Family Friendly Conferences

I gave birth to three little boys while in graduate school, and a fourth as a newly minted researcher. This means that I spent seven years in my early academic career pregnant or nursing. During that time i also attended a lot of conferences, traveling with, at a minimum the children who were dependent on me physically. My oldest, for example, flew one hundred thousand miles in his first year of life. As a result, I can tell many stories about chasing down breast pump parts by pantomime in foreign countries and messy airplane diaper explosions.

Although my colleagues were always supportive of me when traveling, attending a conference on my own with a child was very hard. There are a number of clever tricks a parent can use to make it easier, but somehow i learned most of these too late for them to be useful for me. As a community, we can save others this trouble by designing family friendly conferences. What follows is a list of ideas for supporting parents at conferences, particularly when the parent does not have a supporting spouse traveling with them. The list includes ways to make children feel welcome, support childcare, and minimize the amount of travel necessary.