Mame-Fatou Niang-Meunier, French and francophone studies graduate student, felt ostracized and alone as the only mother in her department.
While her peers were partying, Ashley Baggett, history graduate student, spent her evenings typing with one hand and holding a baby bottle in the other.
Heather Durham, English education graduate student, read her textbooks aloud to her daughter instead of traditional bedtime stories.
Meunier, Baggett and Durham met in a feminist theory class, where they spent the 15 minutes before the professor arrived exchanging parenting stories and relating to one another. Meunier had the idea to form the Student-Parents Association as a support group for parent undergraduate and graduate students.
“Just having this feeling that you’re meeting people going through the same thing takes out those feelings of ‘I’m a bad student’ or ‘I’m a bad mom,'” said Meunier, SPA president.
SPA members agreed that having a strong support system as both parents and students is necessary.
“In grad school you spend so much time working, working, working, but you look at your children and you say, ‘I should be playing with them,'” said Baggett, SPA vice president. “Everybody tells me I’m so driven. I have two very big incentives,” she said, smiling at her children, Madilyn and Alex.
SPA is trying to recruit undergraduate and graduate student members and let them know there are people experiencing similar difficulties balancing parenting and studying.
“When I was TA’ing, I had an undergrad who had to miss every Wednesday, and attendance was key in this class,” Meunier said. “She told me she had to miss because she had a daughter, and she had no one else to take care of her on Wednesdays.”
SPA hopes to advocate for more affordable, quality childcare, along with the University Council on Women.
“There’s power in numbers,” Meunier said. “If just I go to daycare and tell them that it’s unaffordable, they won’t listen to me. Other universities have child centers, they have their own daycares. It might take five years, it might take 10 years, but we have this goal.”
Fathers are also a part of SPA. Meunier and Baggett’s husbands, Jean-Baptiste Meunier, comparative literature graduate student, and Kevin Baggett, Paul M. Hebert Law Center assistant law librarian, attended the first meeting.
“Family is not exclusively a woman issue,” said Carolyn Lewis, SPA adviser and history professor. “Often, fathers feel left out. Fatherhood isn’t the same as it was 50 years ago.”
The missions of SPA are to offer a discussion venue for student parents, to build community and to create “an organizational vehicle for collective action.”
SPA plans to have guest speakers about parenting issues, a children’s clothes swap and “emotional support and resource” discussions.
“I think that LSU has been trying to reach nontraditional students,” Baggett said. “I think this organization’s perfect. We can contribute to their academic success and retention rate.”
SPA will advertise at Wednesday’s student organization fair, and it is in the process of creating a logo.
 
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Contact Andrea Gallo at [email protected]