Meet Jamie Grumet
Jamie Grumet is the author of Modern Attachment Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Raising a Secure Child. She is the CEO and founder of I Am Not the Babysitter LLC, Co-Founder of Emmenemoi.com, Project Director of Nurture Tomorrow by VCA International, and a well-recognized advocate for children’s health issues. Jamie has been featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, Pathways to Family Wellness and The Attached Family. She has been interviewed and featured in Kindred, PDN, TODAYonline, Yahoo and The Huffington Post. Jamie has written for HLN, MomsLA, The Adoption Magazine, Blogher and Pathways to Family Wellness. She has made media appearances on “Huffington Post Live,” “CNN,” “Nightline,” “Today Show,” “Anderson,” “Dr. Drew,” “The Ricki Lake Show,” “Carte Blanche,” “60 Minutes Australia” and “Good Morning America” among many others.
In 2021, Jamie was featured in the Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series, a collection of video interviews with nine professionals, parents, and scientists who found ways around breastfeeding advocacy barriers, or just broke them. The series was presented at the La Leche League International's 65th Anniversary Conference. She is currently a contributing editor to Kindred Media and a member of the board of directors for the venerable American nonprofit, Kindred World.
Read Jamie Grumet’s interviews and articles on Kindred.
Learn more about the Meet the Wayfinders oral history series produced by Kindred Media and featuring Jamie's activist story for La Leche League International's 65th Conference in October 2021.
About That TIME Magazine Cover
Jamie talks about the aftermath of her appearance on the cover of TIME Magazine's May 2012 issue, the breakthrough it provided for full-term breastfeeding, and how social media - ten years later - celebrates celebrities and anyone nursing their toddlers and children. In 2022, the American Association for Pediatricians upped its former recommendation of one year of breastfeeding to two years, if possible, and longer.
In March 2023, Time Magazine featured the iconic 2012 cover of Jamie Grumet and her son, Aram, on their Centennial Celebration Cover. The commemorative cover image features at least one cover from each of the last 100 years. The 144 images were selected from the more than 5,000 issues. Jamie and Aram are in the bottom right. Read the interview, watch Jamie's video with Time, and see the Time photo shoot from 2023 here.
Here are some reactions to the cover:
The Cover Shot Heard ’Round The World, An Interview With Conscious Parenting Revolutionary, Jamie Grumet, By Lisa Reagan
Listen to the original interview with Jamie Grumet on her experience as the Time cover advocate for full-term breastfeeding in May 2012. Lisa Reagan asks Jamie about her family, her international nonprofit work and what she will take away from this experience when she is eighty.
Does Time Magazine Have, er… “Attachment Issues?” By Robin Grille
Mother, Interrupted By Tracy Wilson Peters and Laurel Wilson
Pleasure is Bad! Get Over It! By Michael Mendizza
Are You Mom Enough? (Did They Get You?) By Chris Webb, MS
The Woman on the Cover is Both Madonna and Whore By Jessica Kramer
Attachment Parenting International Responds:
A Kindred Interview with Jamie Grumet
Where Were You When The TIME Cover Of A Breastfeeding Mom Broke The Internet?
In 2012, an internationally-raised, second generation attachment-parented Los Angeles mom stepped onto the cover of TIME Magazine with her three-year-old son to model for the world what species typical, full-term breastfeeding looked like. While culturally normative breastfeeding has been missing from America’s real life experience for generations, Jamie Grumet’s real life experience shaped her worldview and spirit to boldly advocate for the human family’s billion year-old plan for lifelong wellness: breastfeeding.
Where were you when you first heard about the TIME cover? I remember sitting in a parking lot glued to a radio show wondering if I was hearing the broadcast correctly. If this is true, I thought, and TIME Magazine featured a breastfeeding mom on its venerable cover in celebration of attachment parenting’s 20th anniversary, then I guess my work as an activist is done. I can go home and take a nap.
Not.
The worldwide fallout from the magazine cover, and purposefully antagonistic headline, “Are You Mom Enough?”, became the Cover Shot Heard ‘Round The World, (Kindred’s 2012 interview with Grumet). In the months following the shoot, Grumet and her family suffered harassment from internet trolls and paparazzi, as well as gratitude from parents and championing support from surprising places.
Today, eight years later, Grumet is a single mother of her now teenage boys and living in San Francisco. In her new book, Modern Attachment Parenting, she shares the truth of her recovery from the trauma of the TIME cover, her immeasurable compassion for parents, and a grounded, field-tested review of attachment science within the context of modern American life. The book features a foreword by Alanis Morissette and an introduction by Attachment Parenting founder, Dr. William Sears.
In our interview below, you will hear Jamie reflect on her experience and her wish for Americans to realize that, “while our village is not enough“, parents are in fact “enough.” This interview is in celebration of October’s Attachment Parent Month events. Check out Kindred’s resources for more on attachment science and support, along with our entire 15 years of materials on Kindred dedicated to restoring human connection. Support our nonprofit work here.
Read the transcript from the interview here. Listen to the podcast interview below.
Projects & Ongoing Advocacy
Waves for Water
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Kindred World & Kindred Media
Jamie is a board of directors member of the venerable nonprofit Kindred World. Read Jamie Grumet’s interviews and articles on Kindred.
Meet the Wayfinders
Meet the Wayfinders is an oral history collection of video interviews with nine professionals, parents, and scientists who found ways around breastfeeding advocacy barriers, or just broke them! The series was created at the invitation of La Leche League International in celebration of their 65th Anniversary Conference held October 15-18, 2021. Watch the full oral history video series here.