Time Magazine's 4yo breastfeeding cover

Care factor?

Judging from the reaction to the latest Time magazine's May cover of a young mum breastfeeding her kid, it's apparent we don't like the look of a kid on the breast. But really, are they hurting anyone? And why does the feature title read Are You Mom Enough: a deliberately antagonistic and confronting question? As if the desire to connect child's mouth with nipple proves you are, or are not, a good mum. How ridiculous.

Why should you care if another mother is still breastfeeding, or not breastfeeding, or enjoys sleeping in bed with her child, or carries the kids in a sling until age 10? Who cares, really?

Last time I checked, the term mother covered quite a variety of women, roughly from ages 10-60 plus of every race, religion and persuasion. The only thing many mothers have in common is they conceived a child, which is possibly the most universal act on earth apart from copulation and digestion. So why do we have such strong expectations and opinions about how mothers are supposed to raise their young?

Why does the image of a nipple in someone's mouth provoke such strong feelings? No one seems to really care when it comes to who is involving who in oral sex or nipple play, as long as everyone is a consenting adult. I guess that's where the problems start: we think children are asexual. But they are not. Does anyone not remember being a child? As Belle Du Jour's - sorry Dr Brooke Magnanti's - new book, The Sex Myth explains, childhood is a time of sexual exploration. Not an opinion, but as evidenced by extensive research.

And most mothers know this. They either ignore or temper their young child's sexual behaviour.

Is it because we know that children are sexual that we don't want them going near a woman's nipple - women's nipples should be reserved for sexual pleasure, but not for children, and only for a strictly short time for babies as a source of food. I mean, who really cares what a woman does with her nipples? We don't stand around discussing the ins and outs of which mothers are engaging in nipple play with their lovers, why do we care so much about her giving breast milk via the nipple to her child?

Like many mothers I had multiple problems with breastfeeding and one of them was the cultural struggle to see my own nipple as a source of food, comfort and pleasure for a little creature who was not my sexual partner. I was also a little jealous of mothers who found breastfeeding so easy they could feed baby on the go, while I had to mess around with sterilised bottles, cooled boiled water and carefully measured powders.

After I finished breastfeeding I was a much freer person, able to leave my baby for more than three hours and venture back into the city and other adult only venues. I met another mother who was still breastfeeding her four year old and when I laughed in surprise she explained she had had to train her daughter to only ask for the boob at home, not in public. The image of a four year old girl in scruffy shoes reaching up to have a suck on her mum's nipple was strange to me, just as the Time magazine cover is deliberately confronting. But I didn't really care. Why would I? This is not a child rights issue.

Breastfeeding is, however, a human rights issue. That is, a mother's right to breastfeed and not be thrown out of cafes or off the bus because she is feeding her infant, something that still happens in Australia today. But when I trained companies on this issue and how to implement a lactation friendly workplace, the issue of child's age never came up.

I asked if the legislation would stipulate a cutoff age, so that we would not have a mother of an eleven year old asking for her right to breastfeeding breaks, but legislators apparently did not see this as an issue, despite the increasing awareness of breastfeeding older children raised by Little Britain's skit of a grown man breastfeeding.

In Australia we had the fantastically misogynistic but uncomfortably realistic peek into parenthood via the award winning novel The Slap and its fabulously produced ABC TV miniseries. This novel, bought to us by single gay childless author Christos Tsiolkas, explored modern parenting matters via central character Rosie. Rosie was characterised as the ultimate victim loser by her attachment parenting methods, including the continued breastfeeding of her three year old Hugo who happened to be a little demon. The Slap of the title occurs when Hugo's behaviour slides into the unacceptable and an adult belts him. Is Rosie abusing this child's rights by breastfeeding him? No. Is slapping a child a child rights issue? Um, yes.

We can talk nipple until we're blue in the face but really we should stop demonising, as The Slap does, or martyring, as Time does, women who breastfeed. And focus on more engaging and practical parenting topics such as what activities you can do with your toddler lying down.