I think that children at workplaces are a difficult issue.
1. When I was a child my grandparent (already retired) was doing a part-time job as a gatekeeper at a hotel during the summertime. Because both of my partents were working, and there was a summer break at the kindergarden, sometimes I was taken there to be with him during the day at the hotel.
This was mostly possibly because I was quite a good kid, if I were given a few toys, I would stay put in one place. Plus, I loved my grandpa a lot. But I do remember being quite bored there.
2. When I was working at a startup, one of our colleagues was a single mother and sometimes she had to bring her child to the office, because she had no one to watch over him. We accomodated this pretty well, he was also a well behaving child. Although there was one instance when he was next door to the developer team, just a day before release, and what happened is that we helped him expand his vocabulary... in a direction not approved by his mother :)
But I always felt a bit uncomfortable about this issue. And not because of the mother or the child. I felt uncomfortable because I was thinking - if Judit is allowed to do that, would András be allowed as well? He had a child and the mother often went aboard for conferences. And when I get a child, would I be allowed to bring him to the office as well? I always wanted to take a great part in raising my children, so it would be great if I could bring a child to the workplace. And ofc it was quite clear that no, it cannot be the norm. An office of 20 ppl could work with 1 child present, but not with many.
I organize conventions and every now and then I get a request that "Can I bring my dog with me? It's a super well behaving dog, he won't do anything bad, pretty please!". And it pains me but I always have to say no these requests. Because one dog wouldn't be a problem, but if I allow one person to do that, then I have no justification not to allow it to others. We have 10,000 visitors, probably 1000 of them has a dog, and a 100 would love to bring his dog to the convention. And 100 dogs would wreck the whole place.
The issue is the same with children at workplaces.
3. I have an acquitance who is a professor of philosophy. She took her 1 year old baby to conferences aboard and then she complained (in the usual angry-feminist style) the lack of facilities for baby-care at conference places.
Now I think that it's nice that people tolerate this, but I think it's not rational to expect it to be the norm. Because if you go to a philosophy conference, you want to listen to the lecturer and not to babies crying in the background.
So my experience with this (both as a child and as a co-worker) is that it works but it is not ideal for anyone involved. It's only an emergency measure.
Jacinda Arden and her child at the UN
So, what about this PM and her child? Well what is quite obvious that she was not in an emergency. She could have easily arranged care for her baby. Hell, she had her husband with her, why not simply leave the baby with the father at the hotel and some bottled milk? That would be a very good solution to the situation.
So she did not bring her child to the UN because she had no other options. She bought her child to the UN to show off, to send some a message.
The question is, what is that message?
Two things came to my mind, a personal and a social one.
1. The personal message is that she was basically bragging to the world that she is such a supermom, that she is bringing her baby even to the UN.
Supermom is a big problem nowadays. "Supermom syndrome" is now accepted as a legitimate psychological and health issue. There is a great pressure, especially among the highly educated, upper class people, to do only the very best in every aspect of parenting. And it's unreasonalbe and it leads to burnout, divorces and spoiled and confused children.
To give you one example: there is some health advantage of mother's milk compared to formula, but not much. Modern formulas are pretty good. Yet there is such a huge stigma against formula, it's crazy. We went to a class about baby-care, organized by Maternity (a private obstetrics institute), it was full of rich, hipster parents, and the lecturer said things like "Now, of course all of you will be breastfeeding, because every mother who wants to do that can do that [that is a big lie, I knew several mothers whose milk stopped for one reason or another], so probably you will never ever need to use a bottle to feed your baby, but if for some strange reason you have to...". That's the kind of pressure people are getting. It sets highly unrealistic expectations, and they tell you that you are a failure as a mother if you have to ever use a feeding bottle or formula. That's stupid.
And there is a lot more to it than breastmilk vs formula. There is the stigma against pacifiers. There is the hype about breastfeeding on demand (as opposed to teaching babies a schedule) - which often devolves into the attitude "never let your baby cry". There is the slogan of "children first, always". Then there is the usual drama about which foods are healthy and organic. Combine this with the general overprotective trend in contemporary western culture. And combine it with the carrier women's desire to prove to the world that she can be just as a good mother as a housewife.
What you get is a huge problem. A burned out and stressed mother, who is playing the martyr. A new iteration on the yiddishe mame. Spoiled children who never learned about their limits. Plus broken marriages. Which hurt even more the personality development of the children. This is not good for anyone involved.
So now we have a PM walking into the UN, showing off what a supermom is, instead of trusting the father with taking care of the child for a few hours, maybe with a bottle of milk (it doesn't have to be formula, she could milk herself and put it away into a bottle). She seems to be a victim of supermom-syndrome and she is spreading it by setting this as the expected standard. I am not impressed.
2. Her move could also be interpreted as a social message about how women should manage family and work. For example an article on this topic in The Guardian said:
"So a prime minister combining leading her country with new motherhood is an incredibly inspiring symbol for many women who are run ragged trying to make it all work – or perhaps contemplating starting a family with real trepidation about the impact on their career."
When intelligent people talk about feminist issues (or maybe it is better to say: when people manage to talk about feminist issues in an intelligent, rational way) the demands of motherhood and its conflict with carrier comes up as one of the central issues. So we have here a genuine issue.
But we do not have a genuine solution here. That's the problem.
Because it's nice that the prime minister can bring her child to work, but that's not feasible at most workplaces. You certainly can't do that in factories. Nor if you are work in a grocery store. Or if you work at a call center where your employer measures your effectiveness by every second. And so on. Basically it can only work for women who work in an office and do such highly paid jobs on their own schedule that they can stop work every 3 hours to breastfeed for 30m. That's like the top 1% of women.
So a solution that only upper class women in a few special jobs could do is not a good solution at all. It basically puts feminism back to square one, where only a few jobs are optimal for women (to be more precise that is not square one, but square two. That situation was the ending point of 1st wave feminism - equality before the law, and the starting point of 2nd wave feminism).
Now Ardern was sensible enough to admit that she is in a very privileged situation where she can schedule her work, but she is aware that most people can't. But still her move is hailed as a brilliant example, which I think is quite stupid.
This reminds me of that famous anecdote about Marie-Antoinette (there are actually no proof that she ever said that): when she heard that the people of Paris are rioting because they don't have bread to eat, she said "then let them eat cake".
To make things even worse, even among those few jobs where you could pull this off, it only works as long as you are the only feminist poster-mother. Because it's very nice and cute that she bought her 3 month old child to the UN council. But imagine if everyone else bought their children as well! It wouldn't work.
The separation of family and work
There are good reasons why family life and work is kept separate in modern society. Of course feminists like to decry that it is only done by the evil conspiracy of the patriarchy to make carriers and life more difficult to women. But just because it raises an obstacle in the path of some women, it does not mean that it exists for that purpose.
This separation is quite modern, just a few centuries old. Back in the middle ages (and earlier) people did indeed do their work and family lives together, or at least less separate.
Peasants worked together as a family. And even when the men went out to till the land, the women worked on textiles (a very important part of all ancient and medieval economies!) while also taking care of the children at the same time.
Artisans worked at their homes. Usually it was somewhat separated, with the shop / workshop being on the ground floor and the home proper on higher levels, but they were quite close anyway and they worked in small, family sized units (just the family + a few apprentices and / or slaves).
And nobles also worked and lived their family lives together. If you remember all the medieval paintings of courtrooms, the wife is always seated right next to her husband. That means, and it is often overlooked, that she participated in all the meetings and she had a voice there as well. So in this sense it might be true, that with the separation of work and private life, women lost some of their influence over politics. Earlier they used to be co-rulers with great influence. This also shows that contrary to how feminists would like to portray, medieval noblewomen, far from being mere posessions, had an immense amount of political power.
So why not go back to the medieval style of merging work and family life together?
There are a few good reasons.
First of all, the rise in productivity, that is the foundation of modernity, was achieved by concentrating workers into one place and organizing their workflow. There is a huge difference between a medieval artisan working with an apprentice and an early modern age worker at a manufactory. This increase in productivity is huge, and it applies not only to physical tasks.
There are economic fields where family businesses work well. Small shops, restaurants and small companies are frequent examples. That's nice, but that's not the standard.
It is also a question of focus. Do you want your doctor to manage a crying baby while examining you? Do you want your accountant to write your tax declaration documents while having an heated arguement with his wife? Do you want cashier at the grocery store to scold her misbehaving 5 year old, when there is a huge queue and you want to get home early?
We should also think about the problem of nepotism. Even in our society, there is a serious social conflict generated by children benefiting from the networking done by their parents (that is why I am not that much impressed by Bill Gate's declaration that his children won't inherit any money. It's a nice thing, I won't argue, but they will inherit and benefit from his networking anyway). Now imagine how that problem would grow if work and family is not separated. Just imagine how much networking advantage would a child get if his parents were top lawyers who lived their family life at their office. He would be on intimate terms with all their clients.
Do you know how feudalism was born? Feudalism is not a trivial thing, because every ruler wants to maintain control over to whom he grants the resources of his state. But in feudalism the vassals inherit the fiefs granted to them and the ruler has no influence over that. So why would any ruler introduce feudalism?
According to Marc Bloch who wrote the La société féodale (which is great classic on this topic), one of the leading factors were the fact that sons were assisting their fathers in managing the fiefs granted to them, and that made them the most logical candidates to be the new holders of the fief upon the deaths' of their fathers.
When I first heard about bringing the baby to the UN, the image of Lysa Arryn with her little son Robert, from Game of Thrones, came to my mind. Partly because Lysa is such a good example of the dangers of being supermom (she still breastfeeding her four year old). But also, because this whole idea that a leader of a country goes to the UN carrying her child had quite strong a feudal undertones.
So at first glance it seems that bringing children to work is a good solution. It is a great deal of help to the parent at a negligible cost to everyone else. So it seems like a no-brainer. But the truth is that the cost is far from negligible. It seems only negligible as long a negligible amount of people make use of this "solution".
Not understanding the hidden costs in making systemic changes is a pretty common problem. For example it is a constant source of conflict between managers and software developers. It is also very typical of the social justive movement mindset. Whenever someone who is the member of a minority runs into some difficulty in life, they are prone to quickly jump to the conclusion that it is the system that should change.
They usually argue that it costs almost nothing for other people, but it would be such a great help to that minority person. But that "almost nothing" can be quite much when spread out among a lot of people.
Another line of thinking is that if a system systematically presents a difficulty for someone from an "oppressed" minority, than the system is wrong, it is oppressive, its only function is to keep that minority oppressed, and therefore it is a no-brainer that the such a system must be dismantled. But that is a bad argument. A system can raise systematic difficulties and at the same time solve even bigger problems. In fact it is very difficult to find any system that solves big problems without creating some other systematic problems.
So it is true that the separation of family life and workplace does raise a systematic problem for those women who want to do both at the same time (actually it raises the same problem for men, but there is much less hype about that), but maybe we should keep that principle intact, because that's a central pillar of modern society.
Yes, this means that women who want to do both at the same time have to find some other solution. And that solution will most likely require them to do some compromise or sacrifice (don't breastfeed for 3 years, use formula, hire nannies, trust the father, use nurseries, accept the fact that you will be away from work for 1 year). But it's probably more reasonable than forcing society to sacrifice a pillar of modernity.
Or maybe not. I am open for a debate. Maybe some neo-feudal gender-egalitarian society, where families and work are closely integrated would be better than the current one. Maybe with the outsourcing of physical tasks to robots and the telepresence technologies of the internet we can create a new society where once again families became the standard units of economy, and not individual persons.
We can certainly debate that. But to have such a debate, people have to acknowledge and understand what the current system is doing, what problem does it solves for us and what would be the price of changing the system, and prepared for the new-old problems that would emerge after such a change.
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