For Jamie Lynn Grumet, breast-feeding goes beyond newborn nutrition.
It’s love and comfort that should be extended until whenever the mother and child are ready to wean.
Grumet, a 26 year-old parenting blogger who is seen offering her nipple to her nearly 4 year-old year-old son Aram on the cover of this week’s Time magazine, is happy to be the newest face of attachment parenting.
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Attachment parenting is the theory supported by Dr. William Sears, based on the notion that the strong emotional bond forged during early childhood has lifelong benefits.
Grumet told Time magazine that she was breast-fed until she was six years-old.
“She wasn’t a hippie. Everyone thinks she must have been because we lived in Northern California,” she said. “My dad did go to Berkeley, but he was a nutritional scientist. My parents were really into nutrition, that’s why.”
She said she remembers the being breast-fed and the positive feelings associated with it.
“It’s really warm. It’s like embracing your mother, like a hug. You feel comforted, nurtured and really, really loved,” she said. “I had so much self-confidence as a child, and I know it’s from that. I never felt like she would ever leave me. I felt that security.”
Grumet, who is also the mother to an adopted son, said breast-feeding him helped ease the trauma of bringing him home.
“I didn’t realize how much it would help my attachment to him,” she said. “When his English improved, because the connection was there, he didn’t do it as much. So now he’ll do it maybe once a month.”
The idea of attachment parenting and extended breast-feeding isn’t new.
Dr. Sears made waves on the subject when he wrote “The Baby Book” in 1992. Earlier this year, actress Mayim Bialik penned her own book on the subject called “Beyond the Sling.”
She still breast-feeds her own son, who is nearly four years old.
There’s no real rule on when to stop breast-feeding.
About 75% of American moms nurse their babies, yet only 44% are still doing it by the time the child is 6 months old, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
The World Health Organization encourages all mothers to breastfeed until the age of two, along with appropriate foods.
Grumet is aware that the photos she posts to her blog as well as her cover photo are shocking to some.
“There are people who tell me they’re going to call social services on me or that it’s child molestation,” she said. “People have to realize this is biologically normal. It’s not socially normal. The more people see it, the more it’ll become normal in our culture.”
