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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?".

i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more conservative than i thought.

and as a parent, i find that very sad.

i wish every parent the opportunity to spend as much time with their children as they can. and if that means that they play where the parents are working, then i am all for it. rather that than sending them off to daycare. (there are exceptions of course where the environment is not safe for kids to play)

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The biggest benefit of working from home, which i have been doing since my older daughter (now an adult) was an year old. Self employed too, so have flexibility. I also home educate which would not have been as easy without working from home.

My last employer had childcare available onsite at work, and that should be more common too (I did not use it because my now ex did not work, but still very good for a lot of my colleagues).

I also find it sad how little time many parents have with their kids. We really need to make employment a lot more family friendly in general.

Not everyone loves children, is the unspoken unpopular thing to say. Even more unpopular: dogs. These are things I wish not to see in an office, nor a bar environment. Actually see isn't the issue, it's the uncontrollable, but considered normal, noise that I find stressful.

See I adore dogs and yet I can easily visualize and understand what your reaction would be like to having a dog around during your work day.

I find this or that sound a dog makes endearing- you find it annoying or worse. I find the mess a dog makes a mild inconvenience- you find it disgusting.

Instead of telling you you’re overreacting or that you’re being insensitive to people who are obligated for some reason to include their dog in your meeting with them, I can agree with you that you shouldn’t have to have dogs in your working life if you never chose this.

And it’s not me doing you a favor by accommodating your unique sensitivities; the default should be your version, not my version.

You posted 16 times about this in this thread. That's excessive. Please don't perpetuate flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Feedback gratefully accepted.

I’m defensive on this topic because I get a lot of flack for it. I’ll stop now.

I agree about dogs. Children however are just like adults in how they're all different and have their own personality etc., so I think society is suffering from delaying this integration into society. We all grow up and eventually have to integrate with others, and it seems because of this separation of ages that we will have a less cohesive society and culture in so many ways (which I think is visible already, as mentioned in this thread).

As an intentional non-parent who lived for a decade in several Asian countries: work calls are for doing work.

Serious people don’t let their kids talk over their meetings.

Chill with the attitude, you have no idea what she’s been through with her kid. Maybe the kid just got off from a tantrum or something.

I find it equally probable she just doesn’t give a shit. People bend over backward to give people like this the benefit of the doubt for some reason.

/wfh parent of two

The thinking is if they have a kid then they’re the victims of heartless monsters (e.g. me) who expect them to work at the same level of professionalism as people who don’t have kids.

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