TIME Magazine ‘Attachment Parenting’ Cover: Too Much?

TIME Magazine ‘Attachment Parenting’ Cover: Too Much?

Time’s May 21 issue, featuring a 26-year-old mother breastfeeding her 3-year-old son. (Credit: TIME)

FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) â€" It’s certainly attention grabbing, but does it go too far?

Time Magazine’s forthcoming issue focuses on the doctor who â€"â€" literally â€"â€" wrote the book on the extreme parenting method known as “attachment parenting.”

That’s all well and good, but TIME’s eye-catching cover just-so-happens to sport a mother framed in front of a sparse white background breast-feeding her three-year-old as he perches atop a chair.

“The subjects on this week’s TIME cover aren’t models in pose,” writes TIME scribe Feifei Sun in the magazine’s photo blog.

Perhaps taking a cue from New York Magazine’s much lauded yet oft-criticized approach in teasing its cover story on nearly-elderly pregnant women â€"â€" in fairness, that one was staged and manipulated, unlike TIME’s â€"â€" the national magazine’s angle is a brash one: There’s also the point of the accompanying tagline, “Are You Mom Enough?” What’s that imply?

Considering how other magazines have received the jet-black-placard-over-the-cover treatment from area grocers for much less, it’ll be interesting to see how the TIME cover is received.

Attachment Parenting’s goal, according to Attachment Parenting International, is “to raise children who will become adults with a highly developed capacity for empathy and connection.”

Breastfeeding, as the site notes, is considered to be “the optimal way to satisfy an infant’s nutritional and emotional needs.”

But, as noted in a Baltimore Sun editorial, visualizing the act remains divisive in current American culture. Is putting such a striking image just going to further ill attitudes toward breastfeeding?

We’ll leave that up to you: What do you think of the cover? Is it appropriate? Effective? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.