Shared parental le­­­ave is a policy that was introduced in the UK in 2014 with the aim of giving parents more choice and flexibility in how they care for their child in the first year. However, it means that the mother would have to share part of her maternity leave with her partner. This would reduce the time a mother can spend on maternity leave. While the shared parental leave policy is great in encouraging fathers to take a more active role in the early days of the child’s life and enabling mothers to return early to the labour market, it presents a unique challenge to mothers who choose to breastfeed.

Barriers in the workplace are some of the key challenges to breastfeeding mothers who choose to return to work early after childbirth. Returning to work often means mothers must constrain their breastfeeding, which sometimes results to mothers ceasing breastfeeding.

The lack of a legal framework on what employers are expected to do to support breastfeeding mothers makes shared parental leave unattractive to parents who desire to exclusively breastfeed for six months and to continue according to the WHO breastfeeding recommendations. While there is ACAS guidance and the Health and Safety Policy on what employers should be doing to support breastfeeding mothers returning to work, employers are not obliged to follow it and there are no consequences where they do not follow the guidance. Furthermore, flexible working remains a request not a right and does not go far enough to protect breastfeeding mothers in the workplace. 

Shared parental leave policy has been criticised as not fit for purpose for reasons such as financial constraints, the complexity of the policy, societal perception, childcare responsibilities, lack of workplace support and breastfeeding. While the recent evaluation report recognised that there are challenges with the shared parental leave policy, it failed to identify breastfeeding as a challenge. The study that informed the report did not consider breastfeeding as a factor to evaluate its impact on the policy. It is extraordinary that a policy that is meant to provide parents with flexibility on how they care for their child, do not consider breastfeeding as a key factor. 

A study with mothers that were breastfeeding and took shared parental leave demonstrated that shared parental leave only worked well where the workplace was supportive and made provision for the mother. 

It is important that mothers are supported in how they decide to feed their babies. Breastfeeding need to be part of the family friendly rights in the UK. This would ensure that breastfeeding is factored into policies that concerns nursing mothers such as maternity leave and shared parental leave. 

Dr Ernestine Gheyoh Ndzi is the Associate Dean for Law and Police Studies at York St John University. Her research interest lies in Company Law and Employment Law. Ernestine has in the past four years been researching on shared parental leave and breastfeeding. Ernestine is a member of the Board of Trustees for The Breastfeeding Network. She is the producer of the breastfeeding documentary titled ‘Breastfeeding: Not on the Agenda. She is running a 9-webinar series exploring the benefits and challenges of breastfeeding. She is also leading on the campaign for change to support breastfeeding in the UK.