Diaper emergency? Mom launches website to help parents locate baby change tables in Lower Mainland

Michelle Cyca, a journalist and mother of two, says she has had one too many public diaper emergencies where she could not find a baby change table — so she launched a website to help other parents in similar crappy situations.

Cyca, who lives in Vancouver, is the brains behind VancouverChangeTables.com, a site dedicated to identifying which businesses in the Lower Mainland have diaper changing tables and which ones do not.

The online database is already up and running, and users can submit their own observations to help increase the amount of information available on an interactive map. The map also specifies whether the tables are located in women's washrooms only, or if they exist in the men's and/or gender-neutral facilities as well.

"You often find yourself having to deal with putting your baby down on a cold, wet grimy bathroom floor because there is no other option," said Cyca, speaking to CBC's On The Coast.

She created the site over the Christmas holiday period and said she has received an outpouring of supportive feedback from dads who have been forced to use bathroom floors or plead for access to the women's washroom.

"It's still a really gendered inequality," said Cyca.

In early October 2018, former Vancouver Park Board commissioner Erin Shum introduced a motion to add change tables in all Park Board building washrooms and community centres.

A municipal election was held later that same month and the city's leadership changed. A spokesperson for the City of Vancouver confirmed via email Friday that Shum's motion was never put into action.

"At present there is no specific requirement mandating change tables in building by-laws," said that city statement.

As of 2022, open data from the City of Vancouver shows there are 72 parks with washroom facilities in the city. According to a statement from the Park Board, there were 57 baby change facilities in park washrooms — not including community centres — in 2020. 

For decades, access to adequate washroom facilities for parents have plagued mothers like Cyca.

"Babies are people [and] they have physical needs like going to the bathroom and it would be nice to live in a society that accommodates them," said Cyca.

David Anderson, education faculty professor at the University of British Columbia, published a peer-reviewed report in Curator: The Museum Journal in 2003 that investigated the long-term memories of 128 visitors to large-scale exhibition events and included reflections from mothers who attended Expo '86 in Vancouver.

He said 17 years after the event, a dominant memory for those mothers was trying to find adequate washroom facilities to attend to the needs of young children.

"Memory encoding and emotion are highly connected," said Anderson. "If they can't get their needs met, it colours their memories negatively."

Cyca said the needs of parents and babies can often be invisible to people and she too had stopped thinking about it until she had her second child. She soon remembered that a lack of change tables was a huge headache and for some, the alternative is to just stay home.

"It's another barrier to being out in society when you have a baby ... and parenting can be really isolating already."

For Lezlie Lowe, mother and author of No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, the challenge of finding a change table comes as no surprise.

Lowe has done extensive research on bathrooms in western society and said, generally speaking, decisions about washroom access are made by people with simple bathroom needs, and that do not always include women who are pregnant, menstruating or toting tiny tots.

"We have a really inadequate attitude toward provision that is limiting people that have a diverse need," said Lowe.

She said she realized when she became a mom that the way she navigated the world was no longer possible, and that her "kid's bathroom needs dominated everything."

Lowe would like to see policy makers do better when it comes to public washroom access by increasing the number of them in cities and the accessories they include.

"Bathrooms are everything," said Lowe.

CBC has reached out to various provincial government ministries to ask what conversations, if any, are being had by provincial policy makers to mandate change tables.

The province responded that neither the Ministry of Children and Family Development, nor the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction play a role in change table issues, but that the Ministry of Health should be responding. That response remains pending.