Thinking you can be present as Breastfeeding Mother & Politician!

This past week Giselle Hale, Redwood City City Council Member, and Julie Lind Rupp, Head San Mateo County Central Labor Council, published an opinion piece on making government more family friendly and in particular more friendly to nursing mothers (https://www.smdailyjournal.com/opinion/guest_perspectives/time-to-make-government-more-family-friendly/article_8c45159c-9164-11e9-b700-e7f3cdb679aa.html) by allowing mothers to nurse during official government meeting and allowing for extended maternity leave (Giselle Hale took a six month maternity leave while serving as a Planning Commissioner). Things that need to be considered are whether or not long or extended leaves are appropriate in volunteer and nominal stipend opportunities. In addition, the reality is whether we like it or not more and more research is showing that human beings are not really able to multi-task. Moreover, although serving in government in general is important, encouraging people to think that they can have it all is the ultimate con job.

I am a mother of two children and a career woman. I had the luxury of being able to work less than full time as my children grew up. I was either at work or with them. I did not mix the two areas of my life, at least not very much. Almost four years ago, I ran for City Council. I would like to think that if I had wanted to run and serve in a political capacity I would not have expected any more leave than someone like Prime Minister Jacinda Arden from New Zealand who took six weeks. Which in the case of Redwood City City Council is missing at most three meetings. I know that when I gave birth to my son and my daughter, although running small start up businesses, I took barely a couple of days off. Had I been in an elected government position, the higher likelihood is that unless a meeting fell within three days of the birth I would have been there.

Serving in government is not a requirement, in fact it is a privilege. If someone feels the need to run and is elected to serve, then serve they should. Today we have family planning that allows women to better plan for events that it may be best they do not do concurrently with having young children that are still breastfeeding. If they still want to serve, then that is a choice they should be able to make but they should not expect society to give them extended leaves and preferential treatment. If they cannot serve they should resign. They can always run again after whatever break period they require.

As regards breastfeeding on the job, Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, said over ten years ago:

"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves. The brain is very good at deluding itself."

"Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually not….You're not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly."

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

So in the case of the theoretically proposed breastfeeding mother serving as City Council member at the dais, she is either paying attention to her child or she is paying attention to the debate. She may even switch between subjects but she isn’t paying attention to both! That isn’t how the human brain works.

Now let’s take that a step further as the opinion piece does and say that that breastfeeding mother is going to breastfeed in the privacy of her own home AND serve as a full-time committed city council member or politician on a webcam.

The science still says otherwise. (https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/can-humans-actually-multitask.html) While you may argue that you can walk down a street and chew gum at the same time, the fact is that you aren’t using the same part of your brain to do both. However, try reading a book and holding a conversation at the same time and all of a sudden things don’t work. Either the mother is paying attention to her child OR she is paying attention to the meeting; she simply cannot do both at the same time. She might go back and forth quickly. You say that is enough; but when every word counts and the word she misses is the double negative; things can get pretty dicey, pretty fast.

In addition to the fact that a human brain can’t process two actions at once, all of us that have actually attended a City Council or other government meeting in person vs. watching one online know that the experiences are actually quite different. The environment at a live city council or any other government meeting is a 360 degree multi-sensorial experience, instead when you watch the same event online it is a limited two dimensional experience. It has only the limited angle of whatever camera is shown and whatever the audio recorder that is usually coming from only one input source. Forget about sensing the crowd rustling or holding signs; forget about smelling concern or fear (yes we humans do emit non verbal signs of stress and relaxation that other humans are able to pick up and interpret correctly); and forget about watching the very bored facial expressions of your sitting mayor as he is compelled to listen through his constituents public comments. I could go on and on.

Maybe council woman Hale believes in Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” book theories; but even Michelle Obama clearly denounced them:

"That %! Doesn't Work"

(https://www.npr.org/2018/12/03/672898216/michelle-obamas-take-on-lean-in-that-doesn-t-work) but this is really the subject for another post.

All the technology in the world can lead us to believe that we can transcend the limits of our humanity, even our own brain; but the fact is that by acknowledging scientific evidence only when it behooves us and discarding it when what we have learned from it doesn’t fit the narrative we would like; we end up with a system, not to mention, a president, that sense that science has become political and is simply a cudgel to use when we like the results.

Let’s stop deluding ourselves.

We can’t have our cake and eat it too. Utopia does not exist. We can't take extended leaves and claim we are serving our constituents. We can’t breastfeed, listen to a discussion and vote intelligently on sensitive issues all at the same time. Wonder Woman does not exist.