Several years ago, Joyce DeLucca became pregnant at the same time she was building her new company, Kingsland Capital Management, an investment boutique in Manhattan. Her employees wondered: Was she going to take a maternity leave during this crucial period?
She did not. Instead, DeLucca decided to bring her newborn to the office with her. She set up an enclosed playroom adjacent to her office, where Layla, now three-and-a-half years old, could play, along with a baby sitter.
Layla is still coming to the office.
“If I have a break I can stand up and walk into her room,” said DeLucca, who is 42 and works 12-hour days. “She knows her way around the office and sometimes she’ll visit me on the trading desk. But it’s not like she comes with me to meetings. If I put my finger to my lips, she knows to be quiet.”
Layla’s sister Ariana, who is seven months old, now comes to the office, too.
More companies are allowing women — and some men, too — to bring their babies to work. The advantages are clear: The women don’t lose money by taking maternity leave. They can breastfeed conveniently. And they can bond with the baby rather than worry that he or she will develop a closer connection with a nanny or a daycare provider.
Of course, disadvantages are clear, too. The needs and noises of babies have the potential to be highly disruptive and to stir resentment among coworkers.
Susan Seitel, president of WFC Resources, a workplace consulting firm in Minneapolis, put it this way: “The business of business is business. I think it’s a little distracting to have children at the office.”
Critics also say that both child and job could lose out because the parent can’t be 100 percent devoted to either one.
DeLucca’s firm has about two dozen workers and she says they are welcome to bring in their children as well; about five have done so for brief periods. Her employees like having children around, she said: “I have not heard anyone react other than enthusiastically.”
The Parenting in the Workplace Institute, a nonprofit group that started in June 2006, has a database of 117 baby-friendly companies of all sizes, among them retail stores, banks, law firms and state agencies.
“This has been going on for 15 years in a limited fashion, but in the last two years it’s really taken off,” said Carla Moquin, the founder of the Parenting in the Workplace Institute, who lives in Framingham, Massachusetts.
“It’s partly economic concern,” Moquin said, because there are many more women in the workplace. “Also, the Family and Medical Leave Act requires companies to give new mothers three months off. Even though it’s unpaid, it’s hard on businesses for an employee to be gone. That, combined with the fact that more people are seeing this as a viable idea, has inspired companies and mothers to work something out.”
The most successful programs, Moquin said, are ones in which companies have written policies — to designate another employee as an alternate caregiver in case the parent is temporarily unavailable; to specify areas for breastfeeding or changing diapers; and to spell out the ages when children are allowed in the office. Usually, babies are allowed up until six to eight months, or before they start to crawl.
Even women who advocate bringing babies to the office say it can be rough.
“It’s far better for me to have my child at home. It’s hard to be your best work person and your best mom because you’re doing both things at one time,” said Denise McVey, president of S3, a 25-person advertising agency in Boonton, New Kersey, who brought her son to the office for his first eight months.
Borshoff, a communications firm in Indianapolis with 40 employees, has a Bring Your Baby to Work program for infants ages six weeks to six months. The firm pays 80 percent of an employee’s full salary when the child is in the office.
That way, the parent can devote energy to the child without feeling guilty.
“It feels very fair,” said Susan Matthews, principal of the firm. “We keep time sheets so we can monitor productivity and we see that parents really don’t maintain the same productivity levels.”
Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says she believes that taking children to the office can only enhance their development.
“There’s no reason to believe that children need to have absolute single-minded attention being paid to them with nothing else in the background,” she said.
Jacqueline Grace, president and chief executive of LifeTime Media, a publishing company in New York with nine employees, has been taking her daughter Alexandra, now five years old, to work since she was two months old — all day, every day.
Initially, Grace said, it was easy to work with Alexandra in her office.
“She slept, nursed and slept more,” said Grace, who would hold conference calls while breastfeeding or while Alexandra was asleep. “As she grew and needed more space to play, I gave her her own ‘office,’” Grace said. “She loved the idea of having an office — and a computer — like everyone else. Of course, her office had a bouncy seat for her and her dolls and games and balls and markers and bookshelves filled with colorful books.”
Grace says that all of her employees can bring their children to the office, in the belief that having children around creates a positive environment.
“People smile more; they’re more relaxed and playful,” she said. “It has been challenging at times, for them and for me — editing a book and hearing a three-year-old sing ‘Elmo’ don’t usually mix well — but we all adapt and learn to be respectful of our office-mates.”
She says that the arrangement has enhanced her daughter’s “self-esteem, her sense of security” and that it “has taught her so much about who she is, who she can be, as well as some amazing office skills in the process.”
Grace added that she has been careful to hire “baby-friendly people.”
“If you hate children,” she said, “LifeTime Media is not a place for you to work.”
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