Hi I'm Heather Friedmann, Co-Founder of LATCH. I want to take a minute to introduce you to my family and to tell you a bit of a story about how LATCH came to be and why what we're doing is so important.
First, a bit about me. I'm blessed to be a mother of two kids, Gabriella, 4, and Noah, 2. I'm expecting twins in August 2014. Together with my husband, Arturo, we are raising our kids in the Boston area and are proud to call Massachusetts our home.
Arturo's originally from Peru, and so we were lucky enough to get married in Peru in 2008. Arturo got a job offer transfer to work in the Middle East around that same time, so despite just being married, we spent a few years apart with me keeping my job in the United States and he working from Doha, Qatar. I visited him in Qatar in December 2008, and shortly after our September 2009 get-together trip to Santorini, I found out we were expecting. We agreed that we would have the baby in the United States and then we would travel back to the Middle East together as a family so that Arturo could keep working at his job in the Middle East while I took a leave of absence from my job in Boston.
Gabriella was born in June 2010 and in early August, we set off as a family to Dubai, UAE. I was not working while in the Middle East, so I stayed home with Gabriella during the day while Arturo went to work. He came home every day for lunch, so we'd get to eat all our meals together as a family. Our apartment was close enough to walk to a mall with a grocery store, and so we'd shop and pick up food for the day as part of our routine. I was breastfeeding Gabriella exclusively at the time, since she was just a few months old. I'm a modest person and wouldn't feel comfortable ever breastfeeding in public, regardless of whether or not I was in another country. In the Middle East, you would perhaps guess breastfeeding in public would be an even bigger issue, as the culture is generally considered to be more restricted than that of the US in terms of what would be considered acceptable public behavior. And perhaps that is the case, but luckily, there was a solution already in place.
I felt totally at ease knowing that at the mall there were these lovely nursing lounges for moms that were breastfeeding. Built into the mall were these first-class facilities for mothers with changing tables for changing diapers and a few small rooms with a baby theme and a comfortable chair for breastfeeding with a privacy door that you could shut while you were nursing. There were a few of them in the mall, scattered around on each level and in different wings, similar in terms of restroom availability and placement. I thought it was totally amazing, but also, I felt like it was the norm. I wondered if as a new mom, I had just not noticed these places in the United States. The idea of the nursing room made perfect sense: it was well-utilized, it was serving a need, and everyone was benefiting without needing to be seen. Little did I know, this was far from the norm in the United States.
When we returned to the United States on a permanent basis in December 2010, I returned to work and therefore needed to pump at work so that I could have enough milk for Gabriella. I had chosen a pump at Babies R Us and it came with a carrying bag that I could use to transport my pump back and forth from work to home. I was given access by my employer to a tiny room upstairs in our building to pump with an assigned time that I could use the room during the day. I couldn't help but be disappointed with the set-up compared to the Dubai standards I had become accustomed to. Old furniture, bad lighting, a shabby rug. But I kept up with the pumping and the breastfeeding until Gabriella was about 17 months old and we found out we were expecting again, with our son, Noah. My milk supply started to drop off and Gabriella weaned herself. I was happy to have a few months off from using the pump.
With Noah, I had a shortened maternity leave so before I knew it, I was right back in the same situation at work with the same pump and the same pump room. I was even more dissatisfied the second time around with the process and how unglamorous it all was. I knew it was best for my child, but there was no type of outside incentive from society to support you like I had felt there had been in Dubai.
I recently watched this video on the internet of the charity:water campaign and how it got started. If you don't know already, charity:water is a great organization that is doing so much to improve access to safe, clean drinking water via wells for areas around the globe where people would previously take water from puddles or muddy ravines or walk for days to get water from a river miles and miles away. Part of charity:water's advertising campaign to raise funds was to show the people in other parts of the world without access to drinking water. They then re-enacted the idea in the United States by showing a white, upper class family in New York City taking water from the Central Park pond and carrying it home to pour the murky water into glass cups for the kids at the kitchen table to consume with their meals. The point of the campaign was obviously that it shouldn't be acceptable for some people to travel for days to get murky water when other people have access to clean drinking water 24/7 from a tap a few feet away. The campaign was effective and it netted charity:water millions to help the organization build a number of wells and further its mission.
But it got me thinking over the course of the next few weeks about my own life and what I was carrying to and from work with the breast pump. I'm not equating my situation to what people in other parts of the world have to suffer from in terms of access to drinking water, but I did realize, perhaps for the first time, how the United States didn't have what Dubai seemed to have right when it came to facilitating breastfeeding for moms and their kids. The problem in the US wasn't with breastfeeding itself, but with the process, especially when you're outside of your home or at work or using a pump, which is the case for millions of American moms every single day. So I started to think of how to improve on the process and how to make it easier for moms in the United States to breastfeed their kids.
I think everyone has heard about how breastfeeding is so important for the child, but also for the mom in terms of health benefits and nutrition. And the truth is, Americans are breastfeeding; moms that choose to breastfeed are at an all-time high. According to the CDC's most recent breastfeeding report card, breastfeeding rates are at their highest levels ever. More than 76 percent of mothers start out breastfeeding in 2013, an increase from less than 25 percent in 1971; and 47.2 percent of mothers are still breastfeeding at six months of age.
All of this is being done despite the fact that many moms are now choosing to return to the workforce after their maternity leave, be it for personal career growth or for financial reasons or otherwise. The global breast pump market is forecast to reach 5.63 million units by the year 2015 and 7.3 million units by 2018, according to Global Industry Analysts, Inc. The firm projects that growth will be driven both by an increasing number of young mothers in the workforce and the desire to breastfeed babies for a longer time.
And yet when I went to Babies R Us, there are a limited amount of breast pump options to purchase, and very few bag options. This was a surprise to me because there are literally hundreds of diaper bag options out there on the market and there are quite possibly tens of thousands of handbag options available for women for carrying their everyday essentials around to and from work. Usually moms wouldn't need to carry a diaper bag with them to and from work, but if they did, there were plenty of options available that would fit their needs and their style. Why were there only two black bag options available in the store for the pump that every nursing mom would need to carry to and from work?
I thought at the very least, this was something I could work to improve. Along with my husband, we crafted a prototype and got started. We put a lot of thought into what the bag design should look like, and how we could make it better suited to its purpose. I knew from using the original pump bag two times that the straps got dirty and showed dirt easily, and that the pump itself was heavy so we couldn't make the bag much heavier, even if it was to improve design purpose and use.
We're working on our second prototype and plan to be able to enter production with a manufacturer.
We want to make breastfeeding fashionable.
We want to make breastfeeding fashionable.
And so we're here to ask for your support. We want to be the company that helps moms continue to breastfeed by making it a little bit of a nicer process.
We're asking you to contribute to the cause.
It's 2014 and we've come a long way, but there's so far to go and so much to do, even in terms of catching up with what's already the norm. And so we're going to start with the bags. Make carrying a pump easier, better, nicer. We think this is a great first step, a necessary step, but also, not the final step. We're going to keep pushing, keep talking to people, keep searching for solutions on how to improve the breastfeeding process, specifically for nursing moms returning to work. I know how hard it is because I've been there. And maybe you've been there, too, or your friend has been there, or your wife has been there, or maybe you'll be there in a month or a few years, or you want it to be easier for the next person so that they don't have to go through what you did.
That's what we're about and that's what we're trying to do. Please join us in our campaign. We're hoping that our bags inspire, and that we're a meaningful part of supporting women in their role as mothers, as breadwinners, and as everyday superheroes.
Sign up here to get notification as to when the bag will be available for purchase and email us here with comments, suggestions, and advice - we will do our very best to respond personally. Thanks in advance for your support, and thanks for being here.
