Child care bridges two worlds
Employers open the door to on-the-job parenting
SOMERVILLE - One recent morning at the offices of Farm Aid, as managers sat around a long table and talked business, Shailagh Heneghan got cranky.
She squirmed. She grumbled. She made sure everyone knew her displeasure. And so the staff did what they often do at Wednesday meetings: The associate director of the 22-year-old organization held Shailagh. Then the campaign director tucked her under his arm in the football hold. Finally, the operations director lifted Shailagh into her arms.
"We sort of did pass-the-baby," said Wendy Matusovich, Shailagh's mother and Farm Aid's resource development director.
When Matusovich returned to Farm Aid's Somerville headquarters from her maternity leave earlier this year, she did not return alone. With the blessing of her bosses and the agreement of her 11 co-workers, she brought Shailagh, now 6 months old, to share her office. While the baby slept in her car seat or gazed at a black-and-white dangling mobile, Matusovich did her work, sending e-mails, talking on the phone, attending meetings.
Farm Aid, the nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting family farmers, is joining a wave of employers experimenting with "parenting at work" policies that allow workers to bring their children, including infants, into the office. The practice blurs the line between office and home life, and is designed to help parents balance the delicate juggle of those two worlds.
An increasing number of employers are also allowing parents to bring children to work when regular child care falls through - when schools are closed or a nanny calls in sick. A national survey this year by the Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management found that the number of respondents in offices with policies for those emergency child-care situations increased from 22 to 29 percent over the past year.
But the most ambitious programs allow babies regularly at work, often until they start crawling or walking. Some, such as Vermont's Zutano, a children's clothing company, provide new parents with cribs, Diaper Genies, and changing tables.
"It's a very exploratory area right now," said Mary Secret, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Social Work who has studied companies that allow children at work. "Businesses are doing this now because it makes business sense for them," she said. "It helps with their productivity. It keeps absenteeism down. It helps with retention and recruitment."
It may not be a perfect solution for employers and co-workers. With babies needing attention at least every couple of hours for feeding, diaper changing, and other demands, they can be more of a distraction than an attraction for employers who may want to get a new parent back at the office sooner than usual.
And so the practice remains quite rare. Carla Moquin, a Framingham legal secretary with a consulting business on babies in the workplace, found about 85 employers across the country with such policies, although she believes there are many more.
"A lot of these companies started it because they just didn't see any other way of getting the work done," Moquin said. "They said, 'Is there any way we can get you to come back? You can bring the baby.' "
The arrangement does not work with all babies or in all workplaces. Zutano, for example, had to ask the mother of one screamer to make other arrangements. In other cases, workplaces are too dangerous for children.
David Yas, publisher of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and a new legal magazine, Exhibit A, was skeptical about parenting during work hours. Yas, a father of two sons, occasionally works from home but gets less done than at the office.
"The kid needs to eat. The kid needs to poop," he said. "It's a distraction. You won't be doing as much work as you normally do. There's a reason why there are day-care centers. There's a reason there are nannies."
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"At work, the climate is not conducive for an infant," she said. "It's actually a disadvantage to the child and to the parent."
Parents cannot give children the attention they need while they're working, Vetter said. And, children would be exposed to the germs passed around in a large company.
"I think it would be very distracting to everyone around," she added.
Moquin advocates establishing policies to govern baby-at-work programs. For instance, some employers reserve the right to decide that a particular baby is disruptive and notify parents that they must find another source of child care. But both Secret and Moquin found that is rarely necessary.
In the decades since two-worker families became common, parents have found quality child care expensive and elusive. Most parents cannot rely on their extended families to care for their children. Women who return to work when their babies are young often find it difficult to breast-feed their children for at least the first year, in accordance with the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines.
At FCD Educational Services in Newton, at the invitation of company officials, two women have brought their babies with them after maternity leave. Now, a third is pregnant, and Thomas A. Gee, senior vice president and chief financial officer, has offered the same arrangement to her.
"It's not only good for the employee to have this flexibility . . . but it's really good for the [other] employees in the organization, whether they have children or not. It kind of gives them a different view of where they work," said Gee, former present of Southern Vermont College.
At Farm Aid, which was made famous by Willie Nelson's benefit concerts, Matusovich returned to her job six weeks after giving birth and has continued to work part time - mostly at the office, but also at home.
She sends e-mail while Shailagh lies on a blanket, or makes calls while Shailagh sleeps. When she nurses, Matusovich pulls a shower curtain across the open side of her office.
At Zutano, the company began allowing babies five years ago. Company officials wanted to encourage the production manager, Denise Towne, to return quickly after giving birth and suggested she bring her new son with her.
Towne started taking her baby to the office when he was 9 weeks old. She worked part time for a month, then returned full time.
The arrangement meant she could stay later at work, if necessary. And although her son was a bit of a fussy baby, he didn't cry much at work. Towne, of course, is still expected to finish her work.
"He was always entertained by things that were happening in the office," she said. "There were all these things to look at and all these people coming in and out."
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com. 