The morning before I was presenting a paper at a Beat Generation Studies conference in Paris, the babysitter I’d arranged to watch my daughter texted to say she couldn’t make it. Worried I’d have to cancel the presentation, I asked the organizers, two men, if they knew of any last-minute babysitters.

“Bring her!” they said. “We’re fathers of six kids between us. We’ll watch her.”

So, with trepidation, I did. While I presented my work in an auditorium, the director and my moderator entertained my daughter by letting her draw on the whiteboard and then, to my horror, the walls. During the Q&A, my daughter demanded to nurse. As she did, her diaper leaked on to my pants. Afterward, several people came up to me to laud my bringing her. A middle-aged woman reminisced that one of her favorite memories was bringing her daughter to her thesis defense.

Unfortunately, my experience is not the norm. For most working women, bringing their children to work or having a flexible schedule is not an option. When flexibility is offered, like in the case of this London-based investment banker, it comes with a huge caveat: advancement is less likely for parents, usually mothers, who request flexibility. This can hit single parents – currently 35% of US children live in single-parent households – particularly hard.

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While one solution may be for companies to offer new parents the ability to bring their babies to their workplace or offer on-site childcare, as of 2016, only 200 companies had official policies allowing children to be present at a workplace during working hours. And, of course, there are many industries (construction, factory work, and medicine, for example) where allowing children at the workplace would be dangerous. Moreover, it is often those parents who are in most need of flexibility – single parents or those in low-wage jobs – who are least likely to have it.

I have been deeply privileged to have a partner who works a more traditional job, so I could take time to build a career with more flexibility for child rearing: I co-founded a remote-work startup, published a novel and went on a book tour, all while a new mother. Yet my partner regularly scoffs when I ask him to bring our daughter to work with him – what would his clients think? Company culture and industry standards obviously play a huge role in the “bring a kid to work” idea. When an industry like my partner’s (real estate finance) is made up almost entirely of men, it becomes even more difficult to shift the culture, though I was pleased to overhear him recently on a call from home say, “I’m working from home today, so you may hear my toddler screaming,” which precipitated a longer parenting conversation with his client, also a father.

While not common, bringing children to work is a rising phenomenon and seemingly most visible in governance. Take New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, for example. Ardern made news for bringing her three-month-old to the UN general assembly in September. Recognizing her circumstances are different from the general public’s, she said, “If I can do one thing, and that is change the way we think about these things, then I will be pleased we have achieved something.”

It is often those parents who are in most need of flexibility – single parents or those in low-wage jobs – who are least likely to have it

Likewise, Australian senator Larissa Waters was lauded last year for breastfeeding her baby while voting on a resolution in parliament. Closer to home, Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth successfully spearheaded a groundbreaking resolution to allow children under the age of one on to the US Senate floor.

In a less deliberate case of workplace-family intersection, there’s the viral video of Professor Robert Kelly’s children bursting on to the scene of his BBC interview. The incident raised a variety of questions about why he didn’t address the presence of his children as well as arguments about how his wife retrieved the children. Interestingly, Kelly said he thought the intrusion of his children meant he’d “blown it in front of the whole world”. Kelly’s assumption that the visibility of his children during the interview would somehow tarnish his credibility as an academic speaks to the fact that we still harbor assumptions that our children aren’t welcome and that it’s unprofessional to take an interview or a work call while home (yet in a 2016 survey, 43% of working adults said they spent some time working remotely).

Like the widespread support for Kelly’s mishap (his older child even became an internet meme), I am fortunate I never felt my child’s presence was offensive to my audience – not even when she ran on to the stage at a Beijing literary festival, crawled on my lap and started nursing. To the contrary, many students in the audience, especially women, noted it was inspiring and empowering that I wasn’t ashamed of my intersecting role of mother and professional.

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And why should I be? The reality is that most Americans can no longer rely on the traditional nuclear family to raise the next generation. Our villages have dissolved, and while we often call on family, friends or, as is usually the case, paid childcare to fill in the gaps, the idea that our work identities are somehow fully separate from our home selves clearly has damaging consequences for all. Women often feel like they’re “failing” as mothers and in their careers. “Doing it all” has really just meant the bulk of the emotional labor in a household falls to women.

I wonder what the world would look like if children were more integrated into the workplace. What if more parents (and, given the gender pay gap, especially women) had access to resources that allowed them the ability to balance family and career? What if (and here’s a big wish) caring for another human being was considered valuable work, even something worthy of mentioning on a résumé?

One of my earliest, fondest memories of my mother is the click of her heels on our hardwood floors on the mornings she readied for work. Although she only worked part-time at a small insurance agency she inherited from her parents, I knew the office well – the smell of burnt coffee, the typewriter I’d play with while my mother worked. As a child, I didn’t realize how lasting that influence would be, how I respected both my mother’s independence at work and also her introduction of me to her working self.

In bringing this generation of children to working events or offices, we’re teaching them a valuable lesson about work-life balance, as well as the intersecting identities we inhabit on a daily basis. My hope is that, when these children become our world’s leaders, they’ll remember we didn’t shut them out of work spaces. As a result, they will build the policies and support systems for a more equitable and enjoyable workplace.