Babies in the Workplace

for a baby, which is another reason that work babies tend to be so content. Babies are born able to recognize human faces and they show far more interest in looking at faces than anything else in their world. Babies are designed to be around lots of different people, to watch people interacting with each other, and to learn as much about their world as possible. The best way for a baby to do this is to be immersed in the human world--to be around lots of other people and engaged in the day-to-day activities of other people, and to have their physical needs met quickly so that they can focus their energy on learning.

The book The Scientist in the Crib theorizes that one reason human children have such a long period of dependence
(more than any other species) is to give them a protected period in which to learn

the nuances and details of their particular culture and environment. This is a key reason that humans are so adaptable--for example, we can live under far more diverse conditions than any other creature on Earth.

As any new parent knows, when babies are awake they require nearly-constant entertainment in order to stay content. This is extremely difficult for one person to provide--many adults have trouble thinking of new and interesting things to do with a baby for eight to ten hours a day. The patterns seen in other countries and the results of these baby-to-work programs strongly suggest that babies are not designed to interact with only one person for the majority of each day.

Since the beginning of the human species, people lived in groups for