Beautiful perspectives about how to raise awareness

Over the last year I have seen individuals within the CNBC community make huge strides in terms of find their voices. We have become more confident and more willing to share our stories within the community and also in the “wider world”. Now that we have found our voices we want to use them to raise awareness, change attitudes and make a very child-centric world slightly more tolerable. All of which is great. However, I think we need to be careful. Sometimes, even though we have the best of intentions, there is a risk that our endeavours to raise awareness may cause potential problems. In fact, it may well alienate the very people we were hoping to influence in a positive way.

Not sure what I am talking about? Let me give you an example:

In March 2018 one of the leading supermarkets in the UK announced that it was going to have a “Mother’s Only” checkout as part of their Mother’s Day celebrations. Like many people my initial reaction was WTF (excuse my language). Understandably this cause upset, frustration and even anger within the CNBC community. Many people felt that it rubbed salt into wounds already raw by the increasing in motherhood themed social media posts and emails landing unannounced in their email inboxes. However, my initial outrage soon turned to bemusement: how were they going to “monitor” this?

Were only women with children under voting age allowed?

Were mothers expected to carry their passports and the child’s birth certificate to prove the relationship?

What happened if mothers nipped in to do the shopping whilst the child(ren) were being looked after by someone else?

If a woman joined the queue and was asked to prove that they were a mother, what would happen if they couldn’t? Would they be dragged by the hair to the back of one of the longer queues made up of men and other non-mothers?

Eventually I decided that it was a ludicrous, badly thought out and misguided gimmick. I was going ignore it this year and then work out how to approach the supermarket to raise awareness in the hope of preventing such insensitivity happening again next year.

I then became aware that some members of the CNBC community had started threads on the supermarket’s Facebook business page in an attempt to raise awareness. I kept an eye on a few of these posts and noticed two reactions.

There were posts that were only commented on by people from within the community. Comments that were either supporting each other through their emotional pain or were adding their voice to the inappropriateness of the supermarket’s actions.

Then there were posts were parents did comment. Mothers complained that it was only one day: why shouldn’t they have a checkout solely for them. Fathers commented saying leave the mothers alone: let them enjoy the day without being made to feel guilty. Most of these comments were aggressive in nature and not sympathetic to the idea that Mother’s Day can be upsetting enough without the added “insult” of Mother’s Only checkouts.

There were very few parents writing anything supportive of the women expressing their pain. I hope that this took place on posts that I didn’t see. However, you only have to look at articles about being childless that receive a deluge of aggressive comments about overpopulation, thousands of children needing adoption and how parents wish they had never had their children to suspect that parents who are empathetic to the CNBC community on-line tend to be in the minority. Or at the very least are reluctant to get involved in something that could turn into on-line bullying.

As for the supermarket, they remained silent, even though some of the comments took on a bullying nature.

Whilst the intentions were good, to raise awareness, unfortunately the outcome wasn’t so great. The supermarket didn’t change their policy and did nothing to engage with the customers that they had upset. The parents who commented on the posts probably feel that their misguided belief that all women who are childless are bitter, twisted and hate mothers, children or both have all been confirmed. It’s harder to judge the reaction from people who didn’t become involved in the discussion: however, using the comments of those that did as a guideline, I imagine that the majority would have responded negatively to the original post.

Surviving Mother’s Day is a huge struggle made worse that the world can’t organise a “piss up in a brewery” and decide on ONE DAY. I completely agree that attitudes need to change making it easier for people who are still struggling with their childlessness whilst living in a mother-worshiping, child-centric world which is made harder during the Mother’s Day “season”. However, we need to be so careful about HOW we go about changing those attitudes. If we are seen to be “attacking” mothers or implying that mothers shouldn’t be acknowledge one day a year (even though in our global social media reality it’s three or four days a year) we won’t change attitudes for the better. Instead we run the risk of alienating people and we can’t afford to do that.

We are in a minority and we are going to need “outside” help if we are to make significant changes to attitudes in the rest of the world. In other words, we need parents to help us. Over the past couple of decades there have been huge strides made in changing attitudes about mental health issues. Most of those changes have come about because people on the “side lines” have been working hard on behalf of the people suffering directly. Professionals working in that sector of health have played their part, so have the media and lawmakers, together with the family and friends of actual patients. We need to follow this example and nurture relationships with empathetic parents who are willing to help up raise awareness. Otherwise the only awareness we will be raising is within our communities and we’re “preaching to the converted” there!

The culmination of all these thoughts is the creation of the Infertility and Childlessness Advocacy Network. I’m not going to share with you any details here because this blog is already longer than I had intended. Instead I am going to ask you to follow the link and visit the new website.

As usually I’ve needed to bounce ideas around with other people about “The Infertility and Childlessness Advocacy Network.”  Brandi Lytle, of Not So Mommy, and Sue Johnston, The Infertility Advocate, have been unstinting in their support and brilliant with their creative input. Thank you both so much for helping me hone my vision.

In CANBACE friendship!

If anything I have written resonates I’d love to hear from you in the comments. I appreciate that this can be a difficult subject to speak openly about so if you don’t want me to publish your comment on the website please let me know and I will keep your words private.