Changing your baby’s nappy in a public toilet can be a cumbersome task at the best of times, but when there’s no changing table available to use, you have to get inventive.
That’s why one father has kicked off a call for baby changing tables in men’s toilets – #SquatForChange – after a photo of himself squatting on the floor of a public toilet so he could change his son’s nappy went viral.
Donte Palmer’s impressive quad crunch, taken at a restaurant in Florida and later shared on Instagram, has prompted a positive conversation among dads.
“What’s the deal with not having changing tables in men’s bathrooms as if we don’t exist!” he wrote on the platform. “Clearly we do this often because look how comfortable my son is. It’s routine to him! Let’s fix this problem!”
Speaking to BBC News about how the picture came about, Palmer said: “We went into the restroom and there was no changing table around. So I got into my perfect man squat, I threw Liam over my lap, and I began to change him.”
Palmer’s other son Isaiah watched his father squatting to change his brother, and took pictures of the moment without his father realising.
When Palmer and his two sons went back to the table, Isaiah revealed the photos and the family laughed at the situation. But a comment his wife made to him stuck in Palmer’s mind and later made him post the pictures.
“She said: ‘It’s weird how mothers don’t have to get creative or make innovative ways to changing a diaper but you had to be creative, and you had to do it and then just squat to change our son’,” Palmer said. “She doesn’t think it’s fair.”
Other fathers have been getting involved in the #SquatForChange conversation by sharing their own images of squatting in bathrooms while changing their babies’ nappies, which Palmer has championed on his Facebook page.
“This is what the movement is about! Fathers are stepping out to squat. We will squat until change comes. Changing tables should be in all men’s restrooms,” he wrote.