When it comes to the acceptability of breastfeeding, Time Magazine just turned back the clock 50 years.

The cover photo for the May 21, 2012 issue depicts an attractive twenty-something woman breast feeding a kid who looks every bit old enough to make his own peanut butter sandwich, if not run to the store to pick up a jug of milk to wash it down with.

In an era when Sandra Fluke, a poised 30-year-old law student, can’t speak to a congressional committee about whether insurance plans should cover the cost of contraception without being called a slut and a prostitute, Time Magazine should have known better.

I am not saying this as some uptight suburban mom who gets wigged out by anything that seems a little bit unconventional. When it comes to non-mainstream choices in parenting, I have plenty of street cred. I have given birth via natural childbirth two times (and to prove it I can give you the names of the people who heard the screams). Both of my children were delivered by midwives. And one of my kids was even delivered at home — on purpose.

I’m not ashamed to say I’m a cloth diaper-carrying member of the natural mom movement. From the effectiveness of spanking, to the pros and cons of circumcision, to whether or not to vaccinate, to advisability of co-sleeping, I have found myself on the Grape Nut rather than the Frosted Flake side of many of these issues.

To be clear, it’s not so much the cover story but the actual photo that I am sour on. The cover story is about Attachment Parenting, a philosophy of child rearing that is intended to promote a strong emotional bond between parent and child. Extended nursing, co-sleeping and baby wearing are the holy trinity of this approach — the intelligent design behind the eternal bond.

But while I hold more than my fair share of non-traditional parenting beliefs, I’ve never been a follower of Attachment Parenting. It’s not because I am against co-sleeping, baby wearing or breast feeding. And of course I want to be close to my kids — especially when it’s almost Mothers’ Day.

But my goal as a mom is to help my kids to be as independent as possible given their age and developmental level. And I’ve always felt that past a certain point, co-sleeping and breast feeding might be more about meeting the parent’s emotional needs than the child’s, and in that sense might work to interfere with the child’s emerging independence.

Although Attachment Parenting may not be for me, there are certainly aspects of the philosophy that I respect. And at the end of the day, I believe that how one parents children is a highly personal decision.

But as I said, my issue with the cover photo isn’t about Attachment Parenting. My objection is to the cover photo because of the inflammatory effect I fear it will have on the acceptance of breast feeding.

When it comes to feeding your baby, study after study has proven that “breast is best,” as the saying goes. From building your child’s immunities, to decreasing the odds of becoming obese, to dodging bullets like diabetes or asthma, to fewer childhood ear infections, to higher IQs later in life, to a reduced likelihood of breast cancer for moms, the science is all there.

Yet despite the obvious public health benefits of breast feeding, the public climate remains anything but supportive. (There’s an underwire bra joke in there somewhere, but even I can’t go there.) Behind the opposition seems to be the mistaken notion that breasts are strictly sexual accoutrements rather than body parts designed to dispense milk to babies. It’s as if people see breastfeeding as taking something that was designed for sexual gratification and retooling it for use in child rearing — like using an old issue of Hustler to teach your kindergartener to read.

Given this tawdry misconception, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a perennial debate over the appropriateness of breast feeding in public. Plenty of people feel that the sight of a woman discreetly breastfeeding a baby in a restaurant is not just inappropriate, it is actually stomach turning. This view has always dumbfounded me.

The notion that propriety and manners dictate that in order to feed her baby a woman must leave the room where everyone else is eating and sequester herself in a room where everyone else is doing the opposite of eating sounds not just illogical, but inconvenient and unsanitary, as well. No one suggests that adults should eat in private just because they use their mouths in the process and mouths are body parts that are also often involved in sexual acts.

Yet the battle against breast feeding being viewed as somehow perverted continues, and mothers who want to do what they feel is best for their babies are caught in the crossfire of this ridiculous battle of the overall culture war.

And in running this cover photo, Time Magazine just emptied an entire magazine of bullets into this battle. But by staging this photo to be as bizarre as possible, rather than defending the majority of breast feeding moms, Time Magazine intentionally turned its firepower against them.

The fact is, most moms do not breastfeed while standing up. Why? Because the mechanics of it don’t work well that way plus it’s not at all comfortable. But by having the mom in a standing position, then having the boy stand on a chair to elevate him to breast height, the effect is that the kid appears older and bigger than he already is.

Additional touches like the mom resting one hand on her hip while staring somewhat defiantly at the camera and the boy holding his arms down rather than having them around his mom, all tend to create the impression that these are two individuals involved in breast feeding rather than a mother and her small child.

Had the cover photo been of the very same mother breast feeding the very same child, except with the mom sitting on a couch with her three-year-old in her lap while she gazed down at him, the effect of this photo would have been very different.

Reasonable minds can differ as to the appropriate age to wean your baby as well as the pros and cons of Attachment Parenting. But by deliberately going for shock value in its cover photo, Time Magazine hasn’t helped Attachment Parenting gain acceptance; it has only pushed breast feeding farther into the dark, seedy shadows where it doesn’t deserve to be.