There are only 2,600 rooms in Shanghai, which are most needed by mothers.

Written by Yang Xiaotong

It was a mother-and-baby room in an old shopping mall. The door frame was deformed, and the door had shrunk, leaving a wide gap that faced a mirror, reflecting everything inside the room.

Xiaonuan noticed it, but being in a hurry to pump milk, she could only go in. She locked the door, walked to the corner, pulled the curtain, and started pumping milk.

Suddenly, there came a series of rapid sounds of someone pressing the doorknob outside. Xiaonuan thought it was another mother who wanted to share the mother-and-baby room. She opened the door and saw an elderly male cleaner. She closed the door and stepped back into the room. The sound rang out again. When she opened the door again, it was still the same elderly man.

Later, when the pressing sound came again, Xiaonuan simply ignored it.

It wasn't until she finished pumping milk and pushed the door open to leave that she looked back and found that the elderly man was peeping into the mother-and-baby room through the gap. Xiaonuan felt a little scared. "Fortunately, I locked the door, and fortunately, the door lock was in good condition."

This wasn't the only unpleasant experience. There were many similar ones. Sometimes, the mother-and-baby room was occupied by non-breastfeeding mothers and babies for a long time. Sometimes, the mother-and-baby room didn't have proper partitions and was filled with the smell of smoke... After becoming a mother, 33-year-old Xiaonuan found that it was actually so difficult to find a safe and comfortable mother-and-baby room.

01. The Long Search

The first problem when looking for a mother-and-baby room is the scarcity in quantity.

A "White Paper on Mother-and-Baby Rooms in Chinese Cities" released by Yicai in March 2019 showed that there were only 2,643 mother-and-baby rooms in all cities in mainland China. Among the cities equipped with mother-and-baby rooms, only 7 cities had more than 100 mother-and-baby rooms. The average number of mother-and-baby rooms in second-tier and lower-level cities was less than 10. According to HUST Shushuo, the number of mother-and-baby rooms in Shanghai in 2023 just exceeded 2,600.

The insufficient provision of mother-and-baby rooms makes many mothers go through a long search when they need one.

In December last year, Tian Yiran from Shenyang became a new mother. In her impression, good shopping malls generally had good mother-and-baby rooms. However, during use, she found that "having" and "finding" were two different things.

At the beginning of this year, Tian Yiran accompanied her husband on a business trip in Beijing. Before going out, as a breastfeeding mother, she specifically searched on social media for a shopping mall with a mother-and-baby room in advance. But when she really needed to pump milk, she still didn't know where the mother-and-baby room was. Even after asking several staff members, she only got the answer "We don't have a mother-and-baby room here." It wasn't until she walked around the shopping mall several times that she finally found the mother-and-baby room.

In "This Life Is Also the First Time", Lu Yuanfang had to pump milk in the women's restroom because she couldn't find a mother-and-baby room.

There is always a problem of uneven distribution of mother-and-baby rooms in shopping malls. Not every floor has a mother-and-baby room, and not all shopping mall guides indicate the location of the mother-and-baby room. So every time, mothers have to walk around the shopping mall for a long time.

This also makes many mothers survey the terrain of their destination like Sherlock Holmes before going out. For example, Jane from Hangzhou, to ensure that she can find a mother-and-baby room immediately when she has a need to breastfeed, checks the existence and location of the mother-and-baby room on the official account of the destination every time before going out. If there is no information on the official account, the first thing Jane does after arriving at the destination is to ask the staff, "Is there a mother-and-baby room here?"

However, even if a mother-and-baby room is found, that small space may not necessarily bring comfort to mothers during use.

Almost every mother has had a bad experience using a mother-and-baby room because of its quality. The "2025 National Survey on Mother-and-Baby Rooms" jointly released by the Physician's News, the Zhejiang Women and Children Foundation, and the mother-and-baby brand Babycare showed that more than 60% of the respondents thought that the quality of mother-and-baby rooms needed improvement; in addition, compared with the insufficient quantity, incomplete facilities, unpleasant odors, and being occupied are also the three most common pain points for mothers.

Searching for mother-and-baby rooms on Xiaohongshu, you can see many mothers complaining about the facility problems in mother-and-baby rooms. Not to mention bottle warmers, diapers, and wet wipes, even the three "must-haves" - diaper changing tables, sinks, and nursing chairs - are difficult to be fully equipped. It's either "no hot water" or "no diaper changing table". What's even more absurd is that there are no sofas or chairs for mothers to sit on and breastfeed in the mother-and-baby room of a high-speed railway station in a provincial capital city.

A dirty and messy mother-and-baby room, provided by the respondent.

Mogu, a new mother from Jinan, told the "Post-90s Research Institute" that in the mother-and-baby rooms she has been to, those with hot water, a diaper changing table, or something like a "leather pad" similar to a diaper changing table are "already considered very good mother-and-baby rooms". She remembered that when she took her newly born baby to the Women and Children's Health Care Hospital for a child health check, she went to the mother-and-baby room in the hospital. "Although it was called a mother-and-baby room, it was actually just a small room with a chair." That day, there were many mothers with babies in the hospital. Mogu had to breastfeed face to face with other mothers. "It was quite embarrassing."

The hygiene condition of mother-and-baby rooms is also often worrying. Netizen @Live Well Today posted a post complaining that the mother-and-baby room at a certain high-speed railway station was "dirtier than the restroom", "the sofa for resting seemed not to have been replaced for many years", "there was urine on the floor of the nursing room, and the chairs were very dirty", "the curtain couldn't be pulled tightly, and the wall was extremely dirty"... Many mothers in the comment section expressed the same feeling. Some even encountered people smoking and eating in the mother-and-baby room.

Fortunately, the official saw this post and sent a private message to @Live Well Today, saying that they would immediately carry out rectification. Some netizens said, "They only rectify after it's posted online." But in the view of some mothers, "it's already good that they can rectify", after all, there are still many mother-and-baby rooms with a terrible hygiene condition.

02. Settling for Less

The inconvenience of mother-and-baby rooms is quietly restricting mothers' movements. According to the "Investigation Report on Breastfeeding Factors in China", more than 60% of mothers have reduced their outings because of the inconvenience of breastfeeding in public places.

Mogu is one of them. Before having a baby, her favorite thing was to go to the night market in the evening to feel the hustle and bustle of the city. She also arranged a trip every six months or a few months to places like Zhangjiajie, Jiuzhaigou, Xinjiang, and Guizhou to relax.

But after becoming a mother, Mogu's frequency of going out has significantly decreased. Especially in the first three months after giving birth, Mogu hardly went shopping outside because "it was really too troublesome". Every time she went to an unfamiliar place, Mogu would feel nervous and anxious, worrying about "where to breastfeed the baby if there is no mother-and-baby room", "where to change the diaper if the baby poops", "what to do if the baby gets sleepy and it's too noisy around"?

Still from "Thirty-Nine", sourced from the Internet

Due to the imperfect facilities of mother-and-baby rooms, almost every mother has to carry a lot of things when going out.

Every time Jane goes out, she has to carry a full mommy bag, which contains diapers, changing pads, wet wipes, diaper cream... And to breastfeed her baby, she also has to bring a baby bottle, milk powder, and a thermos flask to ensure that there is always warm water at 40 - 45 degrees Celsius to make milk powder. "Even going for a walk feels like moving house."

How to handle this huge mommy bag and a baby struggling because it just pooped at the same time is also a big problem. Almost every mother told the "Post-90s Research Institute" that they hoped fathers could participate in the process of changing diapers. But in fact, many mother-and-baby rooms that don't have a strict partition between the nursing area and the diaper changing area "completely" restrict men from entering. For this, Jane's solution is to bring her mother or mother-in-law with her every time she goes out.

Still from "This Life Is Also the First Time", sourced from the Internet

Not only Jane, it seems that mothers have solutions to all problems - if there is no mother-and-baby room, just stay at home; if fathers are not allowed in, just find someone else; if there are no chairs in the mother-and-baby room, they can sit on the toilet; if there is no place to pump milk in the company, they can go to the car, the restroom, the corridor, the meeting room. If all else fails, they can use a nursing cover at their workstation... They have come up with "must-have tools for pumping milk at the workstation" such as nursing covers, privacy curtains, and even single-person tents. There are also dense "guides for breastfeeding mothers going out" and "comprehensive evaluations of mother-and-baby rooms" being passed around on various social media platforms, showing a kind of empathy and mutual help among mothers.

But the price for this is giving up some rights and dignity. Jane remembered that the "mother-and-baby room" on the high-speed train was just a diaper changing table in the public restroom. Before taking the high-speed train, she bought a nursing cover, thinking it would cover well. But when breastfeeding, she found that she still exposed herself because of the reflection on the window glass. But she didn't care about the shame. She just leaned forward a little and pulled the nursing cover down. After all, making sure the baby wasn't hungry was a more important thing at that time.

Actually, the construction of mother-and-baby rooms has been gradually progressing in recent years.

Since the deputies to the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference proposed in 2016 that mother-and-baby rooms should become a standard configuration in public places, China has been continuously introducing relevant policies to promote the popularization of mother-and-baby rooms. In November 2021, the "Action Plan for Promoting Breastfeeding (2021 - 2025)" jointly issued by 15 departments including the National Health Commission proposed that by 2025, the configuration rate of mother-and-baby facilities in public places should reach more than 80%. In recent years, many cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou have also successively introduced policies to increase the number of public mother-and-baby rooms and explore the standardization of the construction and management of mother-and-baby rooms.

A loving mother-and-baby room in the park, sourced from IC photo

It is gratifying to note that the number of mother-and-baby rooms in shopping malls, airports, and high-speed railway stations has increased significantly in recent years. For example, Guangzhou has become the first city in the country to achieve full coverage of mother-and-baby rooms in key public places.

However, looking at a broader perspective, it can be found that there is still an imbalance in the construction of mother-and-baby rooms between regions, and the gap in resource allocation still exists.

Looking further, after solving the problem of "whether there is", the problem of "whether it is good" has gradually emerged. For example, does the design of the mother-and-baby room really meet the needs of mothers and babies? Who is responsible for the daily cleaning? Whom should they turn to when the facilities are damaged?

These problems also expose the gaps that have not been filled in the process of mother-and-baby room construction.

03. From "Existence" to "Excellence"

Fortunately, there are some pioneers who are trying to promote the transformation of mother-and-baby rooms from "existence" to "excellence".

Many cities have included mother-and-baby rooms in their livelihood projects. Shanghai, Shenzhen and other places have introduced a series of policies on the construction standards, facility configuration, management and maintenance of mother-and-baby rooms, and even plan the target of the provision rate and configuration rate of mother-and-baby rooms within a 15-minute living circle.

Some shopping malls are also actively responding to the demands for mother-and-baby rooms from all parties.

Tian Yiran remembered that she once went to a shopping mall. Just after parking her car in the underground garage, she heard the shopping mall broadcast saying "There is a mother-and-baby room at XX location on each floor of the shopping mall. We have baby strollers, baby carriers, and baby diapers. If you have any questions, you can go to XX location for consultation".