Babies in the Workplace

Babies in the Workplace  40

41  Why it Works

Many Office Jobs Allow Flexibility    The Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the only period in human history in which babies have been increasingly separated from their mothers on a routine basis.  This was primarily due to the fact that factory conditions were extremely unsafe for children, and it was hardly feasible to care for a baby while working on an assembly line.    But our current technologically-based economy is a different world.  Now, many office (and some retail) jobs are structured in such a way that parents can effectively do their work and care for a baby at the same time.  In this Information Age, creativity and resourcefulness are highly-prized traits in employees, and many employees have tremendous flexibility in the specific way they do their jobs.  These modern conditions make

working while caring for a baby highly feasible, and the voluntary assistance of coworkers in an office environment can help parents be even more effective in their jobs than they would be telecommuting from home while taking care of children. Formal Structure    A big key to the success of these baby programs is their formal structure.  The concept of babies in the workplace has been discussed on various internet forums in recent years.  People's comments seem to fall into three groups--people who are opposed to the idea because they've never seen it tried and assume it can't possibly work, people who are opposed to the idea because they had negative experiences with their own or other people's babies being brought to the office on an informal, occasional basis (with no formal procedures or expectations in place), and people who work for a company with a