Article: Breastfeeding and Chestfeeding at Your Pool: What Staff Need to Know and What the Law Actually Says

A parent settles into a chair on the pool deck and begins nursing their baby. Another patron complains to a lifeguard. The lifeguard, who has never received any guidance on this, asks the parent to move to a more private area. The parent knows their rights. The interaction escalates. A complaint is filed.

This scenario happens at aquatic facilities across the country, consistently, and almost always because staff were never given the information they needed to handle it correctly. This is a fixable problem.

What the Law Says

Breastfeeding and chestfeeding (a gender-inclusive alternative to breastfeeding used primarily by transgender men, nonbinary parents, or cisgender individuals who feel the word "breastfeeding" does not fit their identity or anatomy) in public is legally protected in all 50 states. The specifics vary by state — some laws are broader, some include explicit protections against being asked to cover up or move to another location — but the baseline protection exists everywhere. In most states, a person has the legal right to breastfeed or chestfeed in any location where they are otherwise authorized to be. A pool deck, a splash pad, a locker room, a lobby — if the parent is permitted to be there, they are permitted to nurse there.

Some states go further, explicitly prohibiting staff or other patrons from asking a nursing parent to cover up, move to a private area, or use a restroom. Asking a nursing parent to go to the restroom is widely regarded as discriminatory — the restroom is not where anyone eats, and it is not where anyone should be expected to feed a child.

Before your next busy season, look up the specific breastfeeding law in your state. Know what it says. Make sure your supervisors know what it says. That knowledge is the foundation for handling these situations correctly.

Why Aquatic Facilities Get This Wrong

Aquatic facilities are uniquely positioned to get this wrong for a few reasons. The environment involves a lot of exposed skin, which creates confusion in staff and patrons about what is and is not appropriate. Lifeguards are often young, undertrained on this specific issue, and put in the position of responding to patron complaints without any guidance from their facility on what the law actually requires. And because the pool deck is a shared public space or in the water with a lot of sightlines, a nursing parent is more visible there than they might be in a restaurant booth or a park bench — which means the complaints happen more often, not because anything inappropriate is occurring, but because more people are watching.

None of this makes the situation more legally ambiguous. It just makes it more likely that an untrained staff member will respond incorrectly under pressure, in front of other patrons, without a script to fall back on.

What Staff Are Allowed to Ask — and What They Are Not

This is the part that needs to be unambiguous in your training. Staff cannot ask a nursing parent to cover up. Staff cannot ask a nursing parent to move to a different location, including a restroom, a locker room, or an office. Staff cannot ask a nursing parent to stop, pause, or wait until the child is somewhere else. In states with explicit statutory protections, doing any of these things can expose your facility to a legal complaint — and in every state, it exposes your facility to a public and reputational one.

What staff can do is make sure the parent has everything they need to be comfortable. If there is a quieter, shaded, or more private seating area and the parent would prefer it, staff can offer it — but only as an option, never as a redirection away from where the parent already is. The parent decides where they are comfortable. Staff support that decision; they do not make it for them.

Train your staff on this distinction specifically: offering a more private space is hospitality. Requiring a nursing parent to use one is discrimination. The difference between those two things is the difference between a five-star Yelp review and a formal complaint.

Handling the Patron Complaint

This will happen, and your staff need a script for it before it does. When another patron complains about a nursing parent, the response should be calm, brief, and does not put the nursing parent in the position of having to justify themselves. Something like: "Breastfeeding and chestfeeding are legally protected here, and that parent is welcome to nurse wherever they're at in the facility. If you'd like, I can help you find another spot at the pool."

That is the entire conversation. Staff do not need to explain the law in detail, argue the point, or escalate to a supervisor unless the complaining patron becomes confrontational. The goal is to protect the nursing parent from having to manage another person's discomfort while also feeding their child — that burden should never fall on the parent.

Practice this exchange in staff training the same way you would practice any other de-escalation scenario. Staff who have said the words out loud once, in a low-stakes training setting, respond far more confidently than staff who are encountering the situation for the first time on a crowded Saturday.

A Note on Staff Discomfort

Some staff members, particularly younger or less experienced ones, may feel uncomfortable or unsure how to act natural around a nursing parent — not because they disagree with the practice, but because nobody has ever talked to them about it directly. That discomfort, left unaddressed, is often what leads to an awkward or poorly handled interaction, even when the staff member's intentions are good.

Naming this directly in training helps. Tell your staff plainly that nursing on the pool deck is normal, legal, and none of their business to manage beyond making sure the parent is comfortable. Removing the mystery removes the awkwardness.

Building a Policy That Actually Covers This

Your written policy should state clearly that breastfeeding and chestfeeding are welcome anywhere at your facility that the parent is otherwise permitted to be, that staff may not ask a parent to cover up or relocate, and that staff are trained to redirect patron complaints without involving the nursing parent in the conversation. If your state law includes specific protections beyond the federal baseline, cite them in your policy so staff have language to point to if a situation escalates.

Post this policy somewhere your team can access it quickly, and include it in new hire onboarding, not just an annual refresher. Seasonal aquatic staff turn over constantly, and this is exactly the kind of guidance that gets lost between one summer's team and the next if it only lives in one training session a year.

Aquatic facilities are family spaces, and feeding a child is not an interruption of that — it is part of it. A facility that has trained its staff to handle this calmly and correctly is a facility that families notice, remember, and come back to. Getting this right costs nothing beyond a few minutes of training and a policy that says what the law already says.

If you want to bring structured training on this or other inclusive facility operations topics to your team, that is exactly the work I do. Reach out and let's talk about what your facility needs.