I also feel very strongly about the importance of including babies as part
of their mothers' lives. I have been to many conferences (often as a
speaker!) with babies and even toddlers present; I've also been to many
conferences (on non-breastfeeding topics) where there were no babies
present. Guess what - you don't get perfect silence either way. At the
no-baby conferences you get people having side conversations (often loud
ones!), construction going on outside the building, airplanes flying
overhead, people in the next room applauding or laughing, people coughing
and sneezing, etc., etc.

When I'm speaking, I treat a baby's occasional shrieks or loud noises just
as I would an airplane drowning me out or a jackhammer blasting outside the
room: I stop, wait, and repeat what I said. It isn't a big deal.

And noises happen in exam settings, too, even when there are no babies
present. Those of you who need complete silence in exams - how do you manage
when you are working with a mother, when you have to dredge up that same
information and apply it to her problem? Because you certainly won't get
silence in that situation! Is it that you just become too nervous because of
the exam pressure to concentrate and worry that any sound will further
distract you? I don't mean this as a criticism or judgment, I am trying to
understand better how this works. I wonder if we should consider the person
who needs total silence to be the "special consideration" and provide a
quiet, perhaps sound-proofed room for exam-writing for those who need this.

There was a time when one argument against women working was that it would
be "too distracting" for the men and productivity would drop. But men (for
the most part) got used to it. We can get used to babies too.

Teresa Pitman

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