Under 12? Are you serious? Maybe you're being sly by hiding something loaded in "proper work". A 10 year old should be rather self-sufficient.

Even my four year old was able to take care of herself, playing games, browsing the web and so on. Cooking is the only thing we wouldn't let her do. Or perhaps you mean it's more appealing to hang out with them and play?

> I've tried this and it was so disastrous that I'd never let an employee do this.

It's not your employees' fault you didn't raise your children properly. Kids in Asia are doing hard manual labor on a farm at 7 or 8. They can definitely keep quiet and entertain themselves at that age.

Fairly certain having 7 or 8 year old kids doing hard farm labor is "raising them properly." More like "desperate poverty."

My point is that for the majority of human history, 7 and 8 year olds were expected to do things that were a lot more intense than simply not bugging their parents for a few hours at a time while they did office work. They aren't constitutionally incapable of it, and OP shouldn't make assumptions about the upbringing of his employee's kids.

Wow, that's a bit harsh. It can also depend on the personality of the child. Some kids like to have more attention.

Agreed, every child is different. What is the definition of properly and at what point does a child reach that state? The poster has minimised a complex parent -> child relationship to a a binary state of being raised properly or not.

I did it with my daughter after schools and I'll likely do it with my son again once he is school aged. For the first week or so, my daughter would come and pester me and I'd hold firm. And slowly it was less frequent until finally she stopped bothering me altogether and then we kept that up for years.