When Sarita James had her third child, Uma, she decided to do things differently from what she had done with her first two children. Although offered paid maternity leave, she planned to return to work when Uma was just six weeks old. But the baby looked so small that James had major doubts. She thought: “Why couldn’t I bring Uma along with me to the office?” As she writes in The New York Times, the experiment proved to be a big success with baby, colleagues and even clients.
Across the US, the number of working parents has risen in recent years. The Pew Research Center reports that 70 per cent of mothers with children younger than 18 were working in 2015, compared to just 47 per cent in 1975. But childcare remains a major problem for women seeking employment or working longer hours. According to research from Michigan State University (MSU), only seven per cent of workplaces across the US offer on-site day care to employees and their children. Research shows that there are many benefits of workplace day care, including access to a larger talent pool, more women in management, lower absenteeism, improved performance and longer tenure.
There are, of course, downsides to having day-care facilities at work, including potential distractions and worry (“Perhaps I ought to take a quick look.”). For employers, it’s usually a question of set-up and running costs for a childcare facility and concerns about the company image.
But how about taking babies and older kids to work with you? According to Beverley Turner, broadcaster and working mother of three children, constant interruption is just the beginning of your problems. “Places of work require order, focus and decorum. Kids are inherently chaotic boundary-smashers to whom Post-it notes are flappy stickers, quietness triggers the screaming reflex and coffees are merely brown splashes in cups designed to be elbowed off edges,” she writes on Telegraph.com.
Sarita James admits that she took a big risk by bringing a young baby to team meetings and client appointments. She was lucky that her baby daughter slept and fed easily at work. The ease with which she was able to return to work made all the risks worth it.
Helping an employee to return from parental leave is a win-win for staff and employer, reports The Guardian. People who take their children to work show a more human and caring side of themselves to their colleagues, which is especially important for managers and directors.
Carla Moquin, founder of the US-based Parenting in the Workplace Institute, tells the newspaper that flexibility and work-life balance are huge deciding factors for people choosing a place to work. She believes that employees are far more likely to remain at an organization if they feel supported in their family lives.
Every year, many firms celebrate “Bring Your Children to Work Day”. It really misses the point, however, about the challenges of balancing work and family life, says Sally Peck, family editor at the Telegraph.com: “Bringing children to work for a special event is not useful, but regular visits to see what your parent does all day is. The goal here is not to disrupt the office, but to show your child what is so important that it takes you away from them.”
Peck takes her three-year-old into the office a couple of times a week before she drops her off at day care. She believes that these visits help explain her working life to her child. She hopes it will help her daughter “learn how to behave in the adult world. It’s about time we got over our strict separation of children and real life in Britain — because it damages both.”
Not every workplace is a suitable place for a child, of course. “If I’d been, for example, a cook, a doctor, a bus driver or a welder, I could never have tried it,” admits Sarita James. “But many parents — and not only the ‘lean in’ professional women [see “For more information”] that you might expect — might find this model works for them, if they can get their employers to agree.” And who knows what that could lead to in the future? The Financial Times reported recently on the success of its “Bring in Your Parents Day”. In years to come, perhaps a grown-up Uma James will invite her mother, Sarita, to her workplace to share the secrets of her success — if Mum promises to behave, of course.