- Jamie Grumet went viral for breastfeeding her then-3-year-old in 2012.
- She says many parenting "choices" are not really intentional because society does not support mothers.
In the photo, her 3-year-old son stands on a stool, craning to latch onto her breast.
It wasn't the photo Jamie Grumet thought that Time magazine would run. The staged pose wasn't the "best representation" of what it's like to breastfeed a toddler, she said. Still, when the photo of her breastfeeding her son, Aram, ran on a 2012 cover of the magazine with the words, "Are you mom enough?" Grumet went viral.
Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck ridiculed the photo on "The View," Rush Limbaugh memed it, TMZ chased down Grumet and her family in a Los Angeles park, and men mailed letters, calling Grumet a "pedophile" to her apartment along with religious paraphernalia. Many of those letters said, "I need to submit and go to my husband, or they tried to call my ex-husband a beta male," she told Insider.
Aram is now a confident 14-year-old. And by the way, he loves the photo of himself as a breastfeeding toddler.
"Everybody was so worried he was going to get made fun of. That never happened because kids aren't the assholes everybody makes them out to be — their parents are," said Grumet.
Grumet identifies with attachment parenting
Grumet was a proponent of pediatrician William Sears and registered nurse Martha Sears' ideas on attachment-parenting, which they detailed in their 2001 book of the same name. In the decade since the cover ran, the ideas have become more widely adopted.
Dr. Sears' website describes the parenting style as "being responsive and sensitive to your baby's needs, nurturing your child through touch, and creating a bond that allows the child's needs to be easily deciphered and cared for" — qualities that most parents incorporate whether or not they identify with attachment parenting.
More specifically, people with an attachment-parenting style commonly cosleep, babywear, and practice extended breastfeeding. The sight of dads wearing baby carriers is common now, as are magazine images featuring breastfeeding and pumping.
The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its breastfeeding recommendations last year, detailing that breastfeeding is encouraged exclusively "for the first 6 months" and recognized the benefits of breastfeeding "up to 2 years, especially in the mother."
It did not have guidance for mothers who breastfeed until the age of 4, which is when Grumet stopped breastfeeding her son.
"Mothers who choose to breastfeed beyond the first year need support from their medical-care providers, as well as protections against workplace barriers," the AAP said.
Grumet felt that many of the women who reacted negatively to her cover in 2012 were expressing a sense of shame or guilt around their own parenting practices. Breastfeeding, bottle-feeding and other parenting decisions aren't really a "choice" though, she added.
"Some people who are feeling guilty about doing one thing — insert whatever you want — they don't have a choice," she said. "You haven't failed your child in whatever parenting decisions that…you've made, that you haven't made because you have no other choice. Society has failed you."
Goldberg, for instance, criticized Grumet by saying that breastfeeding her son at 3 was "insane," but has spoken about the difficulties in breastfeeding her own daughter 50 years ago.
"Mothers internalize societal failures as personal failures," Grumet, who has a background in theological anthropology, said. "We try to tell mothers how to parent their children, but then we don't support them in doing it."
Grumet went through her own struggles to feed. Aram was born prematurely at 31 weeks of gestation after she developed HELLP syndrome, a dangerous form of preeclampsia.
She was essentially in a "magnesium coma" after her C-section and had lactation induced by her ex-husband and sister-in-law, who placed a breast pump on her while she lay in recovery, something she is grateful for, she said.
Grumet also tandem nursed her son Samuel, whom she adopted at age 4 from Ethiopia.
Grumet's family trauma shaped her parenting style
The story of Grumet's larger family is also shaped by attachment. Her older sister and brother were born in the '70s, when the pediatric recommendation was to "put the babies on the schedule, leave them in a crib, and there was a lack of touch," she said.
Her mother suffered mastitis, weaning Jamie's sister from breastfeeding at two weeks and her brother at two months of age. Grumet said that the family believes that mental health issues later in her brother's life could have been exacerbated by attachment issues.
While breastfeeding does have some potential impacts on psychological development, the authors of a 2018 review noted that "caution is needed" when explaining how it can impact a person specifically, since it's difficult to control for socioeconomic and other factors.
"My brother ended up having a bad drug problem that [my mother] thinks was related to that," Grumet said, noting that her brother was shot and killed in 2000 by San Francisco police. Authorities later ruled it a sucide-by-cop incident after he provoked a police response. He was 25.
"The impact of trauma rarely comes down to a single factor," said Lucy Hutner, MD, a reproductive psychiatrist in New York City. "But one protective factor that stands out is the degree of social support — the depth to which each person feels like other people are really there for them when they really need it."
Grumet was born 11 years after her brother, and said her mother took a different approach to raising her. For instance, she was weaned at 5 or 6 years of age and coslept with her parents until 8.
"She just parented me completely intuitively," she added.
Her son is now almost 15 and proud of his viral moment
Aram has a framed photo of the Time cover on his wall that "he's never not been proud of."
The viral outrage cycle surrounding the photo now seems short-lived set against the multigenerational story of the Grumet family.
"What's happening in society is we're telling these women to endure things that they shouldn't be enduring," Grumet said of not supporting mothers despite what choices they make.
Today's controversies have moved on to new topics — such as gentle parenting, screen time, and cosleeping — but Grumet's advice for the mothers coming behind her remains clear.
"My mom always says, 'You know, you have to parent the way that you know because you know your child the best,'" she said.
"Society may say terrible things to you, which I've seen in the comment section of things, but they're not going to be there when the coroner shows up for your child," Grumet continued. "You have to own your own decisions. Those people aren't parenting your children."