![]() ![]() ![]() Paid leave has even been shown to yield economic benefit. Most countries provide some sort of paid parental leave, with proven benefits for kids and parents, including increased nursing. ![]() There’s a straightforward solution to this problem: six months of family leave for new parents, paid at a livable wage. This is particularly true for workers of color, who disproportionately lack access to the kinds of jobs that allow for time off a 2016 report showed that 40 percent of Latinx birth parents took no leave at all, compared with 27 percent of white birth parents who reported the same. The technologies that make pumping marginally less frustrating-and even the policies that are set up to support it-just tinker around the edges of an inherently broken thing: that so many parents are separated from their babies earlier than they want to be, because they can’t afford not to be. But sending my son off to spend his day with someone else while I am trying to sustain breastfeeding sets up a whole chain of challenges and unsatisfactory solutions. This is not because I don’t like my job I love it, in fact, and wouldn’t want to be a stay-at-home parent for the long term even if it were financially feasible. And despite all my troubleshooting, each cup has a stubborn leak that slowly drips milk into my bra.īut there’s another issue, which no technological advance can fix: Pumping just reminds me that I wish I weren’t apart from my baby. They also have one tiny tube that isn’t supposed to get milk into it, but somehow does, leaving me to battle the creep of an unsettling grayish mold. My hands-free cups need constant cleaning, yet the instructions make clear that they must at all costs not be put into a dishwasher. While the pump has saved me time and upped my productivity, the new technology still doesn’t provide the frictionless experience of my working-parent dreams. Personally, while looking through the marketing images of slim, happy women pumping at the beach, on the ski slope, and in yoga class, I also hoped my new technology would do something about that terrible feeling I remembered, the inexplicable dread that had been my constant pumping companion.Ī few months into my new pumping journey, the results are underwhelming. All of this is supposed to make it easier for people who are breast- or chestfeeding to produce milk even when apart from their babies for much of the day. ![]()
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