If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
This is the story of my breasts, and how they fed my children in a wide variety of ways and for different lenghths of time through their early years.
After the CDC lowered the threshold at which a child is at risk for lead poisoning by half last week, the number of children under 6 who are now considered at risk jumped from 77,000 to 442,000.
As a culture, Americans need to move beyond narrow interpretations of parenting practices.
Some days, I lay next to her in bed in our new apartment, wondering when the sorrow of divorce would stop. I wondered whether we would survive.
Although I do not like the cover photo TIME magazine chose, the magazine has at least started a national conversation about extended breastfeeding.
As someone who spends approximately 38% of the day with her boob in someone's mouth, I took particular interest in the recent TIME magazine kerfuffle over attachment parenting.
"Are you mom enough?" Seriously? TIME magazine should be ashamed. As if Moms aren't hard enough on themselves.
In the same way we should avoid religious extremism and political extremism, perhaps we ought to avoid parenting extremes as well. Inappropriate helicopter parenting potentially snuffs out a child's initiative, individuality, and sense of self. Attachment parenting runs the same risk.
We may practice attachment parenting (or not), we may chose the bottle over the breast, but we are all bound by the fact that we never, ever feel like we can do enough for our special needs child(ren).
by Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff Executive Director & CEO Healthy Child Healthy World www.healthychild.org TIME raised a ruckus recently with a profile of "...
How about we talk about kids for a change? How about we toss out some encouragement for what we are all doing? How about we remind each other why parenting matters? The other stuff can wait.
Most of us are doing the best we can, whether or not we are breastfeeding for three months or three years or carrying our little ones on our hips or pushing them in strollers.
My son is now 8 and we had a great Mother's Day this Sunday. How could this have happened? I didn't sleep with my kid or wear him in a sling. I left him with a sitter and gave him formula.
The question isn't who is "mom enough" as the TIME title suggests, but whether policymakers are smart enough to devise sound policies for breastfeeding, work, and paid family leave.
Can we look at a woman nursing and think "lunch"? We have learned to stop blushing at the sight of a pregnant woman. It's more than time to give nursing mothers the same break.
It is not surprising that such a public display of breastfeeding cannot find its place in the mainstream, whether printed on the cover of a major magazine or performed by a global celebrity.
