Businesses Learning That Children Aren’t Kids Stuff : Workplace: More employers are becoming sensitive to their employees’ work and family responsibilities.

A dozen colleagues wearing looks of grim determination settle in around a conference table at New England Telephone Co. and take out their writing instruments.

Occasionally, one or another puts down his crayons and looks around to make sure his mother is still there.

The conferees, all children ages 8 to 10, have come to see their parents’ workplace in one of many new initiatives by U.S. businesses to reconcile their employees’ work and family responsibilities.

“More and more today, it’s good for the children to have this kind of information at hand--and for the parents,” said Odessa Morell, who works for New England Telephone’s parent company, Nynex. She also is in the program with her 8-year-old son.

In an age when increasing numbers of families are headed by single working parents or by parents who both work, some businesses are letting their employees rearrange their days around the need to stay home with a sick child, wait there for the plumber or run the car pool to the Little League games. Others are providing day care at work or emergency baby-sitters.

The urgency of workplace flexibility was underscored last week when President Clinton signed into law a measure requiring companies to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family emergencies.

“Everybody’s realizing that work and family are intertwined, and from an employee’s and an employer’s standpoint, it’s getting very difficult to separate the two,” said Elizabeth Hirschorn, director of the newly established New England Work and Family Assn.

New England Telephone provides a five-week information program for workers and their children who are at home alone part of the day. The course is run by Boston University’s Center on Work and Family.

“What affects them at home will affect them at work,” said Ronna Cohen, who conducts the sessions.

The program “really puts my mind at rest,” said Rhoda Healy, an employee who attended with her son Tom, 10. “I worry a lot. There’s things I never thought of, like what to do if someone comes to the door.”

The New England Work and Family Assn., established in December at Boston University, already has 60 corporate members, including the Gillette Co., Polaroid Corp., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Digital Equipment Corp., the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Stride Rite.

The New England network follows on the heels of the Boise consortium, the Bay Area Work and Family Coalition and similar associations in Los Angeles, Buffalo, N.Y. and Rock Island, Ill. Another group is planned in Philadelphia.

“Employers can’t afford to lose their highly trained, highly skilled employees over an issue like family obligations,” Hirschorn said.

Those obligations put the squeeze on millions of Americans.

More than 70% of all women with children between the ages of 6 and 17 now work, and more than half of all women with children less than 1 year old are in the work force.