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Off to Work We Go—Baby in Tow!
By Annie Feighery
Welcoming work places and flexible schedules help moms make ends meet without leaving baby behind.
Issue 128, January - February 2005

The nonprofit sector of the American economy was largely created and designed by women, and it continues to provide many women more family-friendly working arrangements that ease their struggles in balancing family life, financial needs, and career ambitions.

My introduction to the unique benefits nonprofits can offer mothers came a few years ago, when, after months of toggling childcare with my spouse, I began to look for a position with a higher salary and/or fewer hours than my museum position offered. I found a nonprofit group in my neighborhood with an intercultural focus similar to my interests as an anthropologist and writer. In my efforts to present myself as a capable, stable employee, I explained in my interview that I was a new mother, but that I would have full-time childcare for my five-month-old son. The director scoffed at the notion of putting such a young child in a program. She had founded the organization with a baby on her hip, and there was no reason I shouldn’t work with my baby on mine.

Remembering how young and malleable I was in those first months of motherhood, I feel eternally grateful for that wise advice. It helped set me on a career path that would forever include my children rather than separate me from them. Later, when I found out that the organization could not pay me at the level I needed, this detail was easily offset by the $11,000 I would not be spending on inner-city childcare each year.

The women who founded that organization, Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts (MECA), were Latina mothers who worked for their communities through
the church but had no paid positions. They served in this way largely because their cultural tradition so highly valued service to the community, and because 1960s and ’70s America—still trying to absorb into the workforce veterans returning from the war in Vietnam—offered few opportunities for women to have a paid career. In the 1970s, the US government opened up grants for community service organizations that sparked a wildfire of nonprofit organizations, largely run by women. In MECA’s case, a committee of an inner-city Catholic church had become so unified in its mission to educate children in their cultural traditions while providing after-school and summer programming that, with the new government funding, it became an autonomous organization. Its founders had always done their volunteering with their children at their side, and this didn’t change in the transition. The first paid careers for mothers working with their children beside them were created with the birth of the nonprofit movement.

The first obstacle I encountered as a professional working with my baby was my low self-esteem. I had to remind myself that women have always worked with their children, that only the industrial age had separated the family, and that I was made to multitask by thousands of years of evolutionary design. In her book Mother Nature, socioanthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy postulates that the baby sling was the most important tool in the advancement of our species—it put women in the workforce, doubling the number of adult hands gathering food and giving humans a competitive advantage that made possible their journeys beyond the continent of Africa. Inspired by my ancestors, I donned my baby sling and went to work.

My first days were filled with blushing moments of milk leaking through my shirt and feigned confidence as I wore my baby to meetings. But those days were also a gradual awakening. My motherhood was celebrated and recognized at MECA in a way that had been, until then, utterly foreign to me. I began to feel a part of a respected circle of women.

I was a mother.

Since the 1970s, nonprofits have changed quite a bit.

Today, service organizations often follow business practices established by for-profit capitalist businesses and corporations. While this more professional style has no doubt increased private donations, it reflects a great loss in the tradition of service. Furthermore, it removes the main outlet a woman had to contribute to her community and earn money to support her family while remaining connected to her children. Particularly because allowing women to work with their children supports the family unit, and allows cash-strapped agencies to attract workers at lower pay, I encourage the nonprofit culture to return to this fading legacy. The success of this arrangement depends on the temperaments of parents and children as well as the flexibility
of employers, but if all ingredients are present, the arrangement is a winning one for everyone. Aside from the financial benefits, working with your young ones offers them vastly different experiences that stimulate brain development and prepare them for a lifetime of exposure to people of different backgrounds. Employers who can offer such community-oriented support benefit from dedicated, appreciative employees and their own participation in a progressive, family-centered model.

How to work with your children
In practice, caring for your child at work is similar to caring for your child at home. (This includes the occasional high-need day, when a child cannot be put down.) Whether or not mothers are paid for their efforts, they routinely multitask, caring for and entertaining their children while accomplishing daily duties. I’m often asked how I keep a child self-entertained while working. Each baby can play on his or her own for short spurts during the day; the schedule of the workday easily becomes the daily routine all babies otherwise create themselves.
The logistics of raising a child in the office largely depend on a closely attached but well-structured parenting style. The rhythmic parenting that comes from deeply attaching to and therefore knowing your child is converted into a rhythmic work schedule. One thing that offices don’t tolerate is child noise. Older children must strictly adhere to the rules and boundaries of “work hours,” and nursing on demand is the simplest way to soothe a baby before a cry can erupt. Rather than nursing or feeding on a schedule, be free to nurse your baby at every phone call during which you need silence, or during a quick break before a meeting. Develop the confidence in your parenting that will allow you to parent by instinct and focus on the tasks at hand.
One tool that makes working with an infant easier is a sheepskin. New babies want and need to be held often, and working parents need empty arms. Often, a sling is ideal for this situation, but sometimes typing or other tasks require the baby to be set down. Wool is particularly apt to pick up smells; if you sleep with your baby’s sheepskin for a few nights, it captures much of your smell. Additionally, wool reflects heat. When you lay a baby on the sheepskin, he or she still feels warmly held, and rests or plays more contentedly. The sheepskin can line a Moses basket or be laid on the floor next to you and carried from place to place. (If you or your child are sensitive to wool, you can use a small cotton quilt for this purpose.)

Make the office space you devote to your child easily changeable. Babies habituate quickly to environments, at which point they can become bored. Aside from the fact that the absence of stimulation will suppress development, a bored baby is more likely to fuss and cry. Toys should be changed out every week; each set should disappear for a full two weeks in order to stimulate anew when it reappears. The sides of a playpen can be decorated with visually stimulating cloths or throws; these, too, should be changed out periodically. Different music played low next to the baby’s play area is also a nice way to freshen the surroundings.

Working with children requires a mindset different from that of the more traditional office. You have to become very conscious of efficient productivity. This requires being mindful of how the time in your week is allotted. Red-ink your schedule’s areas that are highly time-consuming but not highly productive, and build on the successes of the most productive periods of your workweek.

Learn to react to difficult work situations without stress. The baby by your side will naturally absorb your emotions; you don’t want to turn your children into little high-blood-pressure bombs by reacting to every crisis with stress. Visualizations and breathing exercises are effective ways of letting go of stressful moments, but you must remain aware of your mental state so you know when to use these techniques.

Working with children requires flexibility on your part, and on the part of your colleagues. If your personality doesn’t lend itself to flexibility, you may have to accept that this arrangement is not for you. Acknowledging this in advance can prevent you, your children, your coworkers, and your employer from having a bad experience that will permanently color their views of on-the-job parenting.

Meetings
One of the biggest challenges when working with your baby is the meeting. In the nonprofit world, board and committee meetings are often held after traditional work hours for the sake of volunteers who have their own jobs. This gives you an opportunity to schedule meetings when your spouse or relatives can watch your children. But attending some meetings with a child will be unavoidable.

Beyond the difficulty of encouraging your colleagues to focus on the meeting despite a baby’s presence and occasional sounds, you’ll feel like an acrobat spinning plates as you try to remain aware of your child’s needs while participating in the discussion. Zen breathing, or similar prayer or meditation exercises, can help you train your mind to respond in a calm and focused fashion and can make your inner composure visible. Retaining composure is critical—both your child and your colleagues will be watching you for cues to indicate whether this is a stressful situation or a normal, if unusual one. This isn’t to say you should discourage questions about the baby, or about how you balance these seemingly disparate responsibilities. Such curiosity can be a deeply expressed compliment. Cheerily answer the questions and gently redirect the questioner’s focus back to work with your own work-oriented question.

In a child’s early months, meetings can be nursed and napped through. Keeping your baby slung is an ideal way to conceal nursing from colleagues for whom nursing is foreign, distracting, or even offensive. In later months and years, meetings may require bringing a blanket to lay on the floor, snacks such as frozen banana chunks or bagels, and a special set of “meeting toys” that the child otherwise never sees. Increasingly mobile children may eventually require a playpen or a defined play area.

Working from home
After I’d raised one child through early toddlerhood in the office, I experienced a bed-rest pregnancy that demanded I make the transition to working from home, sometimes with and sometimes without help from loved ones and caregivers. After this birth, I decided to remain at home, and I found a whole new rhythm to the juggling act that is working with children.
In some ways, working with your child or children in your home can be more difficult than working with children in an office. Humans are social creatures; our brains are sometimes more productive when we can bounce ideas off colleagues, and we are generally happier when we have adult social interaction. Working at home—an environment in which you otherwise take leisure—requires discipline. Your home abounds with distractions, from the ever-full kitchen sink to the TV to magazines that have just arrived in the mail. When you do succeed in conceiving of the home as the place where you work, you may find it hard to again conceive of it as a place where you relax at the end of the day. This perception, in turn, may encourage you to work during your leisure time, which hurts your time with your family and hastens burnout.

However, working from home is easier in some ways. The children have all their toys, books, videos, and pets to entertain them, and you have all your parenting tools, such as bouncy chairs and activity centers. You can walk into another room for a quieter phone conversation, or just a moment of peace. The biggest advantage of working from home, if you have the choice, is that it’s easier for an older child or children to blend into your work schedule there than in an open office space that requires serious noise control.

When working from home, arrange your home office area to maximize productivity. Most important, install a high-speed data connection. Time that the children are sleeping or occupied is so golden that you don’t want to waste it waiting for text to download. Plus, your always-connected status to your office will help your colleagues be less aware of your geographic distance.
Choose a laptop over a desktop computer, if possible. Install a wireless network so that your whole house is a WiFi zone. This way, you can sit on the floor in your kids’ room while they play, remaining near them when both work and children require your time.

The 2/3 solution
If your spouse—or mother, sibling, or friend—is able to change his or her work schedule, a great option for working and avoiding daycare is the two-thirds solution. This requires a flexible employer and is not possible for all parents. In this arrangement, the parents each reduce their hours in the office by one-third. That time is spent either not working or working from home. In a typical situation, both partners work eight-hour days. They each spend six hours in the office and toggle those hours so that one works from 6 a.m. till noon, and the other works from roughly 12:30 p.m. till 6:30 p.m. Especially in the first eight months, a baby is very likely to sleep at least two hours during both of these work shifts; during that time, the at-home parent can work.

Even if you aren’t allowed to work from home, toggling your hours can help you avoid childcare. I returned to work early from maternity leave. I “banked” the remaining three weeks I had left and drew upon them so that I could work shorter days. My spouse works for NASA and was able to use his paternity leave (officially flexible sick leave offered by the federal government) in small chunks over these months as well.

You can offer to take a reduction in pay proportional to the number of hours you won’t be in the office, but promise to keep productivity near the full-time level, perhaps for a trial period of four to six weeks. During the normal workday, people often take coffee breaks and spend time chatting or eating. Employers usually recognize these breaks as important for their employees’ morale, but most supervisors are very aware of the time their workers aren’t working. You can often find ways to increase your productivity by working through lunch at your desk and skipping these breaks.

If you want to present the two-thirds solution to your boss, bring a list of what the company or organization can get out of the arrangement. Some metropolitan areas offer tax incentives for companies to encourage green, or environmentally friendly, commuting; working from home can sometimes fall into this category. If you are a federal employee, your agency might be under a mandate to encourage green commutes as well as flexible-location positions. Regardless, both mother and father can use their Family Medical Leave Act time to care for a newborn child. The FMLA covers leave time for the care of a spouse, child, or parent, and accrues as you work. FMLA leave is the only form of maternity or paternity leave offered to many American workers. It is not always paid leave, but it is leave you are guaranteed. If only one partner’s employer is receptive to this arrangement, the other partner can still manipulate FMLA leave time to cover the gaps.

When it stops working
Eventually, most mothers who work with their children in the office get to the point where either their productivity or their interaction with their children takes a hit. At this point you have several options for modifying your situation without giving it up altogether. Bringing a caregiver on-site raises liability concerns with employers. However, state childcare codes allow organizations such as churches to set up childcare areas without changes to the building, as long as a parent is on-site. Especially if your colleagues also work with children and can share the financial burden, under the protection of these codes you can bring in a helper to watch and entertain everyone’s children without turning your location into a full-fledged daycare facility. The helper doesn’t typically cost a lot of money if he or she is a teenager, a college student, or an immigrant learning job skills such as English before moving into a more lucrative job.
Similarly, government policy standards easily allow parents to create babysitting co-ops. You and three colleagues can adapt this option so that each of you watches the children for one hour during the workday.

This leaves four hours, at least two of which will be taken up by a nap; the remaining two can easily be split into small periods of eating, playing with toys, reading books, and/or watching movies.

If neither of these solutions helps, you might consider a part-time preschool or mothers’ day-out program that offers just a few hours of care during the hours in your child’s day when he or she most needs stimulation.

Workplace hazards
Workplaces often use industrial-strength cleansers and pesticides. You’ll have to be especially vigilant about the presence of toxins in such environments. You can offer to clean your own work space, then do so using only vinegar, a duster, and a vacuum cleaner.

All workplaces, and most homes, have childproofing problems. You will have to be watchful until your child is old enough to learn to avoid electrical cords. If coworkers’ desks are near your child’s play area, gently ask them to be aware of what they put in their lower desk drawers. Bring outlet plugs, cabinet safety locks, and wall anchors for file cabinets and bookshelves, and install them yourself.

Nonprofits in particular are often located in old buildings. Keep an eye out for peeling paint, and never let your baby lick or suck on walls. As often as you see it, sweep up dust with a sheepskin cloth or another sort of duster that actually captures the dust.

Frustration, accomplishment, happiness
The emotional challenge of working with your baby is a deep sense of frustration from never having enough time to focus on your job or your child. I found that the best way to combat this angst is a rigid and realistic view of my productivity. Don’t try to do more than you can do, or you’ll cheat your child and never feel a sense of accomplishment—a necessary emotion for happiness at work.

For more information about working with children, see the following articles in past issues of Mothering: “I Am a Woman Working at Home,” no. 31; “Redefining Work,” no. 48; “A Common Covenant,” no. 52; “Children at Work,” no. 56; and “You Can Breastfeed by E-mail,” no. 100. For more related material, go to www.mothering.com

Annie Feighery is an anthropologist, writer, blogger, wife, and mother of two beautiful children, Aidan and Eleanor.