Babies in the Workplace

of their baby's life or soon after returning to
work.

For many women, returning to work--or even the prospect of returning to work--discourages breastfeeding. Continuing to nurse after they return to work without their baby generally requires pumping at least two or three times throughout the day, often more. Pumps are far less effective than a nursing baby at extracting milk, so, especially in those early months, many mothers are unable to get enough milk by pumping to keep up their milk supply and fully supply their babies at day care. Many of these mothers either wean their babies early or end up needing to supplement with formula, which makes for fussier and sicker babies since formula is harder to digest and has none of the immune system benefits of human milk.

Being able to bring a baby to work
makes it far easier for a mother to
breastfeed and she is thus more likely to continue. Sally Rynne said that at Health Newsletters Direct, there was "a lot of breastfeeding going on."

Sally said this was part of the rationale of allowing babies in the first place: "to encourage and make it easy for moms to breastfeed." She said that bringing a baby to work gave moms an opportunity to get support, especially about nursing issues. She explained that it can be "tough for new moms to feel confident enough--they wonder whether they should supplement, whether they should nurse every hour and a half, things like that." She said that there was discussion of parenting issues among coworkers "that was just natural because the baby was there." Sally added that "there were women who wanted to nurse in spite of the fact that it wasn't going well, and they got support [from their