As a mom of three girls, Khallilah Watkins isn’t new to the process and preparation it takes to breastfeed a baby outside of the house. One time with her second daughter, she had to hunker down in a restaurant bathroom for a few minutes to pump. “That was my first experience pumping in a restaurant and inside of a smelly public bathroom because I was like, where else am I going to go?” said Watkins, a social media manager at the Oliver Agency. “People are going to look at me if I’m pumping right here at the table.” Khallilah Watkins holds daughter Harlem, 5 months, in their Chicago home on Dec. 18, 2024. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune) Like Watkins, many new moms and moms with a younger baby hold back from resuming their social lives after giving birth, especially in a world that struggles to accommodate them. Eating out, for instance, can be that much-needed semblance of normal during an isolating postpartum period, but sitting down for a meal around strangers with a hungry baby who needs to be breastfed or settled in for a bottle can make the whole experience stressful and bogged down by social stigmas. “We don’t eat at the table with blankets over our heads, so why am I expected to shy away or be afraid to give my daughter what she needs?” said Watkins, who alternates between feeding Harlem breast milk, which she pumps for bottles, and infant formula.. “I’ve even gone out to the car because I’m embarrassed and I don’t want anybody to see me … but why am I afraid? Why am I apologizing?” To help alleviate these feelings of isolation and discomfort, Chicago-based Lactation Network, an organization that offers breastfeeding and lactation support to new parents, recently launched a new initiative aptly named Room at the Table. “When we were thinking about the places that parents need to be able to connect, to find community outside of the home, outside of work, restaurants as that third place really stood out as an opportunity for us to educate and create more warmth and be more hospitable to parents,” said Ashley Farrow, chief marketing officer at the Lactation Network. For Room at the Table to truly work as intended, the restaurants on their online map needed to be better equipped to cater to and understand the needs of customers who might be coming by because of their promise to be breastfeeding-friendly. So, Farrow said her team trained front-of-house staff at participating businesses to ensure the needs could be met. “So much of it is just not understanding or not really having the empathy of knowing that this person is coming out of their house with a child that is 2 months old, that means they probably spent an hour thinking through all the things that they needed to bring — timing it out between naps, between feedings,” Farrow explained. “There’s so much that goes into that, even though it just looks like to you a person coming out to eat with their kid, but there’s so much more behind it.” The intention is to build the initiative into a robust list of restaurants that will operate as breastfeeding-friendly spaces in perpetuity. If it fits with their aesthetic, the Lactation Network will send restaurants a yellow sticker that reads “Breastfeeding Friendly Space” to put in their windows to show that they are supportive establishments. They’ve enlisted 70 restaurants across the country and one in Lisbon, Portugal. So far in the Chicago area, Room at the Table has partnered with about 25 restaurants, ranging from finer dining establishments such as Stephanie Izard’s Girl and the Goat and Beverly Kim’s Anelya, to market-driven spots such as Lula Cafe and The Publican, as well as fast-casual eateries such as The Fat Shallot and Blackberry Market. “We wanted to make it as low lift as possible, it shouldn’t feel like a huge burden to be able to give just a little extra attention to parents,” Farrow said. Small, yet significant gestures were a key part of training staff at restaurants — things like a mug of hot water to warm a bottle, perhaps an outlet to plug in or charge a pump, making sure a breastfeeding or pumping mom’s water is always full, giving the back-of-the-house a little nudge to speed up the food for a particular table. Servers were told about breastmilk storage too. For instance, pumped breastmilk must be refrigerated after 4-6 hours — offering ice for parents to keep the milk cold while they’re out will go a long way, Farrow added. Participating restaurants were also educated on postpartum depression and anxiety, and the factors that lead to so many women with newborns or small babies falling into isolation. That deeper understanding can help staff be more mindful in offering certain guests a quieter, more secluded space in the restaurant and verbally reminding them that they’re welcome to feed or pump right where they are, Farrow added. Kevin Grace, director of operations for all four Blackberry Market locations in Glen Ellyn, La Grange, Oak Brook and Naperville, said they’ve always taken pride in embracing children and families, but a partnership with the Lactation Network provided staff with even more insight to further their commitment to being inclusive. Grace regularly works with front-of-house staff to take orders and serve customers, who are often moms with small children. Kevin Grace leads the front-of-house staff at Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn, Dec 27, 2024. (James C. Svehla/for the Chicago Tribune)Kevin Grace greets restaurant patrons at Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn on Dec 27, 2024. (James C. Svehla/for the Chicago Tribune)Grace Cairo with her daughter Margot, 11 months and Everleigh, 5, enjoy Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn, Dec 27, 2024. (James C. Svehla/for the Chicago Tribune)Kevin Grace works with customers at Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn, Dec 27, 2024. (James C. Svehla/for the Chicago Tribune)Breastfeeding Friendly Space sticker is posted at the entrance of Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn, Dec 27, 2024. (James C. Svehla/for the Chicago Tribune)Show Caption1 of 5Kevin Grace leads the front-of-house staff at Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn, Dec 27, 2024. (James C. Svehla/for the Chicago Tribune)Expand “I would say, a mom who is in need of warm water to warm a bottle, probably happens in our spaces two to four times a week, and it’s very normal. I’ve watched hourly employees with no direction, accommodate that person easily,” Grace said. “I think the challenging part for us is that it’s very difficult in our spaces to create even a corner of privacy.” Grace said since the Room at the Table stickers went up, he’s had conversations with management about taking the promise to be “breastfeeding-friendly” even further by carving out solutions for women who prefer to nurse more privately. “There’s more work to be done,” he said. “As we start to experience (more families coming in), I think more questions will surface.” For Farrow, it was the small, unanswered questions that led to the initial spark of the idea for Room at the Table. “One thing that kept coming up, whether they’re on maternity leave or just in that postpartum period, was well, where can we go that is friendly? Where are people going to be understanding? Where are people going to be nice to me?” Farrow said. Those early conversations, she noted, happened around the same time an Indianapolis vegan restaurant went viral after it announced that it would no longer welcome breastfeeding parents or children under 5. “It really pissed us off,” Farrow said. “The world is not as accepting of mothers as it needs to be. There’s so little understanding of the mental state of parents in that postpartum period and how fragile it can be … we were like, ‘What can we do to address this?’” Statistics show a growing number of women are ashamed to breastfeed in public, often due to fear of judgment from others. And according to the Lactation Network, 60% of parents don’t meet their breastfeeding goals, in part because of insufficient support in public or workplace settings. Beverly Kim, chef and co-owner of Chicago restaurants Anelya and Parachute HiFi who breastfed her three children while holding restaurant jobs, said the challenges of maintaining a healthy nursing routine while working in a high-stress environment take its toll. Kim said there were many times throughout her career when she needed to pump while on the line in restaurant kitchens. She’d often have to use the one office space available, and would always fret over someone barging in. She remembered one instance, on a particularly chaotic night, where she felt uncomfortable asking if she could step away to pump. Kim said she ended up getting mastitis, an infection typically due to a clogged milk duct. Because of her own experiences, Kim co-founded The Abundance Setting with her husband, Johnny Clark, with whom she owns the two restaurants, to create a more hospitable back-of-house environment for women and mothers in the culinary industry. She was also instrumental in helping the Lactation Network build out a curriculum with information to help restaurants get behind the initiative. “We really would like to see more women and working moms stay engaged and advance and thrive in this industry, considering there is a huge drop-off, especially in the kitchen side and a lot of it is due to a lot of these issues that (The Lactation Network) is talking about,” Kim said. “I’ve experienced both being an employee in (the kitchen) during my first child and having children and being an employer having a restaurant so I really understand how isolating it is.” Kim said many restaurants tend to think they don’t have the perfect space to accommodate breastfeeding moms or parents with younger children and write this off as a reason not to do more. “It’s not about having the perfect anything, it’s about being hospitable and flexible and making it work regardless,” Kim said. “We’ve never had an issue with anyone breastfeeding in our restaurants, but I think it was important to put a stamp on it.” Kim noted that it was through the Lactation Network that she learned about the legalities of breastfeeding. Though there is no national law regarding breastfeeding in public, laws in all 50 states protect moms who breastfeed in any public or private place in the country. The sad reality, Farrow said, is that even with the laws on their side, many moms are still being shamed when breastfeeding in public. Anna Sherman Geller, a mom of two girls, one 3 years old and another 3 months old, said nursing in public got easier for her with practice. But the “devil’s in the details,” she said. “Especially with the clothes and where you are sitting at the restaurant — if you can get a booth or even a table that’s more in the corner, that makes such a difference,” Geller said. “Because do I care if someone accidentally were to see my boob? Honestly, not really, but you almost want it to be a total accident. If I’m in the corner and someone happens to see it, that’s fine, that’s their problem.” Geller said for families with multiple children, an initiative such as Room at the Table has several plus points. “An overall list of breastfeeding-friendly restaurants tells me that those are family-friendly places in general, not just for Abby (the 3-month-old), but for my older daughter, too,” Geller said, noting even something as simple as a restaurant having a kids menu puts her at ease. “Or when they ask ‘do you need a high chair?’ Just knowing that a restaurant is comfortable with or trained on (having children in the space) makes it so much easier to enjoy yourself.” Farrow and others at The Lactation Network who launched Room at the Table have asked partner restaurants to enforce a zero-tolerance policy if they hear negative comments or complaints from other patrons regarding parents who are breastfeeding. Watkins, who works from the office twice a week, is used to pumping at work, with several private — and clean — rooms on every floor. Pumping in public will always be trickier, she said, unless, now, there’s a yellow sticker on the front door somewhere. “My husband and I love going out to restaurants, obviously we’re even more likely to patronize restaurants where people are not going to stare, or even if they are, I don’t have to be uncomfortable because I’m welcome here,” Watkins said. “Who wants to pump in the car or feed in the bathroom? We don’t eat in the bathroom, why should our babies? It feels good to know that there are advocates who recognize that it’s time for things to change.” [email protected]