You Shouldn’t have to Change Your Baby’s Diaper on the Bathroom Floor, Ever
We’ve all been there. You walk into the bathroom at a store or a restaurant to change your baby’s diaper and there’s no changing table. You quickly check the stalls, hoping maybe they’ve tucked the changing table away in one, but nope. Nothing. So you start eyeing the counter space, trying to figure out how you can strategically place your changing pad over the sink. Finally, out of desperation, you put the changing pad, or a blanket, or maybe even your own jacket on the disgusting, germy floor, and lay your baby down, silently wondering if it’d be dangerous to coat your infant’s entire body in hand sanitizer.
That’s exactly what happened to one dad, Chris Mau, when he went to change his 8-month-old daughter’s diaper — and at a McDonald’s Play Place, no less. The dad took his daughter to the men’s room for a fresh diaper while his fiancee played with their other two kids. But, to his surprise, there wasn’t space to change his baby, just an open square of dirty tile floor covered in random scraps of old toilet paper.
Mau was understandably annoyed and shared photos of the gross diaper-changing spot on Facebook, where he wrote:
“I’m getting pretty sick of having to change my daughter on a disgusting floor because the only changing table in the place is located in the women’s bathroom. It’s crazy to imagine, I know, but there are guys who take care of their kids, too. If it’s a public place with public restrooms…then how about making sure us fathers can change our children’s diapers on a goddamn changing table like mothers can? Am I asking too much?”
Mau isn’t the first frustrated parent to take to the Internet to voice complaints about the lack of changing tables in bathrooms, and he certainly isn’t the only dad. Earlier this year, teacher and writer Clint Smith went viral on Twitter when he wrote that the lack of changing tables in men’s bathrooms is not just inconvenient, but also “perpetuates the notion that the burden of childcare should singularly be on the woman.”
And while men’s bathrooms are often way less likely to have a changing table than women’s bathrooms, that doesn’t mean moms are exempt from the problem. On Winnie, we’ve seen countless parents share their frustrations about restaurants, stores, and play spaces that don’t have adequate facilities to change a baby.
That’s why Winnie was designed with these parents in mind. Moms and dads can use Winnie to find the places nearby that do have spaces to change a baby, and to sound off about the places that don’t.
Hopefully, by sharing their frustrations, parents like these moms and dads can encourage businesses to do better — because you shouldn’t have to change your baby’s diaper on a bathroom floor. Anywhere. Ever. Babies are people too, and they deserve a designated clean bathroom space just like the rest of us.
Winnie is the companion app for modern parents. Whether you want to find new things to do with your kids, ask for advice, or just get to the nearest changing table in a hurry, we can help.
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