Babies at Work: It’s Weird That It’s Weird

It's only "weird that it's not weird" because the author has limited the viewpoint to the subjective experience of some kind of homogeneous office environment. As an employer that essentially offers services, that's pretty much the sum totality (as far as I can discern) of their working environment, and the same solution and privilege can thus be extended to all.

In my subjective experience, as an employer in the chemical manufacturing sector, there can be far more diversity. What to do of those parents in the laboratories, or the production facilities? Do they get denied a privilege their office-dwelling fellow employees can enjoy? Or does there need to be an obligation to rotate workers from incompatible positions to compatible positions?

And of course the liabilities... they'd be beyond enormous.

Look, I'm the third generation in a family firm. I got brought to work as a kid by my father, to these very facilities, as he had been decades before. However, in hindsight, though I have sometimes explicitly allowed some office workers who made direct requests (100% of the time) to bring in some older children (in the 8-to-12 range), the idea of having the added volatility of children, kids, and associated endogenous emergencies is horrifying.

The workplace must (also) be a place of professionalism and decorum, and somehow I really don't see this being all that compatible. Yeah yeah yeah: sense of community, enlarged family, & cetera, but...

(Note: Italy, no kids.)

Do everything at work. Take your pants off. Get comfortable.