When Every Day is Take-Your-Kid-To-Work Day

This morning, as I usually do, I dropped my 11-month-old son off at the Tutor Time day care center two blocks from my apartment. Then, as I began my workday, I saw a fascinating headline in USA Today: "Day care's new frontier: Your baby at your desk."

According to workplace trends reporter Stephanie Armour, about 80 companies nationwide now allow employees to bring their babies to work regularly. While plenty of employers -- about 29% -- allow children occasionally (say, when a sitter calls in sick), these most progressive employers don't require a reason. Babies are welcome to hang out in their parents' cubicles or offices on a daily basis until they're old enough to crawl.

As a new mom myself, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, anything that employers do to make life easier on parents is a good thing. On the other, I suspect that taking advantage of such policies can actually make life harder on parents, which is probably not what anyone intended.

Armour's article noted that bringing babies to work is still controversial, and the number of comments posted on USA Today's website seems to back that up. Most of the controversy is silly. For example, one poster stressed that it was not his problem that other people choose to have children, apparently forgetting that he owes his existence to someone choosing to have him.

I also don't believe that babies in the workplace lower productivity among anyone other than the parents themselves. People already waste hours and hours of time at work. They send pointless rounds of emails. They forward funny YouTube clips. They schedule hour-long internal conference calls. They drop by someone else's office to comment on the political scheming they heard about in the bathroom. Despite the self-importance that's epidemic in corporate America, my guess is that at some offices, the only people doing anything that matters in the grand scheme of things some days is the parents.

The truth is, the vast majority of normal people like babies. They coo over them on planes and offer to help parents carry bags. They gladly change tables at restaurants so you can have one with space for a high chair. That's why I believe the various quotes in Armour's article from human resources types who say that bring-your-baby policies raise morale. They certainly raise morale among grateful parents. But I bet they also raise morale among others who like seeing cute faces in the midst of soul-less gray cubicles.

That said, as a working mom who loves both my baby and what I do, I just can't imagine bringing my son to work regularly. I say this as someone who works from home. This summer, when my son was very little, I had a nanny take care of him in my apartment so I could continue to work part-time and still feed him every 2-3 hours. This was a fine arrangement, but I soon realized something: On the days when she wasn't around, I got nothing done.

My son started daycare when he was four months old. Since then, he's mostly been a healthy kid, but occasionally he comes down with something that keeps him out of daycare for awhile. On those days when he's home with me -- just like I discovered last summer -- I get nothing done. The baby needs to eat, needs to be changed, wants to play, wants to babble, gets upset... None of these things blend well with interviewing someone on the phone, cranking out an article before a deadline or even thinking straight. I always cringe when I see work-from-home ads, partly because so many are scams, but also because many tout how much money you'll save on childcare. Um, not if you actually intend to work.

When I'm with my son, I want to be with my son, not trying to type emails with one hand. When I'm working, I want to focus on work, not on whether a 2 a.m. wake-up the night before means I should try to put the baby down for an earlier nap.

If employers want to make things easier on parents, the best solution is to allow parents to bring babies to work, but also have on-site day care with an open-door policy. While other people are wasting time by the water cooler, parents can pop down and play with their kids, but then trust the kids are somewhere safe -- and out of ear shot -- when they do need to make a phone call.

We've all read studies that multi-tasking makes us less effective. The old dividing line between our working lives and personal lives is falling away, but even parents are human. It's very hard to do our best at both jobs every second of every day.

Comments

[SeriousBlack]

Part 2b: Again, imagine the far distant past in which small communities of human beings lived as a group, surviving and either flourishing or perishing based on the group effort of everyone in that group - adults and even down to very young children. Children who would observe at close range, and even contribute and work in valuable ways right alongside with their parents, to that very survival. Observing their parents doing what was necessary to be a good, strong, ethical person who pulled their own weight and did what was necessary for the group as well as for themselves. (Of course they would also witness first hand cruelty and selfishness - and the results of such bad qualities as well; but let's not forget that in today's "modern world" kids are constantly force-fed such bad examples incessantly via today's TV, movies and music...)

[SeriousBlack]

Part 2a: And addressing some other comments made here, you'll notice the "30,000 foot view" of my previous post. I myself am not saying that actually instituting on-site child care on a large scale is an easy thing to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am just sad that western civilizations have gone so far to one end of the spectrum in terms of how little time we are able to spend raising our children "hands on" instead of depositing them in daycare centers and even the whole K-12 educational paradigm - and then hoping that the few minutes of "quality time" that we spend interacting with our kids every night is enough to prevent the kind of widespread behavioral problems we see in our society in kids, teenagers and young adults. What I hope for is some far distant future in which the fallacies of such an approach to raising children are recognized and many aspects of society are refined, including such individual things as on-site child care.

[jvarga]

On site daycare would be one thing, I admit that even though its something that I'd likely never make use of (and I'd much prefer an on site gym, which every employee can make use of), but actually having babies with all of their assorted distractions in the cubicles surrounding me? I guess if you wanted to make separate cubicle farms for babies and for people who don't want to deal with babies that would also be fine. But I can't imagine subjecting a whole office full of people to the various "joys" of a baby or 10.

[cylindar]

My God, what are you smoking or snorting!! To have kids in a workplace is a very bad idea. Do you have any idea what type of liability you are talking about that you would be burdening your employer with. Holy sh$t Batwoman!!! Not only that do you have any idea of the type of neighborhoods (usually very polluted) that many women work in? Do you have any idea about the dangerous equipment they work with (let's just say for example a textile factory or a soldering line or etc. etc. etc.. Are you just talking about the upper middle class types. How about everyone else? I like your idea but there are so many things that could go wrong with it that it is really scary.

[SeriousBlack]

HuffPost's Pick

On-site day care is the way to go. If we went back 10,000 years, human societies would likely be horrified to learn that at some point in the future, we had so completely divorced the contact that we have with our children while raising them. "Modern" societies took a soul-less left turn during the industrial revolution when it dictated that the "masses" were simply tools to be abused by working in factories 12 hours a day, at the expense of all other sensible and compassionate human needs and behavior. Even though things are a little more civilized nowadays, the ritual vestiges of everyone having to flock like lemmings to and from work every day (just to offices instead of factories), at the expense of family life and being able to spend the time required to properly raise children, are in my opinion the cause of much deep-seated frustration and sadness in today's "advanced" civilization.