Hello, everyone,

I had a wonderful experience this week that I want to share with all of
you. I am taking a semester-long course in Conflict Resolution as part of
my M.Ed. Today we did a session on Diversity Training. (This is a
bf-related story.)

This class is taught through the School of Public Health at one of our
local universities. The class has about 50 people in it - about 2/3 grad
students, 1/3 undergrad. About 4/5 are in Health Policy Administration. The
rest are from a sprinkling of other departments, like me (from Education).

For the final exercise, the class brainstormed different groups that we're
part of in order to answer the question: "What you should NEVER AGAIN say,
think, or do towards our group again." I suggested the group "nursing
mothers."

In order to be used in the exercise, a group had to have at least 2
members. For a moment it looked like "nursing mothers" wouldn't make it,
but then another woman in the class said she was a former nursing mother,
and asked if that would  count. The instructor said, "Sure," so we formed a
group of 2.

The exercise was then to take 6 minutes to develop a list in response to
"What you should NEVER AGAIN say, think, or do towards our group again."

Here's the list we came up with:

Don't:
  - Make us leave a public place.
  - Offer us a private place to nurse just to get us out of sight.
  - Tell us to nurse our babies in the bathroom.
  - Keep your children from asking us about nursing if they see us doing
    it and are curious.
  - Ask us when we are going to wean.
  - Tell us we're spoiling our children by breastfeeding on cue.
  - Tell us our milk isn't good enough, or that we don't have enough milk.
  - Try to shame nursing toddlers or their mothers.
  - Make a face / roll your eyes.
  - Judge us negatively for making the choice to bf if you did it differently
    (especially for our mothers).
  - Tell us we need to give the baby a bottle.
  - Tell us our babies are too thin, too fat, too small, too big, too fussy,
    etc. because we are breastfeeding them.

After making the lists, each group had to present their list to the rest of
the class. After all the presentations, the instructor asked the class if
there were any groups about which they had learned some new information, or
which had particularly touched them.

One young woman immediately said, "nursing mothers" and there were loud
murmurs of agreement from the rest of the class.(!) Several people spoke to
me afterwards to tell me that I raised their awareness of a group they'd
never even considered. One student, a 51-year old man, told me about his
wife's experiences bf their two children.

But the really neat thing, which only occurred to me later, was that this
was a classroom chock-full of future Health Policy Adminstrators who are
now aware of some of our society's prejudices against nursing mothers.
Maybe some of them will go on to make a difference in bf policies someday.
Let's hope!


-- Betty Meeler
   Durham, NC
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