Don't Bring Your Baby to Work
Maybe this is retro. Maybe it’s not furthering the advancement of women in office careers, or the acceptance of motherhood as a legitimate part of a working woman’s life. But to the questioner at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog who asks how to handle bringing your baby to work, I have only this to say:
Don’t.
I recognize and respect most trends towards encouraging work-life balance. I think workplaces should do everything they can to support parents through their children’s younger years. But I think that, with a very few exceptions, bringing a baby to work isn’t going to advance your career or make your life easier. What it will do is change the way your colleagues view you, temporarily at best and for the long term at least. Unless your employer is Mothering magazine, bringing in a baby is likely to be disruptive. It’s going to require others to accommodate you and your infant when a crying jag interferes with a meeting or conference call. (Note that I say when, not if). It’s going to require you to nurse, juggle, sway and sing in front of people you’d hoped viewed you as a professional. It is not going to be easy.
I suppose the questioner might get one of those loaf-of-bread style babies, the ones who lie placidly on their backs gazing out the window and eat an nap on schedule. Before I had my first child, I’d read that JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book with her infant snoozing beside her in his “carry-cot” at a local coffee shop. That was so deceptive a description of life with an infant that I hated her for many years afterwards. To some extent, I suspect that the questioner shares my once-rosy view of babies, and it’s almost impossible not to. You really can’t understand the all-encompassing grasp of such a small creature until you’ve experienced it. In that way, I think she should reconsider the logistics and, as several commenters said, be prepared for it not to work.
But even more than a concern for the mechanics of the thing, I think anyone considering bringing an infant to the workplace as a regular thing needs to consider what kind of affect that will have on her image with her colleagues. Now, she is (presumably) a competent, independent individual, focused on the job at hand and able to create at least the appearance of putting work above personal concerns during working hours. She dresses suitably and not in a distracting manner. She can attend meetings scheduled by others and doesn’t require any special treatment.
With a baby on board, all of those things will change. Any meetings or conferences will need to be scheduled around the baby’s needs. If, during an important call (or whatever task requires the most attention in her office) the baby needs her, she will have to put aside work and tend to the baby, who will otherwise disrupt the entire office with his or her demands. If the situation absolutely requires her attendance, and if there is no one else willing to remove the screaming baby entirely so that no one can hear it, she may need to nurse the baby while with colleagues, something I personally have no objection to but many people find distracting. And during all of this, her fellow workers and bosses will be drawing conclusions about her performance. Even if they’re fondly sympathetic to your efforts (as opposed to irritated by the need to shape their working day around your needs), I doubt that fond sympathy is the emotion you want to inspire in your peers. You could argue that in order to become a more family friendly society, we need to be blaze this trail and make it possible. I think we’d be a more family friendly society if we gave new parents more time to just stay home, or provided more and better creches and on-site day-care.
There are people who could pull this off, but for most of them, this isn’t their first rodeo. There’s a learning curve in becoming a parent just as there is in anything else. It’s hard enough to be a first time mother, harder yet to be a first time mother with only a few weeks of maternity leave, and very hard to be a first-time mother while simultaneously doing a job that once took (and is meant to take) all of your time and energy while you were present at work. My advice to the questioner would be to find a babysitter, work when she can work, and be a mother when she’s not working. Bringing a baby in once in a while, for a child-care crisis, is one thing. Trying to fully multitask motherhood and engineering is another. I think the writer will find she’s not able to give her best to either job, and while her baby will undoubtably give her another chance, some in her office may not.
Image by Flickr member @cdharrison licensed under Creative Commons
You know what? It really depends on the baby. Although I was luck enough to work from home with mine, I could have easily had her with me. I think alot depends on whether you have your own office or not. The biggest problem with this is when they start sitting up, crawling, etc. and need to play. Then what are you gonna do? Daycare? No thanks. This is why I just quit and work for myself. I think it’s a cool idea for those who have to get back to work and are resigned to using daycare at a few months anyway, though.
Well, who is going to look after her baby in the office? I did not see that it said, she was going to have him right there in her office.
When my son was about 3 or 4 months, I was able to bring him to the office a couple of times, since the first daycare was next door and when they had to close early my boss allowed me. However, he had a schedule (which he, himself, started at 3 months old), so I got used to it and I knew when he needed to eat, sleep, play, etc. Plus, he was a very friendly non-fussy baby so he had plenty of people to play with him. I took breaks to pump, as I did everyday, and fed him the breastmilk I had packed for daycare. It was not difficult at all.
Oh, loaf loathing. Every day at daycare I see a chart with the morning wake times and nap length of the other kids and silently chafe. I assure myself that mine is surely more interesting and fun, but it’s not always convincing.
You can review the workplace environment of a company here: http://www.cubecheck.com
Perhaps instead of dismissing the idea based on pure theory, you may want to actually talk to some of the hundreds of mothers and fathers who have successfully brought their babies to work in the more than 140 confirmed baby-inclusive companies around the country (who have together hosted more than 1,500 babies to date). (See BabiesAtWork.org/companies.html.) Or you could talk to some of the hundreds of coworkers and managers who consider a babies-at-work program to be one of the best things about their companies–including many coworkers and managers who were just as opposed to the idea as you are–that is, until they actually saw it in practice.
Formal, well-structured baby programs are far different in practice than most people imagine (for many reasons, which we have spent the past five years analyzing).
I’m happy to help anyone who wants to convince their company to start a babies-at-work program (or who wants help in successfully working with their baby).
Carla Moquin
Parenting in the Workplace Institute
ParentingAtWork.org
The real issue with this is breastfeeding and leave policies. I did not take maternity leave because my job is fairly flexible and I can work at home most of the week. But for a few hours each week I had to go to a large meeting, and since I was still breastfeeding every 3 hours this meant that baby had to come along. Looking back I’m really glad I brought the baby to work rather than missing the meetings (which were not strictly required). Women have been fighting mightily for years to allow pumping and breastfeeding in the workplace, and the best way to promote tolerant attitudes towards motherhood in any industry is to have mothers who set an example of professionalism while still mothering. It is also important for women to bring their babies to work while they are breastfeeding to empower other women to do the same. Further, the alternatives for many mothers are worse, she can either pump and pay for unfordable childcare or lose touch with her workplace, why should she be encouraged to do either if there is an alternative that is way more convenient for her and minimally disruptive to everyone else? The problem not mothers in the workplace; the problem is intolerance of mothers in the workplace. The only way to change this intolerance though is for mothers to take their babies to work and change the culture of their offices.
Boy, you are soooooooooooooo wrong! My compnay was one of the first companies to allow babies at work and we have had over 70 babies in the last 12 years. This program INCREASED productivity, teamwork, job satisfaction, morale, retention, reduced turnover and made us an employe of choice in our market! If the parent isn’t willing or balance their work with caring for thier baby it won’t work. That has never once been our experience. And, our customers love it! Don’t knock if you haven’t tried it. I can and does work but the compnay must define their policy and stick to it.
Debbie, I’m glad to hear someone with experience say that this does work. I’d love to hear some specifics, though, about how bringing a baby to work increased productivity. How do you mean?
Ridiculous. Impossible. Disruptive. These are the first 3 words that came to mind.
I used to hate it when my colleagues would bring their kids to work. You felt obligated to stop what you were doing, oggle the kids, try to chat them up, etc. Every once in a while ok, but I agree with the article.