New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was faced with unexpected comments as she addressed the nation not from the opposition, or from an angry citizen, but from her daughter, who interrupted her during a Facebook livestream.
Ardern was midway through updating viewers on the country’s Covid-19 response when she was disturbed by 3-year-old Neve calling: “Mummy?”
“You’re meant to be in bed, darling,” Ardern replied.
“It’s bedtime, darling. Pop back to bed, I’ll see you in a second,” she added, before asking her daughter to return to her grandmother.
“Well, that was a bedtime fail, wasn’t it,” she laughed at the camera.
But Neve wasn’t taking no for an answer: Later in the broadcast, the prime minister’s daughter returned.
“I’m sorry, darling, it is taking so long,” Ardern responded, before announcing she would be ending the livestream.
The pandemic has forced a large segment of the global workforce to go through a remote-work experiment on a scale never seen before, blurring the boundary between work and home lives.
The Prime Minister’s struggle no doubt struck a chord with parents around the world who have battled to balance working from home and childcare.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern interrupted her own Facebook Live meeting to try and coax her daughter back to bed, in a moment that is likely to be very familiar to parents working from home all over the world pic.twitter.com/UDkhbnE8Vu
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 10, 2021