Who doesn’t remember going to the office with their parents?

When you deal with children’s behaviour, you have to get creative, to say the least. Kids see the world in a different way. Where we see work and responsibility, they see playtime and imagination. Where we see awkward social interactions, they see new friendship opportunities. Because of that, when we deal with them, we must also learn to understand the world they live in, so we can guide them in the right direction in the best possible way. 

How do childcare and workplaces meet, you ask? Well, reality is that sometimes it is very hard to get proper childcare for your kids while you’re off to work. We all have the same childhood memory of going to our parents’ office. Sometimes in a “bring your kid to work” type of situation, or when they just didn’t have anyone to look after us once we were done with the school day. In either case, we ended up at their workplace, trying to entertain ourselves with toys we brought from home, coloring books, or, in the best cases, a friendly coworker who was open to playing with us. These ended up being really appreciated childhood moments. 

That said, now we live on the other side of this coin. We are the employees who go to the office and meet our coworkers’ kids. Sometimes, we want to be the friendly adult that plays with them, the one they’ll remember forever. On other occasions, we want to be left alone. Unfortunately, work tends to pile up quickly at a job, and stress runs high. We wish we had more time to play, but that is simply not realistic anymore. 

In this story, a sales worker struggles to set limits for a coworker’s daughter. She visits the office often and ends up preventing the sales worker from getting their work done. In addition to that, neither the manager nor the girl’s mother have been helpful in the situation. The manager seems to want to avoid conflict altogether, and the mother finds it useful for her to get her own work done in peace. It is a tricky situation, because the sales worker doesn’t want to come across as mean to the child, but really needs her to stop being distracting. 

Reality is that kids will sometimes have to come with a parent to their jobs. Childcare is not exactly cheap, and sometimes bringing them along is the best solution. However, they can definitely get you in trouble with coworkers if you’re not correcting them properly. Who do you think should be the one to manage the situation here? The sales worker by being more strict, the mother, or the manager?