Reconciling family and work life is not easy, and neither is reconciling when you are studying. Perhaps the only way for a child to be treated while the mother goes to class is to take him with her. In the case we are talking about, there could be supports that help to combine the care of a baby with the University, but what has been done from this institution is make it a little harder for a mother who attended classes for two hours with her baby.
Two hours that usually coincide with her daughter's nap and until the grandmother leaves work and can pick up the girl. It does not seem so serious, however a student of the last course of Pedagogy at the University of Barcelona has been told that she cannot continue taking her 11-month-old baby with her. And they make it even harder.
Mireia, the mother, 24, says that it was the teachers themselves who encouraged her to go to class with the baby and even do the practices with her, which pushed her to exercise her right.
But now they have told him that it cannot be. The reasons offered by the UB are that the girl is not covered by insurance in case of an accident and that the right of other students to receive classes "in optimal conditions" must be respected.
The mother, on the other hand, defends that anyone can access the faculty without insurance and that her classmates, even those who do not know her, have shown her support so that she can go to the classroom with her daughter. And she plans to keep wearing it, "until they put me a police cordon and don't let me in."
The alternatives that have been offered to Mireia do not convince her, since the continuous evaluation system is a much greater effort than that of other colleagues, which results in discrimination. She was also told that they could change dates for exams or work delivery, but she believes that she can get the credits she lacks in the same way as her classmates doing his best for his daughter, which is being with his family.
The change in situation that has led to the "ban" could have been any. Maybe one afternoon the girl was not calm and cried or somehow bothered those other students who were nearby. The complaint could have been from another student, perhaps from a teacher, although for what the mother points out she received the support of the teachers. We know that there are comprehensive teachers who even help calm the baby, something that has happened on several occasions as we have seen.
They are not the only cases of young mothers who continue to study and, knowing how complicated it is to get a degree, I believe that there are no obstacles to put in them. In the same UB there are other students in a similar situation. Wouldn't it be a matter of considering some kind of measure that would help them, that would make it easier for them to obtain their titles?
We complain that motherhood is delayed, but with so little support for mothers it is logical that many women want to finish their training before having a baby. In this case, we hope that the mother feels she receives more support from peers, teachers and the University in general, and that you are allowed to take your baby to class if both are really good and does not interfere in class. Studying without having children is very difficult and when they have, even more, even if they do not put obstacles.
