Workplaces Conducive to Raising Children

We could also immediately change workplaces to allow for part-time work that has similar benefits and pay to full-time work and to allow for flexible hours and career paths. Our own workplaces, the universities, provide both very good and very bad examples. For years professors have worked at home and determined their own schedules with no loss of productivity. On the other hand, the career structure of universities is deeply in conflict with the imperatives of evolution—the years when we expect academics to work the hardest and longest hours are exactly the years when women can have children.

The very automaticity of our response to babies suggests that it can be combined with doing other things, as it surely was in the Pleistocene. Perhaps the telecommuting home office with the crib next to the fax machine will turn out to be the contemporary equivalent of the baby in the sling on his mother's back or the father plowing next to his children. Perhaps the circle of fellow workers and friends will help replace the extended family group. Grandparents and uncles and aunts have also disappeared from children's lives just when they are most needed, and grandchildren and nieces and nephews have sadly disappeared from our lives. Perhaps we will construct institutions that allow people whose own children have grown up, or who don't have children, to be involved with other people's children.

Alison Gopnik, Patricia K. Kuhl, Andrew N. Meltzoff, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (2001-01-01)

• children
• parenting