A New Initiative Hopes to Make Restaurants More Welcoming for Breastfeeding Parents

Restaurants are, famously, for eating. They are spaces in which consuming food is not only welcomed, but is expected. That is, of course, unless you’re a breastfeeding infant. Earlier this year, an Indianapolis vegan restaurant went viral after it announced that it would no longer allow breastfeeding parents or children under 5, sparking outrage and countless discussions about whether or not breastfeeding in public is “appropriate.” It was especially ironic considering that this controversy centered around a place where food is served, and that breastfeeding infants are simply trying to eat.

At the Lactation Network, a Chicago-based organization that offers breastfeeding and lactation support to new parents, the controversy made clear that it was time to help restaurants figure out a way to be more accommodating to parents and their children. “From my personal experience, those weeks after you have your baby, you’re so alone and isolated, and all you want to do is feel normal,” says Ashley Farrow, the Network’s chief marketing officer. “You don’t know where you can go with your kids, you don’t know where you’re going to feel safe and respected.” And so Farrow’s organization set out to establish a set of standards for restaurants to implement to ensure that they’re being welcoming to breastfeeding parents.

But how did restaurants become such fraught spaces for breastfeeding in the first place? It’s no longer uncommon to see children being breastfed in public places, but restaurants have emerged as particularly contentious sites for this essential part of life. A lot of that has to do with the fact that many people just don’t understand breastfeeding — they view it in a sexual context, or just don’t see what’s wrong with asking a woman to feed her child in the privacy of a bathroom stall. It’s also true that many non-parents don’t understand why the ability to breastfeed or pump breast milk in spaces like restaurants is so incredibly important to both breastfeeding parents and their children. Babies need to eat every two to three hours in the early months, and people who aren’t able to pump for extended periods of time risk painful consequences, including mastitis, an infection caused by clogged milk ducts, along with potential impacts to their milk supply.

“Breastfeeding is still seen as something that’s inappropriate, and so people think that it has to be done behind closed doors,” Farrow says. “When, in reality, everyone else is getting to eat at the restaurant. It shouldn’t be something that new parents are made to feel ashamed of.”

The Lactation Network’s new initiative, called Room at the Table, will offer training and support to restaurants and their employees on how to make their dining rooms more welcoming to children and people who are breastfeeding. It will educate workers on the legalities of breastfeeding across the country — 49 states have enshrined protections for breastfeeding parents into law — and offer insight into navigating tricky situations that some servers maybe haven’t been faced with, like what to do if another customer complains about someone breastfeeding in the establishment, or how to offer hot water that can help warm a child’s bottle.

“We wanted to make it as low-lift as possible for a restaurant, because if it’s easy to implement, people can actually make it work,” Farrow says. “The idea was to give them the confidence to welcome these patrons, and offer insight into how to accommodate any special requests and just educate restaurants on what new parents are going through.” Restaurants that join the program will also be given a window sticker that lets parents know that their space is welcoming to breastfeeding parents.

Courtesy of the Lactation Network

So far, the Lactation Network has signed up about 50 restaurants for the program, including beloved spots like Avec, Mi Tocaya, and chef Stephanie Izard’s Girl & the Goat in Chicago. It’s also starting to see interest from across the country — Austin’s El Naranjo recently joined, as did Queeny’s in Durham, North Carolina, and the Corner Beet in Denver.

In their home city, the Network teamed up with chef Beverly Kim, a former Top Chef contestant who operates Anelya in Chicago, to get even more restaurants on board. Kim’s also a mother of three who breastfed all of her children, and she’s passionate about support for breastfeeding parents, but also knows that accommodating everyone’s needs in a restaurant setting can be challenging. “Some [restaurateurs] are just scared. They’re very limited in space, and they feel like they don’t have the perfect place for pumping [breast milk] or whatever,” Kim says. “But it’s not about being perfect. It’s about being supportive and feeling comfortable offering the best options you have. Maybe you have a corner that’s more private, or an empty private dining room.”

Kim also wants to see this support for breastfeeding parents extend to restaurant workers, too. Many states have laws that require workplaces to offer private spaces to new parents for breastfeeding and pumping, along with break time for both, but Kim believes that there’s a lot of “common sense stuff” that restaurants can do to accommodate breastfeeding employees, like offering up the manager’s office for a worker who needs to pump or setting aside communal fridge space to store breast milk. “It really doesn’t take much effort to ensure that breastfeeding people can stay at work and still nurse their children,” Kim says. “If we want women to stay in this industry, and to keep advancing after they have a family, we have to offer them support.”