Babies in the Workplace

I have a bachelor's degree in psychology from Penn State University and a master's-level certification in mediation and facilitation skills from the University of Utah. I also attended and was on the Dean's List at Concord Law School (a fully-online law school) for three years.

Babies at Work and
"Normal" Babies

In October, 2005, while trying to write freelance articles for extra money, I stumbled onto a concept that transformed my view of parenting and work--I discovered that there were companies that allowed parents to care for their babies at work every day for the first several months of life.

I became fascinated with this idea and searched for more companies with these programs, while interviewing dozens of

people from the businesses that I had
found. I read articles from across the country that had been written about individual companies, and I realized that, as a trend, parenting in the workplace was virtually unknown. No one, not even the people in these companies, seemed to be aware of the range of other companies--in many different fields--with these babies-at-work programs, much less the nearly-universal benefits these programs seemed to provide.

But something didn't make sense. How could these programs be working? These companies wouldn't have continued these programs if they didn't work from a business perspective. But if they did work as well as these CEOs and parents were telling me, that meant that many of our society's assumptions about babies were wrong.