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It's Not Only Ballplayers Who Bring Their Children To Work

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You never know what to expect when you take your child to work at a recording studio, but it won't be boring.  (Jason Bahr/Getty Images)
You never know what to expect when you take your child to work at a recording studio, but it won't be boring. (Jason Bahr/Getty Images)

Bringing your child to work is risky if you’re a Major League Baseball player. The controversy that has followed the disagreement between Adam LaRoche and the White Sox has demonstrated that.

And probably bringing your child to work even if you’re not a Major League Baseball player can be dangerous, too.

Suppose, for the sake of supposing, that you work in public radio. And suppose that you sometimes bring one or both of your daughters to work. No doubt they’d especially enjoy the days upon which there was fund raising, which they’d probably call “fun raising.” They would like the cookies that were supposed to be for the volunteers.

You wouldn’t have a locker for your daughter or a little uniform or anything, but it would be obvious that she was enjoying herself.

Anyway, suppose that on one of those occasions, when one of those daughters was perhaps eight or nine years old, you and she sat in on a live show where an expert on something was on the phone. What if suddenly the phone line quit? The guest would be gone. First there would be silence. Then there would be noise. A lot of noise. Producers, assistant producers, and technicians would probably turn the air in the studio blue while they scrambled to get the expert reconnected.

Your daughter would look up at you, wide-eyed at the cascade of four-letter words, some of which she’d never heard.

“Ah, well,” you would say. “Sometimes this happens.”

But it wouldn’t always go like that. Maybe on another occasion, the other daughter would join you in the office and in the studio. Maybe it would be “Take Your Daughter To Work Day,” and everything would go well. Everybody would have a lot of fun.  Nobody would get in anybody else’s way. The phone lines would all work. There would be no contentious edits. You wouldn’t have a locker for your daughter or a little uniform or anything, but it would be obvious that she was enjoying herself.

In fact, afterward, you would know she’d enjoyed herself, because as you drove home together that evening, she would say, “Dad, when I grow up, I want to work in some place like you do.”

“Why’s that?” you’d ask.

“Because,” she would say, “everybody laughs all day.”

This segment aired on March 19, 2016.

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Bill Littlefield Host, Only A Game
Bill Littlefield was the host of Only A Game from 1993 until 2018.

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