I have been teaching preschool for 4 years now, and I got to
say, there are a lot of funny stories. Something kind of funny happened last
week which reminded me of something I had seen on a magazine cover.
Last Thursday, one of the little girls I teach was having
some separation anxiety so I agreed to let her mom stay for the first 10
minutes of class. The mom took the daughter to a bean bag chair in the corner
of the room and to my surprise she started breast feeding her 3 year old.
Usually I am a pretty big advocate against breast feeding in public (without a
blanket), but I didn’t really see a problem with this situation because I was
the only other adult in the room with 8 other children. Yet I could not help it, the
situation automatically made me really awkward and uncomfortable. I didn’t say
anything, I kind of just awkwardly pretended I didn’t notice what was happening
and tried not to make the mother uncomfortable with my awkwardness.
This story reminded me of the Time magazine article I seen
this week on attachment parenting. Looking at the cover of this magazine may
bring viewers discomfort because it’s a mom causally breast feeding her almost
four year old son. Attachment parenting is a parenting style which encourages
parent to responds to the child’s every need and keeps them as close to the
body as possible. Some things that make attachment parenting different from
mainstream parenting is that it promotes bed sharing between the parents and
child, responding to the child’s every cry and breast feeding until the child
decides not to anymore.
People who defend this kind of parenting style believe there
is nothing wrong with breast feeding a child until he or she is 4 years old.
Some say that Western culture has hypersexualized breast to the point where we
have forgotten their main biological purpose, to nurture and feed our children.
My opinion on this is, to each their own. I do feel although
that this may lead to a very insecure very dependent parental attachment in the
future and maybe a spoiled child. What to you guys think? Does our culture inappropriately
hypersextualize breasts? Or is this crossing the line?
I do strongly believe that with the growing need for women to look a certain way and dress a certain way due to media, our western culture has definitely hyper- sexualized breasts. To an extent I do believe that this hyper- sexualization of breasts caused by the media is inappropriate as it sets a horrible example for young women to have breasts that look a certain way. I believe that people should learn to feel comfortable with their bodies, not cut it up and re-sow it to fit a inappropriate media-inspired standard.
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