Like many moms, Phoenix resident Cara Christ was back in the office just six weeks after giving birth. But unlike the rest of us, she didn’t have to leave her child with a caregiver to do it.

That’s because Christ’s employer, the Arizona Department of Health Services, has an infants-at-work policy, which allows a parent to bring and care for their baby in the office until they are six months old. “I’d wear her in a Moby wrap to meetings,” Christ says of her now-20-month-old daughter. “She’d sleep in her Pack ‘n Play in my office.”

While programs like this are rare — only about 200 companies in the U.S. have them — the number of companies offering them has more than doubled in roughly the past decade, says Carla Moquin, founder and president of the nonprofit Parenting in the Workplace Institute, which works to get companies to adopt formal programs allowing babies and children in the workplace.

Generally, the companies say they offer this kind of program to give parents more bonding time with their children, but there are other benefits to the companies as well. This perk is generally far less costly to institute than something like on-site daycare, and it may get employees back to work faster. Christ says that without the policy, she would likely have taken the full 12 weeks of maternity leave, rather than gone back after about six.

Emmie takes a break. Cara Christ

It also creates goodwill among the parents participating, says Dee Fitzgerald, the marketing and PR manager for body care company Badger Balm, which has had a babies-at-work policy since 2008. And Michael Belenky, the founder of baby clothing company Zutano, which has had such a policy in place for more than a decade, notes that some of the program’s participants “have been some of our longest-term and most loyal employees.”



While the five companies MarketWatch interviewed spoke positively about the programs and said they planned to continue them, there can be problems. Some babies aren’t calm enough to be in a workplace without frequently distracting other workers. (When this happened at the companies we spoke to, the parents arranged other childcare out of the office.) And some parents won’t be able to get much, if any, work done when their baby is present 24/7.

Emmie takes a break. Cara Christ

Usually, the companies have a written policy in place to address issues like this. For example, the Washington State Department of Health’s policy states that if the baby remains upset despite the employees efforts to calm him, the employee should “walk away from the work area with [the] infant, even outside to help calm them” and if this doesn’t work, consider taking him home for the day. Some companies gave the parents their own office, if they didn’t already have one, to minimize potential distractions to others.

The agency also asks that employees you only change the your baby’s diapers in the restroom, bring their own container to dispose of diapers and take them home at the end of the day, and disinfect surfaces if there is a diapering or feeding accident. Parents at Hawaii First Federal Credit Union must select another employee as their back-up caregiver, in case they have in-office duties they can’t do with their child. Plus, most companies note that others can ask the employee to stop bringing their child to work if the arrangement isn’t working out.

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For the parents, there are big benefits to these programs, including financial ones. “Saving money is one of the best parts of the program,” says Vincent Churchill, whose son came to work with him at Zutano in 2009 rather than going to daycare. “Daycare is expensive in Vermont.” And that’s true across the country: The average annual cost of full-time, center-based daycare in this country is now more than $11,000, according to data from child care awareness group Child Care Aware of America.

But the main thing parents who brought their children to work rave about is the extra bonding. Christ says she loved the time she got to spend with her daughter that she wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It was nice to have those additional months with her,” she says. But, she jokes, there was a downside: It was hard to get in and out of the restroom with her baby in just a few minutes. “People see and want to play with her and hold her.”