Gisele Bündchen Revealed Her Unique Parenting Style In Her Incredibly Candid Memoir
Gisele Bündchen was the highest-paid model on the planet during her professional heyday, but she gave it all up when she became a mother. She now has two biological kids, Benjamin and Vivian, with perhaps-soon-to-be ex-husband Tom Brady and a stepson via Brady’s previous relationship. But while the model mom has certainly made sacrifices for her kids, not every piece of advice she’s offered has gone down well with other parents.
Breast is best
The most prominent time Bündchen ran into trouble with the public was in 2010 when the U.K. edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine got her talking about breastfeeding. “Some people think they don’t have to breastfeed, and I think, ‘Are you going to give chemical food to your child, when they are so little?’” the supermodel said. But it was another comment that really got people’s backs up.
A call for a new law
“There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months,” Bündchen declared to Harper's Bazaar in the same interview. And given that the issue of breastfeeding vs. bottle-feeding is still pretty divisive today, you can imagine that the response to this was less than kind. The model even had to address the backlash on her website.
An expert weighs in
To give you an idea of the response from the public, you only have to read a comment from a reader of the CNN Marquee blog. A woman named Angela wrote that moms shouldn’t be swayed by “some model that just popped out a kid and now she thinks she’s an expert.” Angela also called Bündchen “self-righteous” and “judgmental.” But an expert got involved with a more measured response.
She doesn’t have the right
Barbara Emanuel from La Leche League International — an organization that actually promotes breastfeeding — didn’t agree with what Bündchen had said. “One mother doesn’t have to be wrong so that another mother can be right,” Emanuel told newspaper the New York Post. “There are lots of choices out there for women, and La Leche League respects those choices.” Bündchen took all this into account when she replied, too.
