While a breastfeeding mother is at work, her child below two years (i.e. infant) is deprived of direct care and breastfeeding. This holds for almost one-third of the day when a mother works outside of the home. In her absence, the child is bottle-fed by a childcare center or a home-maid or a relative. These ways of rearing a child have been largely accepted in the modern society. The concept that provided the foundation for this acceptance is right to work by every adult member of the society. This paper deals with the conflicts between a child’s privilege to breastfeeding and a mother’s right-to-work from an Islamic perspective. Without submitting to the overwhelming phenomenon of working couples in the contemporary society, this paper gives priority to the child’s privilege to personal care and breastfeeding over the mother’s right-to-work. Hence, it is argued that a working mother who willfully suspends her work during breastfeeding period is successful in achieving a balance between her role as suckling mother and her concern for her career development. This prioritizing of childcare has been grounded in and supported by the framework of Wasatiyah Paradigm and Maqasid al Shari’ah.
Breastfeeding and Career Care: Is there any Conflict of Interest? An Islamic Perspective
M.H. Islam1, ASM Shahabuddin2, Fadzli Adam3, M. M. Rahman4, Rebeka Sultana5
1 Research Institute for Islamic Product and Civilization (INSPIRE)
2Department of Business Administration, Uttara University, Dhaka-1230, Bangladesh
3Research Institute for Islamic Product and Civilization (INSPIRE)
4Institute for Community Development and Quality of Life (iCODE)
1,3,4University Sultan Zainal Abidin, Gong Badak Campus, 21300, Terengganu, Malaysia
5PhD in Information System, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM)
Email: mhedayatul@unisza.edu.my
Abstract: While a breastfeeding mother is at work, her child below two years (i.e. infant) is deprived of direct care and breastfeeding. This holds for almost one-third of the day when a mother works outside of the home. In her absence, the child is bottle-fed by a childcare center or a home-maid or a relative. These ways of rearing a child have been largely accepted in the modern society. The concept that provided the foundation for this acceptance is right to work by every adult member of the society. This paper deals with the conflicts between a child’s privilege to breastfeeding and a mother’s right-to-work from an Islamic perspective. Without submitting to the overwhelming phenomenon of working couples in the contemporary society, this paper gives priority to the child’s privilege to personal care and breastfeeding over the mother’s right-to-work. Hence, it is argued that a working mother who willfully suspends her work during breastfeeding period is successful in achieving a balance between her role as suckling mother and her concern for her career development. This prioritizing of childcare has been grounded in and supported by the framework of Wasatiyah Paradigm and Maqasid al Shari’ah.
Keywords: Breastfeeding, Childcare, Career Care, Wasatiyah (Balanced Approach) and Maqasid al Shari’ah (Objectives of Shari’ah)
Introduction
Working parents with young children resort to childcare centers or maids to ensure their children’s care while they are at work. Primarily motivated by pecuniary interests, maids and childcare centers act as substitute caregivers by rendering children the services they are paid for. The children who grow in the laps of the substitute caregivers are substantially deprived of their mothers’ spontaneous loving care. Could this deprivation be tantamount to violation of child right? Does mother’s right-to-work stand at odd with her child right-to-breastfeeding? The purpose of this paper is to articulate these questions and look for a balance between the conflicting interests of childcare and career care from an Islamic perspective.
Breastfeeding Benefits for Children
It is projected that breastfeeding saves about millions of children’s lives annually from common infectious diseases (Labbok, 2006). More interestingly the Lancet Child Survival Series estimates that 1.3 million additional lives could be saved yearly if women were enabled to achieve 6 months exclusive breastfeeding with continued breastfeeding thereafter (Jones et al., 2003). It is traditionally well-established that only breastfeeding, and breastfeeding alone without other foods or liquids, provides the ideal nourishment for infants for the first six months of life (Labbok, 2006). Breast-milk contains the nutrition which a child needs, including the proportion and suitability for its body for digestion and absorption. The various nutritional elements are not static. They change daily, according to the infant’s needs (Buckley, 2009). A baby has a special formula prepared in his mother's breast to make it a suitable diet. The Gracious and Bountiful God divinely provides the mammary glands with the know-how to adjust its secretions according to the variable and changing needs of the growing infant (Hamid and Az’oz, n.d). Likewise, the modern medical science has also strongly recommended
In-Text Citation: (Islam, Shahabuddin, Adam, Rahman, & Sultana, 2018)
To Cite this Article: Islam, M. H., Shahabuddin, A. S. M., Adam, F., Rahman, M. M., & Sultana, R. (2018). Breastfeeding and Career Care: Is there any Conflict of Interest? An Islamic Perspective. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 8(11), 885–893.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
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