Whole Milk

Of course, we no longer live in the Stone Age, and modern sensibilities, at least in this country, often recoil at the very notion of breastfeeding. (Case in point: those of you who disapprove of this blog’s photograph.) My wife and I were aware of this, and although we didn’t see the big deal about breastfeeding, we did see that it skeeved some people out, so best to be polite about it. If nursing had to be done in public, then do it discreetly. It’s not hard, really. A light shawl or other such cover always did the trick, and not once were we ever scolded while my wife nursed; I don’t think we even got a sideways look for it. The criticism we got for breastfeeding was always at some other time, when folks found out that my wife was breastfeeding at all. Strangely, the static always came from folks who seemed to think that breastfeeding was gross or unnatural. (So is a C-Section. What’s your point?)

The strongest criticism seemed to come people who had not even had kids, so I could never quite figure out what their problem was. I had one colleague chide me that breastfeeding must have been a handy way to keep my wife stuck at home. When I tried to explain that breastfeeding was my wife’s idea, it was deflected away. What can you do? Some folks just aren’t down with breastfeeding. And that’s fine. What’s not fine, however, is when a practice that really has nothing to do somehow becomes your business. TIME seems to encourage that, I think.

The point of the TIME article isn’t so much to drive awareness of child-rearing practices that lead to healthier kids, but to sensationalize the reactions the rest of us have to child-rearing practices carried out to the extreme. For as much as I think breastfeeding is a good thing, I still had to crack wise about it at the beginning of this blog. And more than a few articles about the TIME story coin phrases such as “whipped out a tit” to describe breastfeeding with more than a little scorn. Honestly, I just don’t know where it comes from. A friend once suggested to me that it’s a holdover from women’s liberation: that things like breastfeeding made it tough for women to both have kids and maintain a career. If that’s so, then I can see the resentment, although a lot of workplaces have made it a lot easier for nursing moms to pump milk on site during the day. It’s even something protected by PPACA.

I cannot imagine the collective eyebrow-raising over this will last beyond a week, when TIME runs a cover of something else to pique the interest of an easily distracted public. I do wish that TIME could have refrained from what appears to be a cynical exercise in audience shock in order to sell copies and elicit reader comments. Because this kind of thing typically ends by adding – however slightly –to a baseline skepticism toward parenting practices that may strike some as weird, but have not been proven to actually hurt anybody. And while I am not about to bet that breastfeeding your kid when he is five is going to do much for him except set him up for some cruel mockery at school, you really can’t argue against the

And as much as we’d like to think that there is a simple, universal way to raise kids – it would sure take pressure off of us if there were, right? – the truth is that raising a child is perhaps the single most subjective undertaking you’ll ever see. What works between parent and child in one example works differently in another. All that should matter is that we each try to find that way to best raise our little ones so they can be as healthy and as happy as can be. What others think of it shouldn’t matter. If only that were so.