Have you ever heard the joke about mother’s1 milk being the free baby food? It is free indeed if one does not consider a mother’s effort worth paying.
Nursing a baby is rather time consuming. It is a duty that allows no breaks, no weekends and often no sleep.
Nursing is something that is impossible to share for most couples on biological reasons.
It is often used as an excuse why mothers must leave the workplace for a while. However, some mothers return to work before weaning.
So what are the challenges a working mother with a breast-fed baby meets in the workforce?
Why not to go straight for formula
There are scientifically proven health benefits of human milk for babies.2 The World Health Organisation currently recommends to nurse children exclusively for the first six months of life and to continue breastfeeding up to two years of age or beyond. That is longer than a maximum paid parental leave in Germany. Besides, there is high social pressure on new mothers in this country to nurse their children.3
While expecting my first baby I decided to try nursing. I did it partly because of the health benefits for the baby, partly out of pure curiosity to experience this basic biological function.
We planed with six months of full-time parental leave for me at the start. We changed to the part-time parental leave after five months without weaning. Our first-born refused to take any formula and was not very happy with pumped milk.
As she was one year old, I returned to working full-time. She continued to nurse while eating solid foods until she was 18 months old and we were expecting the next baby.
The second baby is currently six month old and is still exclusively breast-fed. She accepts formula as needed, which makes the life much easier.
With two young children, I have been planning my work around nursing for over two years now.
The labor of feeding a tiny human
During the first weeks with a newborn one can spend up to 14 hours a day nursing. It gets easier as the baby grows. It takes some ten to twelve feedings summing up to 1,5 hours a day for a six months old baby. When solid foods are introduced, the nursing is gradually reduced until one to three feedings usually at the evening or during the night.
Pumping is even more time consuming, as one needs to sum up the time for collecting the milk and the time for feeding the baby.
The work of producing human milk cannot be shared and is hard to postpone to fit ones schedule. Some babies are more demanding than others.
I found that being the only source of food for a tiny human created some significant challenges for my time management and general productivity.
Everyday logistic challenges
A nursing mother needs to be around the exclusively breast-fed baby to feed every three to four hours. If the baby accepts pumped milk, the supply needs to be produced beforehand. So every time the mother leaves the house alone, she need to make arrangements.
A mother might need a possibility to pump to relief physical discomfort created by milk excess, when she is separated from a baby for over three hours. If the milk is then supposed to be fed to the baby, it needs refrigeration.
Responsibility
A nursing mother has the great responsibility to be available. If she gets hurt or falls ill, the life, the health and the psychological security of the baby might be endangered.
The pressure of this responsibility gave me some very hard time while nursing the first baby that refused to take any formula. I was more careful than ever.
Travelling
One is obviously not able to travel separately from the baby.
I expected this to be a great professional issue pre-covid. The covid isolation was helpful to continue nursing our first-born, as I hardly had any chance to spend a night outside the house.
However, as the world recovers from the pandemic, it might become an impediment again.
Especially it might be difficult to explain, why travelling is still an issue as a baby becomes a toddler and a mother returns from her parental leave.
Sleep, a lack of
A baby tends to nurse several times a night, so a mother does not get much uninterrupted sleep.
We are on the lucky side with this one, as our kids are rather good sleepers.
However, there were two months of my life when I was back to work and our first-born did not allow me more than 1,5 hours of uninterrupted sleep between the feedings. Those were not the happiest or the most productive months of my life, to put it mildly.
Nursing as a working mom
So how do workplaces support nursing mothers with those challenges?
In Germany there is a law, protecting nursing mothers. It allows breaks of at least half an hour twice a day when working no longer than eight hours a day. This nursing time is counted as working hours and is not the normal lunch break. It is handled more or less like bathroom breaks that are necessary for everyone and are tolerated.
It is nice to know I might take up to an hour daily to nurse. However, I am currently working part-time, four hours a day. I would hardly be able to accomplish anything if I spend an hour for nursing.
While working from home, I try to accommodate a five to ten minutes nursing break between the meetings. On the days I spend four hours at the office, the baby gets its bottle.
We considered to work full eight hours days, every other day instead of four hours everyday, but the complex logistic of nursing at the office prevented us from doing so.
Now, the 30 minutes breaks might be helpful when the baby is nearby. This includes driving home or having the baby brought to the mother twice a day. The breaks can also be used for pumping, which includes the necessity of milk refrigeration.
We felt it imposes too much logistic stress on us and does not accommodate the psychological and physiological needs of our babies. Nursing only twice in eight hours appears to be not enough for both our children.
Besides, there needs to be a space to nurse in the office.
Nursing room
There is a legal requirement in this country that employers provide a private room to nurse, though the law does not mention that a room needs to have specific furnishing or a fridge. So I heard stories of people storing their pumped milk in the office kitchen fridge as the only way to keep it fresh to feed it to their baby a day later.
While expecting my first-born I’ve asked for a possibility of a nursing room. The employer was rather surprised, as I apparently was the first person in the companies history asking this question. There was no room planned.
The day I was back from my first parental leave, covid lockdown happen and working from home became our reality. So there was no real need to insist on having a nursing room. I am sure that otherwise we could have solved the issue, as my employer is super flexible.
On the rare occasions I actually needed to nurse at the office, I did it in my car in the garage.
Having an extra need
I think the real difficulty around organising the working reality around nursing is less about the logistics and more about the necessity to communicate the extra need.
One needs to ask for a break in a meeting, to ask for a place to nurse, to ask to plan a workshop without travelling. It does not sound difficult, but it is.
Women are largely socialised not to mention their specific physiological issues in public. No matter if we are suffering from period pain, pregnancy nausea or menopause issues, we are expected to do so in silence or to risk appearing unprofessional because of our “hormones”. Breastfeeding is one of those physiological processes, connected to our nakedness, hormones and bodily liquids. The challenge is to break these behavioural patterns and start asking.
It is not especially helpful to work in an industry like IT, where it is so common to be the only female in a meeting room. It is neither helpful that mothers are often perceived as less professional in our culture, so it is not easy to emphasise on this very motherly issue.
Sometimes I feel that I struggle to advocate for my needs and to ask. I dislike the feeling of asking for something extra. However, every time I ask I create a bit more awareness and a bit more diversity, that might make it easier for others to talk of their special needs.
How to be an ally
If you have a new parent who might be nursing on your team, there is a couple of things you could do to make their life easier and your workspace more inclusive.
Consider asking them proactively on how to help them to combine work with nursing a new human.
If they need a room for nursing or pumping, make sure there is a refrigerator, a comfortable seat and ideally a sink.
Please respect the blockers in their calendar, as they might be necessary to sustain a baby.
If you want to be extra nice, end an online meeting 10 minutes earlier, so there is time to check on the baby. A positive side effect might include thankful participants, who get extra time to grab a coffee before the next call.
Try to be especially careful with late meetings or social gatherings during the possible bedtime, as nursed children tend to depend on nursing at their bedtime.
Please consider that any travel might be an issue and give the nursing person a possibility to participate remotely.
Thank you for being a great ally!
1 By saying “mother” in this post I mean any parent able to lactate. Please feel seen and included.
2 We need to admit though, that nursing is just one of many factors influencing a child’s health. Children fed with formula have all the chances to become healthy and happy adults. Fed is definitely best.
3 For some mothers the pressure to breastfeed creates a very special hell with all kind of physical and mental struggles. But even the luckiest of us still have to plan with possible difficulties. There is no guarantee the process works just fine with any new baby even for experienced mothers.