【Feature 198】For maternal love at 37°C
Before returning to work after her maternity leave, Ye Qian thought about all the breast pumping options:
Huddled under the workstation, hiding in an empty warehouse, hiding in the toilet... If all these failed, Ye Qian agreed with her family that she would have to work hard for her parents at home and bring her children near the work every day.
When she was trying to balance work and breastfeeding, her anxiety about her baby not being able to feed her milk once brought the atmosphere at home to freezing point.
In the past ten years, it is not uncommon for working women like Ye Qian to face breastfeeding difficulties.
At the end of 2023, survey data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that the number of female employees in my country in 2022 was 320 million, and women of childbearing age accounted for 22.18% of the national population.
With the liberalization of the comprehensive two-child and three-child policies, this phenomenon is particularly prominent in the first-tier city of Shanghai.
In the end, Ye Qian's parents could not stand up to the cry of their baby who was waiting to be fed. One midsummer morning, two gray-haired old men held a four-month-old baby in their arms. They endured the heat and took three buses to arrive at Kaidi where their daughter worked. He visited the building just to let his granddaughter take a mouthful of warm breast milk.
This scene happened to be met by Xiao Suhua, the chairman of the building union who was passing by.
Such a familiar encounter instantly brought her thoughts back to more than ten years ago...
Protect "breast-carrying mothers"
A set of breast pumps, an ice pack, a few glass bottles - entering the second decade of the new century, those born in the 1980s and 1990s are gradually entering the peak of childbearing.
Many female employees who have finished their maternity leave choose to join the "breast carrying army" while going to work because they know that "breast milk is more valuable than gold".
"37°C maternal love" is another name given to breastfeeding by working mothers.
The process of "carrying breast milk" is cumbersome and fixed: pumping and storing milk after work, and then carrying several heavy bottles of breast milk home after work to serve as the child's "ration" for the next day or two.
But where to pump?
A chance encounter in 2011 made Xiao Suhua pay attention to this special group.
Hiding in the toilet, squeezing in the warehouse, and even huddled under the desk to suck breasts... For several days in a row, Xiao Suhua couldn't help but feel a surge in her heart when she saw several female employees with evasive eyes and embarrassed expressions, as well as old people running back and forth, dripping with sweat. Sorrowful.
At that time, many units and public places did not have private spaces for pumping and storing milk. For a long time, these "breast-carrying mothers" suffered from physical and mental distress.
In 2007, when Li Ying gave birth to her first child, as a first-time mother, she traveled to every inconspicuous corner of the unit in order to find a quiet and secluded place to pump breast milk.
After a few days of "making do" in the dressing room and toilet, she decided: Forget it, wean the baby off breast milk.
It was this helpless choice that made her feel guilty for more than ten years. "Maybe because the child was weaned too early, the child's resistance was much weaker."
During his decades as a nurse at the Shanghai Maternal and Child Health Center, Fan Chongchun has seen too many frightened "breastfeeding mothers."
She could not forget the time when a female employee who had just returned to work hurried over and complained to her with her head hanging down: There was no lactation room in the unit, so she could only suck some milk in a hurry when there was no one in the office area. "My heart was tense. , I am not at all at ease and dare not relax for a moment.”
Due to the cramped environment, irregular breast-feeding, and unrelieved pressure, over time, the young mother suffered from problems such as a sudden drop in milk volume and milk stasis.
"Once you fail to express milk in time during lactation, you may not only face the risk of milk stasis, but sometimes you may also suffer from mastitis due to milk blockage. If it is more serious, it may even develop into a breast abscess." Fan Chongchun always tries his best to help everyone who comes. A mother who asks for help looks forward to practical actions from solving one problem to solving a whole class of problems.
Is there any way to make them feel at ease?
Can a cabin be set aside for free for breastfeeding mothers to use?
In June 2011, when the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions went to Catic Building for investigation, Xiao Suhua promptly reported the situation and volunteered.
Finding a venue and arranging equipment is the first step she has to take. Before that, there are still some "small accounts" that need to be settled.
Catic Tower is located in Jing'an District, Shanghai, where land is at a premium. Even a dozen years ago, if you wanted to rent a small room there, you would have to pay nearly 10,000 yuan in rent per month.
With such an expensive rent, can we still free up free space?
Xiao Suhua felt a little nervous.
During those days, she first found the property manager in the building, and then asked someone to contact the developer of the building, and told them word for word what she saw.
"With the cabin, the building will have more 'human touch'." That day, she made a "big calculation" for the people present, "This means that the investment and business environment will be better in the future." .
"They agreed immediately." This greatly moved Xiao Suhua.
In less than a month, a glass cabin with an area of about 30 square meters was vacated on the fourth floor of the building, and a sign was hung on the door - the birthplace of the Loving Mommy Cabin.
"Soon, mothers from nearby buildings came to use the cabins, as well as many foreign female workers." Xiao Suhua turned her face away, lowered her head, opened the photo album and looked through it carefully.
In one of the photos, a blond Russian girl was standing in front of the refrigerator in the cabin, holding a glass milk bottle in her hand, with a slight smile hanging on her face with the corners of her mouth raised.
The cabin located in the building has so far accompanied more than 100 working mothers through special stages of life, and Ye Qian has become one of them.
In 2013, the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions promoted the experience of Catic Tower in the city and launched the "Love Mommy Cabin" project.
So, the warm companionship lasted for more than ten years.
From 1 to 8000+
"It's already a 'Dojo in a snail shell', where else can we build such a hut?" Many times, such words are not excuses, but the actual office environment that makes some companies helpless.
"Are you going to give up like this?" After being rejected many times, the cadres of the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions were also surrounded by a sense of powerlessness.
But the difficulties of the employees prevented them from stopping——
"It's like fighting guerrilla." New mother Chen Yun's description is not an exaggeration.
A few years ago, her friend's workplace didn't have a dedicated place for breast pumping.
That day, several mothers spent a lot of effort and finally found a free conference room.
"We immediately slipped in and locked the door. We were too embarrassed to turn on the lights too brightly." Unexpectedly, before our friends and colleagues could sit down and warm up, there was a sudden "bang bang bang" knock on the door, and they felt " "Thump!" and his body couldn't stop shaking.
Chen Yun once felt that he had "breast-carrying shame", which was followed by tension, uneasiness and anxiety. "Such emotions were common among new mothers at that time."
After many rounds of visits, the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions not only understands the difficulties of various advancements within the city, but is also looking for very typical cases to use as a breakthrough.
Soon, the Anfu Road Branch, the smallest branch of Bank of China in Shanghai, came into everyone’s sight.
The total area of the employee rest area here is less than 15 square meters. After excluding the changing boxes, the usable area of the locker room is only 1.2 square meters.
How to use this 1.2 square meters to solve practical difficulties for "breastfeeding mothers"?
After many brainstormings, a plan that turned the impossible into possible became clear: "Let the cabin and the dressing room be shared, and arrange the wall into a telescopic operating platform."
For the builder, the significance of this cabin lies not only in its "shared" design, but its completion also means that "even if the space is small and cramped, don't be afraid of difficulties, we have a way to go."
It has been more than ten years since I left.
As of now, there are more than 8,000 huts and nursing rooms of various types in Shanghai, and they have been implemented in government agencies, enterprises, institutions, buildings, parks, etc.
During this period, the builder of the hut wrote down word for word what he had thought during the exploration. The Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions formulated and promptly revised the "Star Rating Methods for the Shanghai Trade Union Love Mommy Hut" and the "Shanghai Trade Union Love Mommy Hut". "Measures for the establishment, management and use of funds" to promote the quality and growth of the huts.
When building a hut, there are gradually rules to follow.
In the first half of 2022, the Shanghai Pudong New Area Federation of Trade Unions formulated a specification and compiled a standardized guiding technical document for the first time at the city level.
Explain in a standardized form where to build, how to build, and how to manage the loving mommy’s house.
Where does the confidence come from to produce standardized documents?
"Under the guidance of the Municipal Women's Working Committee, Pudong continues to promote the construction of huts. Since 2017, the construction of huts has been included in the Pudong New Area Government's 'Practical Things for the People' project for six consecutive years. Currently, there are 998 huts, basically realizing the realization of the goal of subdistricts and towns. , development zone enterprises and institutions, parks, buildings, and business districts have built everything they need, and have served more than 250,000 female employees in total." Dai Hong, vice chairman of the Pudong New Area Federation of Trade Unions, also revealed that Pudong is based on years of operation data of existing huts. , and produced a thermal analysis diagram. In this way, not only can the usage frequency of the cabin be simulated and measured, but various standards can also be supported by practical data.
Less than a year later, a specification of more than 7,000 words was released, covering all aspects of building a cabin: emergency buttons or intercoms should be installed in the nursing area, anti-collision strips should be installed on the corners of furniture, and different star-rated cabins should be equipped with anti-collision strips. Construction standards are different...
Looking through this booklet, Dai Hong felt, "It is not only a specification, but also an instruction manual for the construction of a cabin." In addition to standardized construction, digital intelligence empowerment is also the focus of the development of the cabin, with the help of big data and other With technology, many female workers in Shanghai check electronic maps through mini programs and easily find nearby cabins.
Today, among the more than 8,000 cabins in Shanghai, there are 2,109 cabins with four stars or above.
Electronic maps of more than 150 huts open to the public in public places such as streets, shopping malls, supermarkets, hospitals, etc. are carried on the official accounts of the municipal government's "Suishinban" and the Municipal Federation of Trade Unions' "Shengongshe" to facilitate women in need to find them nearby. Easy to use.
12 outstanding cabin management teams also won the honor of "Shanghai Workers Pioneer".
Explore endless possibilities
Nearly ten years have passed since Yuan Chaolin first used the Love Mommy Cabin.
At that time, she and her colleagues had to go to a hut in a warehouse to pump breast milk.
There is no access control to the cabin, only a simple curtain is installed at the door.
When the door curtain is opened, the entire small room is like a long and narrow corridor. There are three chairs inside. When there are more people, some people have to stand.
Because it is located in a warehouse, unsuspecting colleagues often come in unexpectedly to move things, which shocks everyone every time.
Since there is no sink, after pumping the milk, they have to carry tools through the office area to clean it.
Yuan Chaolin's colleague Yu Xiaoming gave birth to two children and witnessed the "upgrade" of the cabin along the way.
After giving birth to her second child, Yu Xiaoming once again came to the caring mommy cabin of Daikin Company where she worked. Yu Xiaoming quickly noticed the difference——
You have to swipe the access card to enter the renovated cabin. Inside the cabin, equipment such as flowing sinks, disinfection cabinets, refrigerators, etc. are arranged very neatly. Next to the soft sofa, there is a movable three-layer storage shelf. Looking up, , a separate slide rail curtain is installed above each seat...
Changes like this are happening all the time.
The cabin that was originally located on the 4th floor of Cadde Building was soon moved to the more spacious 5th floor.
One day, Ye Qian opened the refrigerator in her cabin and found rows of transparent glass milk storage bottles inside. Each bottle cap was equipped with a small golden lock, the size of a thumb.
Ye Qian quickly realized, "After putting the milk storage bag into the bottle, we can take away the key so it is not easy to mix up."
When she was preparing to pump breast milk, she saw a new music box placed on the table. "Listening to the soothing melody, closing my eyes and resting my mind, my mood improved."
The key to giving mothers a new experience every time is the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions’ continuous attempts to explore its infinite possibilities based on the hut.
Various functions have been expanded, including using the "Internet +" platform to invite maternal and infant experts from the city's top tertiary hospitals to form a "loving mommy hut maternal and child health instructor team", opening online and offline "mommy classes", and organizing cultural and artistic events. , popular science fitness and other activities, and carry out personalized services such as psychological counseling and rights protection consultation, transforming the hut from a "breast carrying station" into a "charging station" to create a good social atmosphere that cares for women's rights.
The worries I had had are dissipating little by little.
"How to bathe a newborn baby?" "How to prepare nutritious meals for pregnant women?" "What can daddy do to help?"... In the obstetrics and gynecology consultation hall of Shanghai Eighth People's Hospital, many new parents They are gathering around the door of the hut for consultation.
Because of the professional medical staff, this caring mommy hut located in the obstetrics and gynecology department has a unique function and has gradually turned into a platform for maternal and infant health services and science promotion.
Zhang Jingwen, director of the hospital's social work department, estimated that about two-thirds of the pregnant women who come here for treatment are migrant workers. For them, obscure parenting books are sometimes not applicable.
To this end, in the past few years, the medical staff in the hut have been trying to make short videos, recording hundreds of parenting knowledge points for pregnant women, and posting them online one by one.
In addition to patients who come to the hospital for treatment, the cabin is also open to internal female staff.
Once, in order to enlighten a female doctor who was depressed after giving birth, Pan Wenxin, chairman of the hospital union, took the doctor and seven or eight colleagues to sit in a circle in this small room and formed a "Balint Group". It is a method of training doctors to handle the doctor-patient relationship.
That afternoon, everyone present replayed the scenes that may induce negative postpartum emotions one by one. From a third-party perspective, they observed, felt, and stated the process of emotion generation, which helped the female doctor to open up her heart.
There is great love in the cabin
I don’t know when it started, but the hut turned from a single sucking place into a small home.
New mothers come here to exchange parenting experiences, find each other who can "comfort me" and "understand me", and have a solid and soft sense of belonging.
"Similar experiences have given us more empathy for each other." When Chen Yun smiled, his crescent eyes looked like crescent moons.
Memories from the past seemed to slowly emerge before her eyes: a female colleague's baby had a fever. Just when she was at a loss, the "experienced people" in the hut taught her their experience step by step...
The hut not only warms many women who are going through important stages of life, but also continues to pass on this love.
Yang Rong is a volunteer at the Loving Mommy's House in Shanghai No. 8 Hospital. One day, she accidentally saw a pregnant woman sobbing non-stop after walking out of the clinic.
It turned out that the expectant mother was already 32 years old and was about to become a senior mother.
The test results I just got were like a bolt from the blue.
The doctor said that the report showed that the placenta of the fetus in her belly was too large and the umbilical cord was wrapped around the neck.
"Don't be afraid." Yang Rong sat next to her and gently held her trembling hand. "We will stay with you and we will definitely give birth to a healthy baby."
In the busy day after day, this little thing was quickly forgotten by Yang Rong.
A few months later, the former expectant mother came to the hospital again with her newly born child in her arms. She found Yang Rong and thanked Yang Rong over and over again: "At that time, my mother was still out of town. It was because of your comfort that I survived." .”
A few days later, she made a special trip to distribute wedding eggs to volunteers and medical staff.
Soon after, she became a member of the volunteer service team.
There are also countless companies that "help" in the construction of huts.
In 2014, Zhongzhi Company established the Loving Mommy Hut Office, with full-time staff to assist in various promotions of the hut: distributing nameplates, posters, love gift bags to the newly built huts, and distributing diapers and air purifiers donated by caring enterprises. breast pumps, electric breast pumps and other maternal and infant supplies.
In practice, although some companies are willing to build cabins, they are worried about where to start and how to match them.
In 2015, by chance, Wang Cheng, who was the head of the labor union of a large home furnishing mall, discovered that due to many decoration and design problems encountered during the renovation process, the utilization rate of some cabins was not high. “Some companies have more than enough intentions. But the strength is not enough.”
"Maybe we can do something to benefit more female employees in companies." Wang Cheng thought to himself.
In order to accomplish this, he and home designer Lian Yuxia first participated in a training camp on the construction of loving mommy cabins organized by the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions. Then the two spent nearly half a year screening nearly a dozen people in IKEA's database. From thousands of products, we select furniture that is easy to assemble, have strong protective properties, and have soft colors, and match them one by one to design cabin model rooms that meet three-star, four-star, and five-star levels respectively, helping companies realize "the cabin is ready to be built and ready to use."
"There is a room in the building and you don't have to worry."
Recalling the scene on the day he returned to work, Chen Yun felt as if he was "reborn".
Because I have been holding back at home for a long time, I still can't adapt to the rhythm of going to work.
At that time, confusion and loneliness suddenly came to her heart:
"Am I falling behind?" "How to balance work and family?"... Her worries are somewhat universal.
These are the difficult questions that stand between working women and motherhood, and there seems to be no standard answer to them.
How to create a fertility-friendly employment environment and build a fertility-friendly society?
In recent years, relevant state departments and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions have introduced a number of supportive policies to provide guidance to help female workers resolve their childbirth worries.
"The first is 'can be found', the electronic map is visualized. The second is 'can be heard', which suggests extensive collection. The third is 'manageable', which means standardized position assessment." said Chen Lu, director of the Employee Service Center of the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions.
Based on the hut, the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions launched an initiative to the city calling for a joint push to create family-friendly workplaces.
As a former member of the "Breast Carrying Army", Ni Jia had previously applied to enter the hut to pump breast milk during working hours. "The impact of childbirth on work has become smaller."
Also feeling the same way is Li Ying, the mother of her second child.
After giving birth to her first baby and before giving birth to her second baby, she was successfully promoted to department supervisor.
Because of the small house, she felt "stable" and "not left behind" when she returned to work twice.
Similar to her, while giving birth to two babies, Yu Xiaoming's position has been gradually upgraded and now serves as the head of the company's legal department.
For Lin Xiaoyang, the cabin brings her an experience of "creating something from nothing".
A few years ago, she quit her job to prepare for the birth of her baby. In order to facilitate breastfeeding, she did not apply for another job until the baby was more than 6 months old.
After discovering that the new unit had a cabin, Lin Xiaoyang let Dabao eat breast milk for a few more months.
After becoming pregnant with her second child, she "had room in the building and was not worried" and immediately returned to work as soon as her maternity leave ended.
More and more new fathers are starting from their huts and following up on the family parenting process.
In Lujiazui, Shanghai, where there are many high-rise buildings, "platter-style" parent-child studios and daddy skills competitions have entered the enterprise.
During winter and summer vacations, children can go to work with their parents. After arriving at the company, they can take a special bus to the parent-child studio to learn chess and practice archery...
Looking at the group photo on the wall of the cabin, Li Zheng's eyes were soft and shining.
In the photo, there are mothers and children who have spent many years together here.
"The current photos are from the second batch, and they will soon be replaced by the third batch." As the vice president of the labor union of Daikin Company, she envisions that in the future, huts can become one of the standards for office building construction. "It may be a law." , a regulation would do the trick, and let the cabin go into every business.”
In the photo, the mother and the babies were smiling brightly.
Someone left a message, "The days of carrying breast milk are both salty and sweet." Others wrote that the cabin is her "safe haven", warm and safe.
Chen Dandan Pei Longxiang