the idea that attachment parenting is a normal, healthy, child-friendly, feminist thing to do.
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I think the child shouldn’t be in the photo because he has no ability to offer his consent. His mother should protect him from such extreme activities.
The nursing, however, is not the problem. The fact that you consider nursing a 3 year old something problematic only reveals your ignorance. That’s not a surprise. I was freaked out when I saw a 3 year old nursing for the first time. I thought it was abusive, too.
I went on to nurse my first daughter until she was 5.5 and my 3 year old now nurses several times a day. “Extended nursing” isn’t the problem.
The problem is putting the child in a spotlight when they have no ability to say “no.”
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Why do you do it?
I personally don’t have anything against it and think people are really exaggerating the “incalculable” damage this can cause. But it just seems pointless to breastfeed a child until such an old age.
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Comfort, nurturing, peaceful times, help to sleep, reassurance, love, connection, reminder to stop and breathe, lots of reasons. I think if you asked someone “why do you hug your child?” or “why do you smile at your child?” you might get the same kind of answer as I would give (if I tried again to answer your question).
My older daughter has a personality that required a lot of additional comfort (anxieties that frequently come with some creative kinds of intelligence). My younger daughter is a more “regular” child, so I can’t imagine she’ll nurse much longer. But, we’ll nurse until one of us doesn’t want to anymore.
Thanks for asking.
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Have you considered any negative effects due to breastfeeding into such an age?
Thanks for your answers, and no judgment on my part. I don’t pretend to know the best and only way to raise a child.
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“Comfort, nurturing, peaceful times, help to sleep, reassurance, love, connection, reminder to stop and breathe”
All those reasons sound like your reasons for yourself. And frankly, who cares about you? I don’t really care if breast-feeding your six-year-old (my god), makes you feel better.
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If a 4 yo cant experience all these things without mommy’s nipple in his mouth, wow, what a failure that mommy is. The kid’s development is HUGELY retarded. Normal kids know how to breathe and sleep by that age.
What’s the need to retarded a child this way? To have an immature dependent doll?
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There are stages of development and they all should be passed at their own time. Take diapers. I think they are great but only up to a certain age. If you see a 4 yo, a 6 yo, an 11 yo who still can’t control their sphincter and bladder, you know there is an issue. And if a kid can’t self -soothe or fall asleep on their own by 4, that can’t be healthy either.
Books on stages of human development abound, so I have no idea why there is so much drama in these discussions.
I hoped we’d end up discussing the desperation of print journalists who have to go to extremes to preserve their dying field, yet this all turned into “mommy knows best ” and “let’s have a nurse in at a graduation party ” kind of thing once again.
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There are “people ” wjo have actually studied the issue and people who have taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with those studies. If you don’t know something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
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I just saw all these comments, and, all I’ll say to them directly is that until I experienced it I felt very much like all of you do.
I’m not going to change your minds and I’m certainly not going to try. There’s nothing that causes me to doubt that this is right and good and healthy for my children. I know what they need and how they need it and, frankly, I’m the only one who ever could. I’m going to back out of this discussion right now because, as I said, I won’t try to change your minds. I also feel no need to defend my actions. Thanks for sharing your thoughts (really), it has been helpful for me.
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You’re right, this is the real issue–the utter desperation of print media causing them to turn to pedophilia in an effort to get eyeballs on their degenerate magazine is fall-of-Rome stuff. But… I can’t think of anything to say about it other than “one more reason to let these paper dinosaurs go bankrupt.” You’d almost think they planned it that way–they’ve just gone over the edge, and they want to go out with a bang. I can see the headlines now: “American institution TIME Magazine shut down as owners, staff arrested, charged with child abuse over cover photo.” I wonder if they still have a single subscriber anywhere but in large urban areas.
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Ignorance of what, excuse me? I have mentioned maybe a bizillion times what the foundations of my worldview are. Yet people keep coming here with the wisdom they learnedly from LLL hysterics and pontificate.
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🙂 Nope. No pontification. No hysterics. Simply this: you haven’t nursed a child, so you don’t have experience with it. So, “ignorance,” is the right word.
In my comment, you’ll note, that I freaked out and saw nursing an older (below the average weaning age for the world, but, still oogy to me) child as potentially child abuse. Then, I had experience with it and my view changed. 🙂
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PS I nominated you for a “Kreativ Blogger Award” and if you want to accept, I think you just do what I did here: http://serenebabe.net/2012/05/14/my-kreative-blogger-award-nomination/ 🙂
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PPS Unrelated entirely to this discussion, I deleted that blog award meme post. It was too much like stuff I was doing a couple years ago during a bad time in my life. It felt too weird having it up there.
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How bad stuff really is in Russia? Look at this review of a new book. On 3rd page is a description of a short story about Jews in Holocaust, which I found “interesting”, so to speak.
http://www.openspace.ru/literature/events/details/36980/page1/
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So somebody wrote a crappy book. That happens a lot and not just in Russia. 🙂
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If you happen to be in Montreal on May 26th:
http://www.studio303.ca/en/
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