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SALT LAKE CITY — On the heels of a nationwide nurse-in, Big Bird is in big trouble with some mothers for not publicly supporting breastfeeding.
The nurse-in that took breastfeeding into Target stores across the country sparked further ideas for normalizing nursing: a petition to Sesame Workshop, the company responsible for producing Sesame Street, to incorporate nursing into the popular children's show.
Lani Michelle, a mother of one from Boston, was unable to attend a Target nurse-in, but nevertheless wanted to support the burgeoning public nursing movement. So she wrote a blog post in support of the movement and to speak out against what she saw as discrimination toward nursing mothers.
"I had seen breastfeeding on Sesame Street before, but it disappeared," she said. "I was thinking of that, and the nurse-in and all the moms who have been harassed recently. The blog post went viral and I was contacted by a couple of other moms. We decided to do something about it."
One of those moms was Michelle Hickman, who organized a nationwide Target nurse-in protest after allegedly being harassed for breastfeeding in a Target store in Texas. Hickman, Michelle and another mom, Jessica Williams, started an online petition and a group to drum up support.
The group, Bring Breastfeeding Back, quickly grew to about 20 members who helped organize the campaign. Within three weeks, the petition had more than 30,000 signatures.
Sesame Workshop did not return calls requesting comment, but producers have said in the past the show does not have an anti-nursing agenda.
"There has never been any edict to remove breast-feeding from the show," Sherrie Westin, executive vice president of the company, told TIME. "We have included it and absolutely would include it again if it were a natural part of the storyline."
It seems that it was once a natural part of the storyline. Segments of the show from the 1980s show babies on the Street being nursed by mothers who explained, "Lots of mothers feed their babies this way."
Increasingly, though, bottle-feeding has been the way to go on Sesame Street.
"All we're saying is there is no reason not to have both," Michelle said. "We're not asking them to exclude bottle feeding or only show breastfeeding; we're saying both should be shown equally."
Michelle said the group hopes to normalize breastfeeding, not marginalize mothers who bottle-feed.
"Every woman has the right to choose how they feed their babies," she said. "And everyone should respect the other person's choice. If I want to breastfeed my child, I should be able to breastfeed my child in public without ridicule, and if a woman wants to bottle-feed her child, she should be able to do the same without being looked down upon like she's doing something wrong. It would be hypocritical for me to think any other way."
"If I'm asking for my rights to be respected, of course I'm going to respect someone else's."
She said most of the resistance the group has seen has been from those who say parents, rather than Sesame Street, should be responsible for teaching their children about nursing.
"Whether or not they should be teaching our children, our children do learn from it," she said. "Sesame Street has done a great job of portraying things in an age appropriate way in the past and we trust that they can do it again, like they've done it before."
Producers of the show recognize the power Elmo and friends have in shaping children's minds, and have in the past incorporated teaching elements not found throughout the show's history. Most recently, the show began to incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — STEM — education into its curriculum.
"Helping raise a generation of children that is excited about science, technology, engineering and mathematics is a critical part of our mission," according to a blog post on the Sesame Workshop website. "It's never too early to encourage kids to be excited about science and math."
The addition of STEM education to the Sesame Street curriculum came as government and private organizations began working toward a goal of recruiting and retaining 100,000 new STEM teachers over a period of a decade in an effort to remain competitive in an increasingly globalized world.
It is a world that Sesame Street has the power to change, according to Michelle.
"It's really hard to change people's minds as adults, which is why we need to start teaching children this is normal as early as possible," she said. "Sesame Street has a unique opportunity to take a lead in social change."
