Keeping in mind that I breastfed my kids on subways, I am still kinda annoyed by this woman who breastfed her kid, while giving a lecture. (Her response is a scream. Really should read it.) It isn't the breast that bothers me; a bottle would also have been wrong. It's the baby in a classroom during a lecture. Even if she was bottle feeding the baby, it is not possible to give an adequate lecture, while caring for a small, sick child. It's barely possible to shower and remain human.
The real problem is that the professor felt forced to bring her child to class, because she didn't have a backup child-care option. I never understood why universities don't have their own childcare centers, especially schools with large numbers of students majoring in education and nursing.
Apt. 11d 
But if the University had their own child care center wouldn’t the baby still have been unable to go due to the fever?
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Some daycare centers admit sick kids. Really it’s only for an hour during class. Or she could have paid a student to watch her kid in her office for an hour during class and then gone home for the day.
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I was never able to bring my own infants to class, or let them sleep in a crib in my office (though I had tremendous fantasies that such a thing would be possible). But, I think the blanket statement that an infant is incompatible with giving an adequate lecture and/or taking a shower/remaining human depends on both the mother and the child and the child. My own baby was also (like yours) incompatible with showering (and, mostly, remaining human). But I absolutely met other kinds of babies.
So, first presuming that in fact this particular child, mother, and lecture were all compatible, we have an issue being made of a breast being used to feed a child in class, and for that, my answer is that a woman should be free to nurse her child wherever he needs to be nursed, anywhere at all, including, for example, on the NBC morning show (where, it might not be allowed). To require otherwise is comparable to women being required to cover their heads.
(Now, I’m not going to comment on this particular case, ’cause I don’t know if my precondition, that the professor be able to do her job while with her baby and while feeding her baby were satisfied)
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Having a student watch the child during class seems like the obvious thing to do.
I can’t imagine having my kids at a daycare center that allows contagious kids to come in. They pick up (and pass along) enough things as it is.
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In her response to the controversy, she said that her child was crawling around the room and making a move towards the electrical socket. That’s not a docile, sleeping infant.
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I have so many conflicting feelings about this story. It doesn’t bother me when women breastfed in public, no matter the venue, and I wouldn’t be personally bothered if I was a student in this class.
OTOH, one of the shitty parts of working while also having children is that each of these things is sometimes, or often, incompatible with the other. So if you have a sick kid, you really need to either take off work or arrange care for her outside of work. The kind of child who is sick, AND can crawl, AND can’t go an hour without breastfeeding is not the kind of child you can care for while simultaneously lecturing students on their first day of class.
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Regarding asking her TA to care for the child: it is
totally unprofessional, disrespectful, and an abuse of power to ask your subordinate to perform tasks wildly outside of their job description when they probably don’t feel like they have standing to refuse you.
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How freaking hard is it to get a babysitter (even for a sick baby) for long enough to teach a short class when you’re a college professor? I lived on campus in DC for 4 years and I had hot and cold running sitters whenever I wanted them.
(Her kid almost swallowed a paper clip while crawling around the classroom, too.)
It being a sick, crawly baby is the main offense–she wasn’t doing the baby any favors, while at the same time exposing her entire class to germs without their permission. My husband had a colleague who installed a Pack N Play in her office and taught her classes with her baby, and she managed just fine like that for a number of months.
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I don’t know, I really sympathize with her. First, she specifically said she told her TA NOT to watch the child because it emphatically wasn’t in her job description, but the TA did it anyway. Secondly, to get a sitter on 3 hours notice for a young baby – someone that you know & trust & not just a stranger – is challenging.
I feel her frustration on the way the reporter handled it, and it just feels like the framing was out of her control at that point. The smart thing to do would probably be to not make any comments, but I imagine in the heat of the moment, it was too easy to try & shape the story.
And yeah, it’s freaking Feminist Anthropology. Get over it, students.
The most troubling part to me is the paper clip & electrical outlet stories. Although I can imagine that she was trying to not let baby distract her from lecturing.
Definitely not an ideal situation, but the whole thing just feels untenable to me. I can only imagine the bitching & whining that would have commenced if she’d sent a TA for the first class in her place.
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As a working mum who once conducted an important interview from a bathroom stall in a pediatrician’s office while nursing (uuuhhnnn), I have a lot of sympathy for her situation, and maybe her solution as a desperation move…but once someone raised it as an issue the best answer was “you’re right and I’m sorry and I won’t do it again.”
I am a fan of good maternity leave and daycare subsidies, but that doesn’t make taking your child to work appropriate in their absence. In this case the baby was crawling around on the floor eating a paperclip, distracting students and sick to boot. This wasn’t okay for just about anyone, and she needs to figure it out better for next time.
Also, a 90 minute class with a baby who can crawl is not a breastfeeding issue. I’m very pro-breastfeeding but once your baby can crawl, he or she can make it 90 minutes.
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P.S. the interview was on the phone, obviously. 🙂
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Ok, so I guess I misread that she asked her TA to watch the child. I still feel all eye-rolly at her thinking it was ok to take a crawling child to class.
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When we lived in DC, I used to have a dozen or so college students on my sitter list. If you’ve got those kind of numbers, you can cover any hours you need.
Similarly, I’m getting ready to go to the hospital sometime in the next month or so, and we’ve gotten four families to agree to take our big kids at a moment’s notice. They do have dates when they’re not available, but I feel pretty safe having four families that have agreed and having all dates, cell phone numbers, and addresses within easy reach.
(Tfoo-tfoo.)
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I’m impressed at all of you who had students willing and able to babysit. Maybe I never learned how to ask students in such a way that was useful. Mostly, by the time I got to know a student well, I felt that it would be inappropriate (they’re my senior project student or my grad student!) to ask them, even outside TA hours and paid out of my pocket, to watch my kid.
Some of us don’t have the social capital or contacts to find babysitters. If it weren’t for the kindness of a colleague with kids ten years older than mine who knew mine well and babysat twice during department Christmas parties, my kids would never have had babysitters.
I took Autistic Youngest to class with me once when the principal called due to her disruptive behaviour in grade five. Forty minutes before class: YOU try coming up with a miracle babysitting solution! That was NOT fun but at least she was old enough to sit at a table at the side of the classroom and play on my laptop.
Students who tweet and post to FB during class about a professor’s breastfeeding as “unprofessional” strike me as a serious case of pot calling the kettle black.
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I’m entirely in favor of women being able to breastfeed in public anywhere, anytime. But a classroom isn’t “in public”; you are in charge there, and you should be attuned to how the things you do will affect your students. We all do this in a hundred different ways every semester. If you’ve thought that through, great, but don’t pull the “breastfeeding women are under attack” argument out – it’s important elsewhere, but not in this case.
What really annoyed me was her attack on the student journalists. This is a story that has gone national, inspired a ton of (sometimes) useful debate, and they were supposed to treat it as some kind of private matter?
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I feel for her….I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that professors have tons of babysitters available, speaking as a professor who has never had a huge babysitter network available. And I gather from her story that this is her only child, who’s an infant–she might not have had a ton of babysitter experience yet. I don’t blame her for not being able to find a babysitter on such short notice. In that situation, I might well cancel class, but cancelling the very first class day is such a big hassle (and interferes w/students’ course shopping). So I can totally understand the situation–seems like the sort of day where it would be hard to make perfect arrangements and lots of things could not work out well.
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My husband and I was married for 9 months. Back in April, I asked for a divorce. I told him that I didn’t love him. I was trying to find a way to make him mad at me. A week before our divorce was final, I told him that I didn’t want to lose him and that I really did love him. But i find out with me threatening him with the divorce that he has loose interests in me,i was confuse why i make the suggestion because i really love him and i was thinking everyday not knowing what to do so I heard about this therapist oniha of the winexbackspell@gmail.com through a good family friend. I went straight out and tried to find the way to make my relationship the strongest type,i told the winexbackspell@gmail.com all my problems and he told me to cast a spell that will make him love me more and more forever,which I bought and act according to what he said,after everything
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I’ve nursed on the NYC subway, on a ride at Disney World, in my office, in a funeral home, in many museums, on various beaches, on airplanes, on a train, in football stadiums, etc., all with my handy nursing cover. The professor should get one, as well as a deeper list of sitters and a back-up lesson plan for the TA to handle. I deeply sympathize with her, though. It’s never easy to leave a sick child. My first baby, a preemie, was sick a lot his first year, and I ended up taking him to work or work events more often than I probably should have. As a new Mom, my list of sitters wasn’t long yet, and as I navigated my new world of mothering and part-time work, I wasn’t confident enough to say “No, I can’t make it in today” as I would not hesitate to do now.
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Wow. I have to say, I wouldn’t do that. If I felt I *had* to bring my kid to class, I would have given the students something to do and left the room if I had to breastfeed. I’m kind of militant about the right to BF in public, but the classroom, while teaching, is a different situation.
Normally I don’t post just to say I agree, but given my previous comments suggesting a kind of breastfeeding militancy, I figured I would weigh in. 🙂
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I’m really irked by the prof’s tone toward the student journalists — who are STUDENTS trying to actually learn something. Yes, the reporter’s initial questions were sophomoric… perhaps because she is actually a sophomore? Ugh.
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Janice said:
“Mostly, by the time I got to know a student well, I felt that it would be inappropriate (they’re my senior project student or my grad student!) to ask them, even outside TA hours and paid out of my pocket, to watch my kid.”
True story–I once had a student sitter on my list get arrested and sent to federal prison for several months after he jumped a fence at a School of the Americas during a protest (that was before he’d had a chance to work for me). I didn’t have any other prospective sitters that were that colorful, although I did have one young woman who came to work intending to do her Chinese homework while watching my preschooler and toddler (who were both wide awake at the time).
When I had a lot of student sitters in DC, I’d try to give them an opportunity to work for me while I was puttering around at home before having them go solo. I probably should have checked references, but at a highly selective university, the admissions office has done some of that work for you.
“Some of us don’t have the social capital or contacts to find babysitters.”
Building social capital and making contacts are real work and requires real effort. It’s not a question of having them or not having them. After a number of years of not needing regular sitters, I’m starting to build a list in a new location. My first effort a was to email the secretary at our Catholic student center, mention our bona fides and location, and ask to have my email forwarded to the Catholic Daughters and similar organizations (adjust for personal tastes). The secretary immediately recommended her own high school age daughter and she’s supposed to work for us this weekend. It occurs to me that campus nursing, early childhood education, education, psychology, speech therapy, family life departments and campus autism centers would be very good places to start looking for responsible young people. I’m thinking through this myself, as we will probably need a lot more help ourselves over the next year. My husband has talent-scouted a very bright, responsible student in one of his courses this fall. As soon as grades are posted, I’m going to email her. There’s also a very nice graduate student from my husband’s department who can help in a pinch, but I don’t know if she’d feel comfortable saying no, so I don’t want to overdo asking her. Anyway, this is a work in progress.
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When Mallory was born, I only took one class (I was still pursuing my BA) the semester after she was born. She was a sleepy four week-old, and I took her to class. My professor was wonderful (I’d had several classes with him before) and he often took sleeping Mallory and rocked her back and forth while lecturing. No one minded it. By the end of the semester she was more active so I left her with my sister. That’s one of my fondest memories of school and new motherhood. I felt fully supported by everyone in the room.
Mallory actually had the same prof last spring. He bragged to everyone in class that this was her “second” class from him.
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I wasn’t a single mom technically, but, in effect, I was and still am. My husband is gone for 13-14 hours per day and can never ever take a day off for emergencies. He is too busy at work to make phone calls or other chores from work. My job was always less important than his, because I was paid incredibly badly. If he lost his job, we couldn’t eat. One of my sons was so difficult that I could never bring him to school.
So, when I worked, I arranged for multiple fallback plans. I had a list of people who could help out, if a kid got sick and couldn’t go to school. Even so, the fear of emergencies was always a major stress. With Ian, we had more emergencies that typical parents.
There’s no question that universities and other employers need to assist their workers more. There are services that provide care for sick children. A local hospital has a sick child daycare that can be used as an at-need basis. It’s very expensive, but it’s ok for an emergency. Universities could have a contract with services like that.
I lost all sympathy for the woman after I read her super long rationalization for her behavior. It was arrogant and entitled. It was also super long and weird. I think she must have some mental health issues.
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Local home school mom went back to work this year, leaving a void in her family’s child care arrangement. “Can you pick up C from school tomorrow?” Always happy to help in an emergency. When the phone rang again at 6:30 this morning, for the third request in the first 2 weeks of school, I once again agreed to help.
In the shower a few minutes later, as the warm water revived my brain, I had the slow realization — “I’m not the last chance, emergency backup plan! I’m the plan!”
I’m going to have to do something about this.
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Because I posted in this thread yesterday my toddler popped a fever last night. 😛 But I am at home, taking the career hit.
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It seems to me that this is defining “person” in a very particular way. It is not the goal of my feminism to define “person” as “50’s male with supportive at-home wife taking care of all personal tasks so he can pretend to be a company machine.” I don’t understand the fuss-how is this different from teaching a class while you have a head cold? Did she actually teach the class, give lecture, answer questions? So what if at the same time she watched her infant, nursed it, etc. How’s that different from drinking some coffee or water? And what about the role model she gave her students for blending work and family life?
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“So what if at the same time she watched her infant, nursed it, etc. How’s that different from drinking some coffee or water?”
Have you ever watched a crawling-age baby? A sleepy newborn in a wrap is one thing, if precarious, but a mobile baby is something else. It is mind-numbing work to take care of a baby in some ways, but it is work. Would it be okay to be working on a consulting project while lecturing, or one’s golf putting?
(I have taken 5 minutes to type that because I am handing Duplo to my toddler. Yay for asynchronous communication.)
“And what about the role model she gave her students for blending work and family life?”
Well here’s my feminism: My goal is not to blend work and family life so that I am always working at home and bringing my kids into the office, nor do I want my fellow parents to do so.
When did “blending” become the goal? Forgive me for getting a bit high-horsey about this but I think it may have about the time the pushback started on women that *only the mother* can provide adequately superior care, 24/7 access to the breast for 2 years, etc.
If this professor had gone off on the lack of adequate sick child care options at her campus, I would be right behind her.
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You know, the wrong thing here is having the discussion in the first place. How often do we have discussions in our public culture that involve second-guessing a single momentary decision about how to cope with a life issue that man made, where everybody feels like they can say, “Oh, I wouldn’t do it that way, it’s so easy to do it this way instead!”
Just about never. Basically I would have happy if we didn’t ever hold cultural kangaroo courts about these kinds of moments ever again. Or if we have to, let’s do them about everybody all the time. “Hey, my male professor came to class even though he was sneezing all the time, he probably gave us all a cold!” “Hey, my male professor forgot to zip up his fly just one day, that’s totally inappropriate!” “Hey, my male professor decided to bring his 5-year old daughter to class and let her read in the back even though he was talking about the genocide in Rwanda!” And so on.
Either we should all be getting up each other’s shit all the time in this culture or we should save it for the stuff that matters. I know which way I vote.
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“So what if at the same time she watched her infant, nursed it, etc. How’s that different from drinking some coffee or water?”
You’ve got to read the woman’s description of the class–this was not an example of successful multi-tasking. One of the biggest things I have against her is that because she screwed this situation up, she may be depriving other women (who are more competent and have better judgment) of the opportunity to bring a well baby to class in a pinch.
Also, this was a sick child crawling around. There were 40 students in the room that the professor exposed involuntarily to her child’s germs. Any one of those students could have had some sort of compromised immune system, but felt uncomfortable about complaining or leaving the room.
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“Either we should all be getting up each other’s shit all the time in this culture or we should save it for the stuff that matters. I know which way I vote.”
Pine herself is the one made a federal case of it.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/05/exposeing-my-breasts-on-the-internet/
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Tim, we’re discussing it, because all of us have been in similar situations before. My husband wouldn’t talk about this stuff, because he didn’t need to. Ultimately, the childcare decisions were mine due to the craptitude of my pay. This is not the equivilent of forgetting to zip up your fly (Steve did that one time. Hee-hee). Caring for a sick child was a MAJOR issue, when I was working, and I am curious how other people dealt with that problem.
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She made a federal case out of it because the student paper (and then beyond the student paper) were making it into an “incident” rather than, “Oh, that happened”.
The range of improvisations we make to balance work-life issues is important, but I’d rather that be an inventory of ideas and experiments, like a Bittman NY Times assemblage of ways to make soup, instead of “This Week’s Scarlet Letter For Someone Who Burned the Soup Once”. We can have these conversations where they work to build collective wisdom rather than work to figure out who we’re going to throw rocks at in “The Lottery”.
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In the area of work-life balance for instructors, students have a competing set of interests that do not necessarily overlap with those of the instructors. It is of course impossible to avoid all interruption of classroom instruction, but if the students aren’t allowed to say anything publicly unless they somehow find “an inventory of ideas and experiments,” that conversation about work-life balance will happen without much input from the students.
Many people say things about their kids aren’t disturbing anything or this potential distraction doesn’t affect their work. They’re often right, but you can’t know that when those who might have a different view aren’t allowed to say anything.
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“She made a federal case out of it because the student paper (and then beyond the student paper) were making it into an “incident” rather than, “Oh, that happened”.”
That’s terrible judgment on Pine’s part. The thing started out as a student paper article idea (with a number of emails flying back and forth) and then (if I understand the sequence of events properly) Pine takes it national to beat the student newspaper to print. Way to be the adult in the situation. How about if she’d just said, “It was a tough day and I took care all of my responsibilities the best way I knew how under the circumstances. If I had to do it over again, I’m sure I could think of some better options, but tomorrow is another day.” and just leave it there.
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