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

I suspect that taking advantage of babies-at-work policies can actually make life harder on parents, which is probably not what anyone intended.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

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.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot