Babies at Work in Arizona

A recent article in the Arizona Daily Star profiles the Arizona Department of Health Services, which has a bring-baby-to-work policy. (Read the whole story here.) Included are interviews with moms and dads who have taken advantage of the program, as well as one mom for whom the arrangement didn't work. Here's an excerpt:

Don Herrington, bureau chief of epidemiology disease control, acknowledges that he was skeptical early on.

"My initial thought was that infants at work would require lots of attention from Mom and Dad, and it would be disastrous from a productivity perspective. Then I thought, with crying and other noises babies make, that it could be disruptive for the rest of the staff."

Herrington kept his concerns to himself, though, and closely watched what happened when the first mom came through. He found that workers were happier after seeing the baby. Morale went up. The staffers interacted more.

Plus, he said, the presence of a baby helped to reaffirm all the things his department preaches about health, from immunizations to hand-washing. "It brings home why we do the things we do," he said.

Now Herrington is one of the program's biggest boosters, saying he has yet to receive a complaint.

"It was 180 degrees just opposite of what I expected."

More interesting than the article, though, were some of the responses readers posted online. Like Herrington, it seems, many people leap to conclusions without ever having actually encountered a baby in an office, which makes much of the discussion a typical online exercise in vitriolic responses to hypothetical situations.

There is some balance, including at least one reader who admits to having worked with two babies, one of which worked out well, and the other of which didn't, and concludes that it depends on the baby and the mom and the coworkers and the workplace. Well, um, yeah.

But the thing that always strikes me in discussions like this is the utter fanaticism people bring to their work--or at least to talking about their work. I like to think I'm pretty hard-core (or, at least pretty hard-core for working part-time at a nonprofit): I check my work email pretty compulsively, sometimes embarrassingly so, I think about work in the shower and the car and sometimes even in my sleep. Heck, I went back three weeks after having a damn baby, because I missed it and knew there was work that wasn't getting done while I was gone. And I've always sort of been that way; at my very first summer job, tending a turnstile at a zoo, it was weeks before I really learned how to lighten up and take all the break time I was entitled to, not to mention the whole half hour for lunch. I figured, it only took five minutes to eat my sandwich, why not get back to work? Which, in retrospect, was idiotic, and I did figure that out eventually, though I never got really good at playing the system.

But some of these folks are, I think, robots. For example, the person who writes, "People go to work to make a living and give their utmost to their employer ... not to attend a nursery function."

I'm with her on the "to make a living" part, and I would maybe add "to contribute to something larger than themselves" and "to feel a sense of purpose," but I think the idea of going to work for the purpose of giving your "utmost to your employer" is a little wacko. I mean, assuming you're a good worker, you probably do it anyway, but is it really why you go to work?