Would an employer be expected to allow expressing breaks for a mum feeding a 3yo?

[StealthPolarBear]

Completely out of curiosity

I guess I'm thinking of a baby who can bf in a sling whilst you are shopping but you cant do this in a shop with a 2 - 3 year old. There were lots of times and places where because we were in public I wouldnt feed ds or dd whereas I may well have done at home e.g if hurt or upset or just wanted a feed.

ah iswym
I think DS's last public feed was in a cafe on an MN meet up :o I also used to bf at the end of the supermarket shop etc.
He was very demanding - DD the exact opposite (when it comes to feeding, anyway)

I didnt bf so excuse my niavety if this wrong

But why should someone get extra breaks to express. I have a 5 year old and if I wanted to make a dental appt for him I would need to do this on my appointed break

Why is expressing any different? Its the needs of your child but not an emergency situation

You're right frazersmummy but I guess you could say the same for a younger child who was being bf so where would the cut off point be?

You could fight for an expressing break, win the case, then use it to sit in a room reading a mag, come out then take your normal break. Who would know?

I think you would be legally entitled to extra breaks for expressing regardless of age of BF child. Your employer may not be too happy about it but you could claim discrimination on basis of maternity issues.. I think it would be fine and the law would be on the side of the mother but there is probably no test case for this.

i think if it came to a tribunal they question would be does the 3 year old need the additional milk that is expressed. i would assume this is what the expressing is for, rather than to maintain supply. you're then into the realms of milk for comfort etc rather than for nutrition. would be an interesting case.

as it stands i would suggest no, an employer wouldn't be expected to provide the breaks for a mother of a 3 year old. up to the mother if she wants to express in the breaks she has anyway.

Expressing for a 3yo in work time would seem an excessive demand to me, simply because at that stage milk production wouldn't be likely to be endangered by a substantial gap between feeds/expressing. Non?

Not really relevant to the UK situation, but possibly interesting to know anyway. Here, in the Netherlands, women are legally allowed to spend up to 1/4 of work time expressing until their child is 9 months. After that it must be done in ones own time.

It's always seemed to me to be a totally arbitrary and very young cut off point. But, bizarrely, I did find that both my DC were happy to be left without EBM from about 9 months. I'm a SAHM, but I can imagine that if I worked more than one or two days a week I'd have found it very worrying to not 'be allowed' to express anymore at such a young age.

I think also a mother of a much younger child will need to express on a more regular basis than a mother with an established supply and older child so could do this in usual breaks. I always expressed in my own break times and wouldnt want to have fought for additional breaks as it would have been such a public thing and I know coworkers would have rolled their eyes even when dd was 5 months old as none had children.

That is interesting

I think in the UK though the guidance is that mothers are entitled to and should be encouraged to breastfeed for as long as they want so there can be no imposed cut off time for when they must stop expressing, whether to use the milk or to maintain supply.

But you dont need to express at this age to maintain a supply and a 3 year old can manage the whole day without breastmilk.

But nobody needs to express,really, you could argue that there could be other sources of nutrition for the child so you can't put an arbitrary age limit on it. Well, you could quite reasonably say 'up until 6 months you can have 2 breaks to express, until 12 months you can take one 20 minute break to express, and after that it's in your own time' but I don't think that would legally be acceptable here.

Yes, but I think there is a nutrional argument before (no idea of age) as the alternative being formula is not as a good as break milk nutrionally. I wouldnt need to give formula or cows milk as an alternative to breastmilk after a certain age. Trouble is it's so individual having a cut off age is very difficult.

Even putting time limit on it is difficult too unless as an earlier poster says it's 1/4 of work hours as one person could take 40 minutes to express someone else 10 minutes.

who wants to try it with their employer?

Stealthpolarbear said she would!

I also think that legally it would be granted. Technically younger babies can manage a whole day without breastmilk but that doesn't mean it is what's best for them. My ds2 was still feeding through the night and day at 14 months and I would have needed to express to keep up with milk needs if I was away from him during the day; so everyone will be different.