Bring Your Baby to Your Work Day
April 12, 2011 by Erin
Could you get your work done with your baby around? Credit: Kyle and Kelly Adams
The majority of new moms in the United States face a big decision during the first few months of their babies’ lives—whether to go back to work or stay at home with their new family member. For many moms, staying home isn’t even a consideration. Some simply love their day jobs and don’t want to stay home, while others simply have to work for financial reasons.
But what if you could spend more time with your baby and keep your day job? What if you could bring your baby to work? For some moms, this idea is a reality. One Kansas City workplace allows moms to bring their babies to work up to 6 months of age, allowing moms to bond with babies, delay daycare and keep their jobs. The company says that there has never been a complaint about a disruptive baby—even more than 100 babies later.
This is the sort of flexible idea I wish would sweep across the nation. Babies are a lot of work, but I’m willing to bet that adding a baby to the workplace is less disruptive to productivity than removing a quality employee altogether. And I’m willing to bet that these employees do their best to juggle the two demands—and probably even work longer hours than they would otherwise. Not to mention that being able to bring your baby to work with you has to make that first day back at work after maternity leave much less gut-wrenching. As much as I discuss baby-unfriendly places, I thought this employer deserved a shout out!
Is your workplace flexible and family-friendly? Would you bring your baby to work with you if you could? Share those thoughts! —Erin
I’ll be honest–I hate this idea. Babies are too much of a distraction, for momma and others in the area.
The link doesn’t work and I’m dying to know which work place it is! I think I’d actually prefer to have a day care provider in my office so someone else could interact with my baby while I work, but so I could easily go nurse or take a five minute play break whenever I wanted to throughout the day. I think it would be hard to get much done having the baby in my office (especially since mine screamed and cried so much of the day when he was tiny), but I would have been way more at ease and productive if I knew he was close by and if I didn’t have to spend so much time with the darn pump.
Jessica — I think this was the article although I can’t find the original: http://www.sheryljmoore.com/2011/02/company-lets-workers-bring-babies-to-office/