Everybody's talking about Time's cover

Have you seen it? The cover of Time magazine last week featured a very attractive 26-year-old mom breast-feeding her 35-year-old son. Actually he’s only 3, but he looks way big.

The cover shot shows the mother, one hand on her slender hip, other arm around her boy, looking into the camera. She’s wearing tight jeans and a tank top. This isn’t a comfy cookie-baking mom in a rocking chair, soothing her baby. This woman is sexy. One side of her tank top is pulled down and her son, who is standing on a little chair, is sucking at her breast while he, too, looks at the camera. And there is a look in his eye. He seems to be telegraphing, “Lucky me.”

As a journalist, I love the cover because it’s provocative; you can’t ignore it. It teases the inside story of a rather extreme philosophy of mothering called “attachment parenting.” Basically, it’s a demanding commitment to child-rearing that requires mothers to breast-feed on demand for as long as the child wants to, have the baby sleep with Mom from infancy and never allow the baby to cry. The proponent of the theory, Dr. Bill Sears, suggests that excessive crying can cause brain damage in babies.

We won’t debate the merits of this brand of mothering, other than to say that the editors apparently chose this photo to show attachment parenting at its most extreme. They gilded that particular lily with the headline, “Are You Mom Enough?” My answer is, no, we’re never mom enough, not if we’re 20 or 60 or 90. We always think our best may not have been good enough, that we might have done some things differently, that the time we smacked him in the behind for running across the street has no doubt turned him into the dumbass he is today.

But why twist the knife? Why make new mothers feel inadequate by suggesting that they need to be available 24/7? These days, young women are trying to breast-feed, offer their babies sufficient cuddle time, care for older children and, most times, work full time outside the home. Are these women “mom enough”? In my book they’re heroic in their efforts to keep the family train on the tracks while putting food on the table.