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Innovative services provide perfect solution for freelance parents
The idea of workspaces that have a child play area, or even on site child care, that cater for self employed parents, has just taken on in Australia, with the first service, Bubs & Boardrooms popping up in Sydney's Inner West.
The idea behind Bubs and Boardrooms and similar services overseas, is to provide a workspace for parents, while also providing a play space for their kids.
So parents can work in a communal, creative shared and serviced office space with similar people for inspiration and company and have their kids nearby playing in a safe play zone.
In the USA and the UK companies such as NextKids and Third Door, workspaces with play zones have been operating for a few years to great success.
Wherever they're located though, the story is the same. They are filled with freelance, self-employed or home-based mums and dads who were trying to balance parenting and work at home and getting nowhere with all the distractions or who were struggling to find appropriate, affordable or part-time child care in order to get anything done.
The ever-growing number of self-employed, home-based or freelance workers has given rise to shared workspaces in cities across the world over the last decade. These communal spaces for creative types are a brilliant way of allowing people to carry on with their freelance career, without having to buy or lease their own office or give up on social interaction.
Now the child care shortage has added a new dimension and communal workspaces have inevitably developed to include some sort of child care offering or child friendly zone.
These co-work locations operate like crèches. They are either membership or pay-as-you-go office and play space centres, that have a nursery manager or several carers on tap to look after children.
As with other sorts of crèches, these child care services are not generally regulated or under national guidelines to work with any particular ratios, services or programs.
However it's in their interests to provide as good a service as possible to develop an ongoing and hopefully long term, trusting relationship between workspace managers, their clients and children and the child minders.
And in any case parents are invariably only separated by a screen, partition wall or set of division blocks, which makes it easy for them to keep an eye on things and drop in to see their kids every now and then.
Bubs and Boardrooms has just opened in Sydney's Five Dock. Its play space is run by experienced carers with first aid training and certificates and offers a fully equipped and safe play zone close to parents who can get to work knowing their children are safely occupied with friends.
It all sounds pretty ideal and we hope it works and spawns other similar innovative and valuable services all over the country.
Next step is to train the kids to answer the phones. Then we're really in business!
Read our article for tips on what to look out for and questions to ask crèches about their services.. |
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