What a Difference a Decade Makes:
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TIME features iconic cover of Jamie Grumet breastfeeding her son on their centennial celebration issue, A Century of Impact, while Yahoo Life readers vote Jamie’s story of the TIME experience the Best of 2022.
TIME features iconic cover of Jamie Grumet breastfeeding her son on their centennial celebration issue,
Jamie is a member of Kindred World’s board of directors and a contributing editor to Kindred Media.
(February 28, 2023, KindredMedia.org) – Internationally recognized breastfeeding and attachment parenting advocate, Jamie Grumet, revisits her iconic, culture-normalizing breastfeeding cover for TIME Magazine’s centennial celebration issue, A Century of Impact, in March 2023. The TIME Magazine special issue features the iconic 2012 cover of Jamie Grumet and her son, Aram, on their centennial celebration cover in March 2023. The commemorative cover image features at least one cover from each of the last 100 years. The 144 images were selected from the more than 5,000 issues. Jamie and Aram are in the bottom right.
Read the interview, watch Jamie’s video with TIME, and see the TIME photo shoot from 2023 here.
The original cover issue from May 2012 was considered “controversial” by TIME’sown staff, who admit, “The cover had been the subject of considerable disagreement within TIME’s staff, with some calling it sensationalized and others saying it accurately captured the pressure mothers were under. Outside TIME’s walls, the cover was fodder for comedians, parenting experts, and a legion of letters to the editor.”
Many breastfeeding advocates called foul on the staff decision to pick a headline that further divided cultural-biased camps of pro- and anti-breastfeeding. Despite the magazine’s attempts to engineer division around breastfeeding, Jamie says in the TIME interview from March 2023:
“Attachment parenting itself has been a lot more normalized in the past ten years, and so has breastfeeding. You see breastfeeding toddlers all the time. We now have breastfeeding shoots attached to newborn shoots. The fact that breastfeeding is part of a mainstream photography package now is kind of neat.
“There are so many different issues that the cover brought up. Specifically, the subjugation of women and society trying to control women’s bodies. Trying to tell women how to parent, but then we don’t support them in doing that. A lot of those issues aren’t just about breastfeeding. It’s a lot deeper than that,” said Jamie.
On her Modern Attachment Parenting website, and in the book of the same name, Jamie corrects the controversial headline: “While our modern village is ‘not enough,’ parents are, in fact, enough.”
“Attachment parenting is about growing and maintaining connectedness, the co-construction of a life together through the biology of love. Jamie’s photo gave the world a look at what that can look like,” said Darcia Narvaez, PhD, Kindred World president and Evolved Nest Initiative founder.
In a benchmark moment illustrating a positive cultural shift toward breastfeeding in the past decade, Jamie also made Yahoo Life’s Best Stories of 2022 list for her interview reflecting on her iconic TIME magazine cover of May 2012. The Yahoo Life interview, read here, made the Best of 2022 list celebrating “women who are living unapologetically. This year, Yahoo Life readers flocked to profiles of women who are defying convention and doing things their way.”
A decade after the TIME magazine iconic cover, Jamie’s ongoing advocacy for full term breastfeeding and attachment parenting helped normalize the landscape of mainstream and social media for the resulting deluge of mothers, including celebrities, posing with their children to support full-term breastfeeding. Jamie shares her insights from the TIME magazine fallout, as well as redefines what it means to be a modern attachment parenting advocate in her book, Modern Attachment Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Raising a Secure Child.
In 2021, Jamie was featured in the Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series, a collection of video interviews with nine professionals, parents, and scientists who found ways around breastfeeding advocacy barriers, or just broke them. The series was presented at the La Leche League International’s 65th Anniversary Conference. She is currently a contributing editor to Kindred Media and a member of the board of directors for the venerable American nonprofit, Kindred World.
In addition to being featured on the covers of featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, Pathways to Family Wellness and The Attached Family, Jamie has been interviewed and featured in Kindred, PDN, TODAYonline, Yahoo and The Huffington Post. Jamie has written for HLN, MomsLA, The Adoption Magazine, Blogher and Pathways to Family Wellness. She has made media appearances on “Huffington Post Live,” “CNN,” “Nightline,” “Today Show,” “Anderson,” “Dr. Drew,” “The Ricki Lake Show,” “Carte Blanche,” “60 Minutes Australia” and “Good Morning America” among many others.
Visit Jamie’s website at www.ModernAttachmentParenting.com.
Read Jamie Grumet’s interviews and articles on Kindred.
Learn more about the Meet the Wayfinders oral history series produced by Kindred Media and featuring Jamie’s activist story for La Leche League International’s 65th Conference in October 2021.
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