Seriously, speaking as a parent, I can tell you that life gets a lot more complicated when a child is in the picture. I want to be a good parent to my child, a

Seriously, speaking as a parent, I can tell you that life gets a lot more complicated when a child is in the picture. I want to be a good parent to my child, and because my spouse also works this sometimes requires that I occasionaly attend functions at my kid's school or take my kid to a doctor's appointment. From the point of view of a young twentysomething single programmer I probably seem less committed. It's certainly true that I now have additional commitments that I did not have before. Yet I want to keep working, both because I enjoy it and because I want to provide for my family. Do you want to deny me that? Do you want to deny yourself a job if you decide to have kids down the road? As a child, would you have wanted your parents to have to change careers and start over when they had you because they "weren't committed enough"? Or would you have wanted your parents to be so committed to their job that they had no time for you? If that was your situation, take a deep look inside and ask yourself how you really feel about that. If you're a young programmer, do you want to benefit from the experience and perspective of older colleagues, or do you want to spend your career figuring everything out for yourself? If you're a responsible business owner, do you want to lose the benefit of your workers' experience just because they start families? To widen the perspective, do you want to live in a Logan's Run future where nobody can hold a programming job after the age of thirty and twentysomething brogrammers have to support a large pool of out-of-work seniors? All of this is the basis for the assertion that "a flexible environment that reflects the needs of parents will help create a better workplace culture for everyone, kids or no kids".