We’ve been on and off discussing bringing babies into work, and that seems like a good enough excuse for posting these extremely adorable pictures of Italian MEP Licia Ronzulli and her daughter Vittoria Cerioli. Vittoria is now three years old, although obviously she’s not three in all of these photos.
Jane Martinson in The Guardian:
As a woman whose own children were forced to push increasingly desperate notes under the door to garner any attention whenever I worked from home, I realise that not everyone can copy Ronzulli. Or even want to. But, while not all of Ronzulli’s politics (nor indeed her liking for pink mobile phone covers) are to my taste, it’s refreshing to see what she has done. Most parents in less privileged positions are forced to lie about sick children or vital school meetings to bosses who are less than understanding. Ronzulli’s actions at least suggest that, instead of pretending they don’t exist or even closing the door to their entreatries, accepting the presence and involvement of children could be good for us all.
Important to keep in mind, I think, that this could never be a solution for many of us. Regardless of whether it would be allowed I couldn’t work with my children around; can’t concentrate well enough when there’s a possibility of interruption.
That being said, the first picture is ridiculously adorable.
Yeah, though my wife, Lioness, has made children in the workplace work on her side of the family income, it’s probably safe to say it wouldn’t work out well on my side.
That said, these photos put a broad smile on my face, and it’s nice to see when people can make it work, and we should move things toward more people being able to make it work.
Grace
Yeah, one of my grad school friends had three kids born while she was in grad school, and she almost always had one or two of them in the office with her. She and her husband, who was also a grad student, had a really complicated schedule worked out, with which kids would be where when. (It helped a lot that their income was low enough that their oldest qualified for the free pre-k program.) (Although, she was actually back to teaching within a day or two after the second and third kids were born. Nearly all of the rest of us grad students told her to take at least a week or two off, that we could easily cover the three class sessions per week that she taught, but one of the professors had given her a whole lecture about deciding what her priorities were, after she failed a qualifying exam a few months after the first baby was born, and after that, she was scared to take any more time off, because people might think that she wasn’t serious about her degree. So she was in front of a classroom with a two-day-old baby in a sling.)
Oh, and as grad students, we had shared offices. When we were deciding at the end of each year who would be in which office for the next year, we always had one designated “baby office,” and no one would be assigned to that office unless they said they were OK with sometimes working while there were little kids crawling around, and sometimes mothers breast-feeding or pumping. (I’m not sure what we would have done if there had been a father who brought a baby into the office, since we always made the baby office all-female, at the request of the nursing/pumping mothers who weren’t comfortable doing that in front of guys.)