Childproofing Your Home Office
Cookie crumbs, crayons and childish laughter in the background begone! (Or at least, get thee to another part of the house.)
By Joanne Eglash
Oreo cookie crumbs in the keyboard. . . an X-rated site suddenly
appearing in your bookmarks list. . . a scream erupting from your
home office as you're preparing dinner in the kitchen. Signs of
a gremlin? Not if you have a child living in your house.
Parents who neglect to childproof their home offices may regret
their oversights. Think it's not important? You'll rethink
that theory if one of these situations occurs in your house:
Attack of the Cookie Monster. You walk into
your office and discover a keyboard generously sprinkled with
graham cracker crumbs. The Cookie Monster also appears to have
spilled milk on that storyboard you created last night for your
presentation this morning. And those crayoned scribbles on your
computer monitor don't exactly give you that warm, fuzzy
feeling either.
Content Continues Below
Analysis: You have a child between the ages of three and
six years who has been having early morning fun.
Recommendation: As detailed below, solutions range from
establishing rules (cookies are off limits in the office) to making
computer usage a reward (if you feed the cat in the morning, you
can play computer games for an hour in the afternoon).
A trip to the emergency room. You're in
the kitchen fixing dinner, and you suddenly hear an agonized shriek
from your home office. You dash into the office and discover your
toddler has been bonked on the head by a glass paperweight that was
within her reach.
Recommendation: You may need to baby-proof your office
(for example, buy special plugs for your outlets) and remove
temptation from your toddler's range.
It's time for that talk. You
suddenly receive a barrage of e-mails that are definitely X-rated.
Put that together with a teenager who's been devoting quite a
bit of time to unsupervised Web surfing, and you can suspect,
either accidentally or deliberately, he or she has been exploring
Internet highways that you definitely don't want your child to
travel.
Recommendation: Limit and supervise your child's Web
site exploration using programs like NetNanny and by being in the
office during his or her surf excursions.
One of the challenges of being a homebased business owner with
kids, of course, is to avoid shutting out your children while
safeguarding your office. To meet that challenge, entrepreneurial
parents have devised a variety of solutions.
Page 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 