Breastfeeding and family-friendly policies: advocacy brief

Overview

This advocacy brief provides key messages on family-friendly policies in employment, including paid maternity leave, access to quality childcare, breastfeeding breaks and dedicated nursing spaces. These policies provide mothers and babies with the time they need to recover from birth, bond with their babies and breastfeed in the critical early weeks and months of life. These policies are particularly important for working mothers, for whom returning to paid or unpaid work is one of the greatest barriers to breastfeeding. The brief issues a call to action to advocate with governments to enact maternity leave policies that provide a minimum of 18 weeks paid leave, and preferably, six months or longer, as well as other family-friendly policies.