Time Magazine features on its May 21, 2012 cover Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, photographed with her three-year-old son, breastfeeding.

Let’s cut to the chase: Mrs. Grumet is a very attractive, young and blond mom. Her son, standing on a chair and wearing a gray sweater and camouflage pants, looks mature and confident.

Despite the story’s focus on attachment parenting, the highly promoted juxtaposition of a hot mom with an older-looking boy, sucking on her nipple while looking at the camera, is an attempt to sexualize the scene, create controversy and get people like me to link to the story.

It’s a deliberate, staged cover photo. It’s link bait.

But it’s also an issue I feel strongly about. So here here’s my view…

I was breast fed until I was about three. It’s natural and most ideal for baby health and maternal bonding.

My kids were breastfed (though not until three).

From a pure biological standpoint, humans were designed to breastfeed.

There’s nothing perverted or corrupt about that. Nothing at all.

But one thing most certainly is perverted and corrupt: The hidden yet powerful pressure forced on toddlers and young children to become mature and sexual.

It’s everywhere, and most pervasive with girls. It’s in our culture and media. It’s in the clothing and toy industries. It’s in our schools and, subtly, in our parenting.

I don’t give a damn about a three-year-old breastfeeding. But I care immensely about the pressure my three-year-old daughter feels to look like a mature, seductive woman.

It is time to obliterate the contradictions!

It is time to get our priorities straight!

I work in the advertising-technology industry.

It’s exciting, interesting and I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

But it has challenges that many correctly observe:

• An explosion of poor advertising inventory, and commodity technology and services.
• Clueless agencies, clueless tech vendors and clueless brand marketers.
• Ethical dilemmas, like excessive gift-giving and boondogles — even summer houses, vacations, and Super Bowl trips.
• Buyers too complacent to invest in important channels like social and mobile.
• And unsustainable LUMAscape businesses propped up by VC money that has nowhere else to go.

But it has a problem far bigger than that:

It has forgotten how to speak English.

Consider the jargon from an anonymous ad-tech executive. He vomited:

You could be buying via an exchange and you could have a frequency cap of three, but some other exchange or network or DSP is already seeing that same page with 13 impressions. Frequency capping occurs at the platform level, not the publisher level. Everyone is trying to reach the same user multiple times, but nobody understands where they sit in the ad-delivery stack, whether you’re No.1 or No. 24. Another huge problem is cookie bombing.

If you’re a human (as opposed to an ad-tech alien), it’s pretty difficult to understand what this “leader” is trying to say.

That doesn’t bode well for the ad-tech industry.

Agree? Go read my latest MediaPost column.

(Photo: M*rten)

The problem with embracing competition is that competition, itself, becomes the end game.

We compete just to compete — not some other higher outcome.

And in hot competition, people begin to confuse what is hard with what is valuable.

Moreover, that develops a quest to compete amidst unattainable odds, which is subtly demoralizing.

Storied entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, unpacked these hidden truths about “us” in a startup class he’s teaching at his alma mater, Stanford University.  (One of his students, Blake Masters, has been posting thorough summaries of Thiel’s lectures.)

These are important truths to recognize in context of any serious endeavor.

Want to learn more?

Go read my MediaPost column.

As father of two preschoolers, I advocate naps.

Most importantly, naps refresh my kids. Naps make them happier people and function better.

So I asked the question at Julian’s pre-Kindergarten parent orientation night: ”Do the kids get nap time or even quiet time in Kindergarten?”

The principle leading the discussion said yes, but the other teachers standing next to him nodded their heads no.

Then the principle said it depends on the class.

Then he acknowledged that naps phase out after Kindergarten, even though we (pointing to himself and then the parents) would do better with them.

If naps are good for us — and scientific research proves they make us healthier, happier and learn better — then why don’t we sanction them in our schools?

Personally, I love napping. However, my habit of not napping, coupled with life anxiety, tends to prohibit my ability to fall asleep in the middle of the day.

I wish that were not the case.

(Photo: Me)

Costco never ceases to amaze me.

There’s a lot to love, from double-seat shopping carts to caskets (displayed in the exit aisle adjacent the snack bar) to wedding services.

The theme of Costco is value, whether you’re buying staples like diapers and organic milk, or higher-priced items like vacations and automobiles.

During our last visit, Costco reminded me yet again how expansive its repertoire has become.

No joke: next to the casket display was a promotion for three and four carat diamond rings priced between $66,999.99 and $84,999.99 — delivery included!

(Going to Costco is usually a family affair, and I couldn’t resist capturing this funny scene of the diamonds-at-Costco poster, with my son examining our receipt while my daughter admired the jewelry with her monkey hat on.)

Of course, selling high-priced jewelry is probably not the marketing endgame. The goal is to position the brand more favorably among affluent shoppers, and persuade them to spend more on higher priced items across the board.

I wonder: Has Costco ever sold one of those high-priced rings? If so, do you think the purchaser prefers to keep that fact on the down-low?

I would love to know the backstory.