Media frenzy on breastfeeding asks wrong questions, obscures context for health
by: Ingrid Daffner Krasnow
posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2012
After last week’s Time Magazine cover story asked, “Are you mom enough?“, the highly political practice of (gasp!) breastfeeding (accompanied by Time’s we-need-to-sell-magazines photo of a mom attached at the nipple to her pre-schooler) created a firestorm of commentary across the web. The basic questions underlying the controversy were: How long is too long to nurse a child? And, is there a moral flaw in the “attachment parenting” approach, which, among other things, promotes allowing a child to nurse until he or she self-weans (usually around age 2)? As a nursing mom myself, I got questions from a lot of folks about my position on the issue. Ahh, great, I thought, yet another opportunity to pit mom against mom to stake claim to the parenting moral high ground.
Let’s just say it didn’t take much thinking during midnight nursing sessions to realize that we are asking ourselves the wrong questions. The fact is, whether one is “mom enough” presumes that we and our kids have our basic needs met — like food, shelter, emotional and physical safety — so we can even bother worrying if/how/how long we nurse.
Let me give you an example. When my daughter got sick earlier this week, there was no question I’d leave work early to go pick her up from childcare. That’s because I have the option to take care of her without risking my salary or my job. But many mothers don’t have the privileges that I have: a job with a living wage, the ability to leave work at a moment’s notice to care for a sick child, and assurance that my paycheck won’t get docked for it. Chalk up another one for white privilege — and white-collar employee benefits.
If we really care about kids’ health, the real questions we need to be asking are: Why does the United States, the most powerful country in the world, have more than 8 MILLION uninsured kids, a majority of whom are Native American, Latino, African American and Asian? Why do states across the country spend more money incarcerating kids — especially youth of color — than we do educating them? Why, among the 15 million children who have a psychiatric or learning disorder, do youth of color disproportionately receive fewer mental health services than white children?
The media should spend less time criticizing parents and more time reporting on the barriers — including long-standing policies and practices rooted in racial, class, and gender discrimination — that prevent millions of people living in the U.S. from having their basic needs met, make breastfeeding difficult or unrealistic for large numbers of women, and, ultimately, harm kids’ health. Rather than debating how long women “should” breastfeed their kids, we need to focus on what employers and other decision-makers should do to eliminate those barriers.
Let’s stop berating women for how they raise their kids and start putting policies in place so they actually have the support they need to do so. Enough is enough.