Babies in the Workplace

The contents of this website are based on more than two years of extensive research of more than 100 organizations around the United States (and a few in other countries) that allow their employees to bring their babies to work on a regular basis. I interviewed dozens of executives, managers, coworkers, and parents about their experiences bringing babies to work and ended up discovering that, if baby programs were carefully structured, they had the potential to be highly successful in a wide range of organization sizes and types.

The key to success for these programs is setting them up just like any other workplace policy--with clear rules and expectations to guide people's behavior and to prevent potential problems. In well-structured programs, parents are highly responsive to their babies's needs, which results in the babies being very content. These happy babies transform the work environment and coworkers frequently bond with the babies as individuals and become invested in helping to nurture them. A community parenting dynamic invariably occurs in which coworkers and executives frequently (voluntarily) "pitch in" to help with the babies' care by holding or playing with the babies for a few minutes at a time or by taking them for short walks. In essence, structured workplace programs replicate a "village" model of working and caring for children, and even many coworkers and executives who were highly resistant to these programs prior to implementation find themselves enthusiastically supporting the programs once they see how well they work in practice.