Well, this is exactly what I was going to say. My thunder has been stolen. Carry on.
As long as they pull their own weight and do their fair share of the work, I guess it’s tolerable, most babies are slackers though and generally sit there eating and pooping, they’re kinda’ like managers in that way… 
seriously though, no, I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring an infant to a professional environment, and that has nothing to do with me disliking kids, they’re a drain on the parent’s productivity, and once they’re self-mobile they have the potential to be even more disruptive and irritating
Occasionally my clients bring young children to my office when they meet with me (I’m a family lawyer). It has always ended up costing the client far more than had he or she simply hired a babysitter, for the work keeps getting interrupted while the client attends to the child, and the longer the meeting goes, the more the child acts out and requires attention, often requiring multiple meetings to deal with what normally would be dealt with in one long meeting. On a simple productivity basis, wee ones have no place in my workplace.
On a personal basis, crying, screaming, whining, shiting, puking, bouncing off the wall people, of whatever age, are very irritating to me. I like my quiet, so I have no interest what so ever in having children imposed upon me in my workplace.
“Family lawyer” strikes me as the wrong line of work for someone who finds whining people “very irritating”. 
You have a point there.
Yes, better in that women are no longer routinely summarily dismissed upon discovery of their pregnancies or while they’re out on whatever leave they can cobble together.
We are sorely, sorely behind the rest of the western world in terms of providing a means by which new infants can be assured of a continuity of parental care in their first weeks of life.
If there’s a new “trend” of women taking their babies to work, it speaks quite loudly to our failures in this regard.
Seriously though, I have every respect for family lawyers. I’m a lawyer myself (I do regulatory work), and that is a job that I would find very challenging - having to deal with people who are undergoing such stress must in itself be pretty stressful.
When a coworker had her now 8-month-old we joked that she didn’t need to put him in daycare, we could just pass him from person to person all day – it’s a small, very female office – but nobody meant it. Though there were a couple of days where the daycare was closed and she had no choice but to bring him in. For a day or two it was fun. More than that? Well, he was a very well-behaved baby, but I don’t think it’s appropriate.
We are a very international crowd and to hear the sort of maternity leaves that are common elsewhere in the Western world pisses me right off on behalf of American mothers.
You let a baby play around a physics lab!? That’s where SCIENCE happens! What kind of monster are you?!
I’m thinking I can get a couple of those collapseable gates and turn some of the empty cubes here into baby paddocks. And then get a little side business going.
Remember that EDS commercial with the cat-herders? Like that, with babies.
Reading this thread I keep having flashbacks to the ex-employee who brought in her new baby who screamed for two hours nonstop. They were on the other side of the building so it was just a constant drone but I can’t imagine the people who worked over there.
I took one of my babies to work every day from the time he was seven weeks old, through early toddlerhood. It was a professional office, and open plan, but I wore him in a sling, nursed him discreetly as I worked, and fenced him in as he got older and mobile. Luckily, he was very quiet and mellow.
I have to admit, it was exhausting trying to keep him quiet and happy once he got a bit older, so I had to cut the hours I had him with me. I overcompensated like crazy at the job, working fast and hard during nap times and when I didn’t have him with me. I got more quality work done in those short hours than people who did the standard work day.
When my next baby came along, they asked me to bring her in, but I knew I couldn’t manage it this time. She was a whole different critter, very loud and squirmy. So much depends on the baby’s personality, as well as how the parent does at multi-tasking. Obviously, I wouldn’t take my baby along on the job if I were a firefighter.
Compartmentalizing family life from work life is an odd, outdated, and unhealthy notion, really an aberration from how humans (particularly mothers and infants) are meant to live.
I don’t even care for the ‘short visit’. Our office policy is supposed to be that only employees and visitors there for company business are allowed past the lobby. The exception that seems to be made for peoples kids irritates me. (especially this week, I didn’t realize it was spring break for a lot of schools…there have been numerous kids every day.)
I couldn’t disagree more. I am paid to work at my workplace, not extend my personal life into the office, diminish my productivity and to be granted special privileges that people without children are not afforded.
My agency allows babies/kids at work for short periods. I myself would bring my infant son to work for 45 minutes until my wife got off work and we could do the switch. I have my own office, so I would check my e-mail, make a few phone calls, and maybe have time to do a round of the facility before my wife made it there. Never had a problem, never caused a problem. Keeping him with me all day however, I couldn’t have gotten much done.
Like so many of the customs we take for granted, it’s an invention that dates from the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, people worked with their kids around.
Most jobplaces nowadays aren’t set for it; it would be very disruptive (even with a well-behaved kid) both for the parent and for other workers. I think work-at-home solutions are much easier to implement, except for needing a company and supervisors who have outgrown the mindset of “people don’t work unless I’m staring at them.”
I’ve been in the grocery store five aisles down from a screaming infant for five minutes and become very annoyed and distracted…
If you asked me to WORK near one I’d probably lose my mind.
I tend to agree that American mothers get short shrift on paid vs. unpaid leave, length of maternity leave, etc…
But bringing baby to work is not, at least IMHO, any kind of solution. I don’t have a baby. I don’t want a baby. I shouldn’t have to put up with a baby at work. The very same reasons I don’t have one at home are the same I sure as hell don’t want to deal with one at work.
Baby DAY CARE at work? 100% behind that.
Baby twenty feet away at work?
Seriously?
:eek:
The thing about the pre-I.R. model of working with and around your kids was that it was good for the kids, because they were learning about life at the same time. Jobs like farming or crafts make sense to a small child, because they can see what’s happening, and it starts to prepare them for adult life since they will almost certainly go on to a similar occupation to one of their parents.
Office jobs are different. You pretty much need to be able to read for any of it to start making even the remotest sense. A baby tagging along in the workplace isn’t learning stuff. A kid being cared for by their own family at home still is, because all the mundane cooking/cleaning/shopping/washing tasks that go on there are still the sorts of things that babies and small children can understand and learn from. So when “bring your kids to the office” is being touted as a great solution to the work/life balance problem, I can’t help feeling it’s far from optimal even from the baby’s point of view, let alone anyone else’s.
Decent maternity leave is what you need.