Dr. Clare Wenham, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, was discussing UK confinement on the BBC when her little daughter came in to conduct important research of her own in the background: Where should she put her framed unicorn photo? ? ?
Presenter Christian Fraser offered his own real-time analysis as the interview continued: “Scarlett, I think it looks better on the bottom shelf.”
Later that day, Sky News’ foreign affairs editor Deborah Haynes experienced a similar interruption when her toddler son walked into his home office asking for a snack. Haynes paused in her analysis of China’s new Hong Kong laws to gently ask her son to leave the framework, but her son took advantage of the distraction to speed up negotiations.
“Mom, can I have two cookies?” she asked, slapping her mother on the shoulder. She relented and then tweeted, “I can confirm that his high-risk negotiating skills gave him two chocolate digestives.”
In a tweet, Wenham acknowledged this difficulty and thanked social media users for the “kind words that normalize the balance between work and parents that so many are juggling in the midst of [the coronavirus] chaos.”
He also confirmed that Scarlett had finally decided on a shelf for her drawing.
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