A couple incidents come to mind.

At one of the first LLL conferences in WI for professionals, the opening keynote session was held together with the opening of a regular LLL Conference (with all the usual little ones in attendance) which was going to continue in another area of the facility.  Unfortuantely, it was in an auditorium with the fold over "desks" on each seat and virtually no place where moms could sit on the floor with their children and the only place for children who didn't want to sit quietly was in the aisles.  Needless to say, there was a lot of running up and down the aisles accompanied with the usual squeals of delight.  It was heartbreaking to read some of the evaluations from the professional conference including one that actually said, "The children were a huge distraction.  Get rid of them."!!!  While I will admit the noise level was greater than usual even for a LLL event, I couldn't help but wonder if that person wasn't in the wrong profession!  My point here is that it is important to be sure the setting is conducive to moms attending to the needs of their little ones or any distraction will only be magnified..

The other situation was a workshop totally unrelated to parenting (it was a workshop for people doing craft home sales parties).  There was definitely a policy that babies and children were NOT to be at any of the distributor meetings-probably secondary to the fact that a high percentage of women in that line of work are stay-at-home moms.  One time a brave mom did bring her nursing baby who made one brief "Waa" which made all heads turn and at that time, the mom left the room with baby until baby was asleep again.  The speaker glared at the mom, but said nothing else.  Later, one of the attendees had a sneezing attackand again many heads turned, but the speaker made a joke of it and immediately got everyone's attention back.  Later I tried to stand up for the mom and said to the soeaker that I was glad mom brought her baby nd that I felt it wasn't any more distraction than the sneezing, but there was no warning that if you were likely to sneeze or cough you weren't welcome.  Her response was that she lost the attention of the audience when veryone looked to see where the baby was.  I believe the reason everyone looked was because it was such a unique occurrance for that group and that she could have drawn tha attention of the audience back in the same was she did for the sneezer, but to no surporise to me, she just couldn't see the point.  I did approach the mom later and congratulated her on putting the need of her baby ahead of the "policy" and that I strongly disagreed with that policy.

Winnie Mading

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