Work is boring because all you do is go
to meetings; you never do anything fun,” says 6-year-old Chloe, whose mom is
the director of publications for a high-tech firm in Manhattan.
One child’s opinion may be amusing to a
mom who likes her job just fine, thank you. But it raises an interesting
question. What are your kids learning about the world of work from your job?
It’s a relevant question for most of us.
Work is a big part of American family life, since in the vast majority of
families, both adults have paying jobs. So what should parents know about the
messages kids are getting about work—and how they’re getting them?
Modeling to Young Children
Children typically learn about work in
two ways: by watching their parents and by being taught about work by the
adults around them. Increasingly, the teaching is less about the content of the
work, and more about how to balance work and family obligations.
Parents of young children can communicate
about their jobs with a few simple words (see “Introducing Children to Your
Work World”), but they should also know that they’re modeling attitudes about
work even when they don’t actively talk about it.
“This type of learning rarely means being
taught directly from sermons on the value of such things as work,” says George
Scarlett, a child development expert at Tufts University who studies
how children develop a sense of identity. Scarlett describes kids’ learning at
this stage as the result of daily conversations and observing—and
absorbing—parents’ attitudes. Parents need to be conscious of their tone when
they discuss work, he says, rather than focusing only on what they say about
work when intentionally “teaching” their kids.
Experts agree that very young children
don’t necessarily need to know details of their parents’ work lives in order to
learn something valuable about work.
“When my daughter asks me about my work,
I have always been very vague about the details,” says Amber Jamanka, who works
in public health and is the mother of a 6-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old
son. “I’m not ready to talk to her about these topics.”
Jamanka and her daughter came up with a
phrase to use—“mom helps keep people safe”—rather than a job title or a
description of the actual tasks. Jamanka explained that she was like a
detective, helping to find out what makes people sick or keeps them healthy.
“It’s useful for parents to talk about
their work at home, and to talk about the good parts as well as the bad parts,”
says Ann Crouter, a professor of human development and director of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. “If a parent
has had a tiring day, for example, it’s fine to mention that. But I’d try to
balance that on other days by mentioning what went well at work.”
Not surprisingly, research detailed in
the book “Ask the Children,” by work-family expert Ellen Galinsky of the New
York-based Families and Work Institute, has shown that negative moods can
“spill over” from work to family, and that this colors children’s perspective
on work. Experts encourage parents to mention their pride and pleasure in work,
even if it’s a few brief words.
The Elementary Years: Time to Teach Balance
Children between ages 6 and 11 start to
identify closely with their parents and are open to learning from them about
the external world, says Scarlett. In fact, the annual Take Our Daughters and
Sons to Work initiative aims to give kids, ages 8 to 12, a look inside their
parents’ workplaces. Not only does it teach kids about what’s involved in
various careers, but about managing the demands of work.
“Today, parents teach their children how
to balance a full plate in life,” says LaWanda Abel, Take Our Daughters and
Sons to Work program manager. “Work, family and community achievements
equally.”
Alec McKinney can relate to that. A
father of three boys, ages 3, 6 and 9, McKinney says his kids
probably think he works too much. His sons aren’t sure what he does on the
computer, but they resent the time it takes out of their family lives.
“Our children know we think it’s
important for us to do work that’s valuable,” he says. “But I don’t hide my
annoyance at having to work during family time.”
To minimize the disruptions, McKinney finds himself
working at all hours of the night, with the result that he’s actually around
during the boys’ waking hours more than many dads. As a research analyst, McKinney knows to be
alert to the tradeoffs over the long term, noting that his kids will need
parental involvement more, not less, as they enter the teen years.
McKinney’s concerns
about time with his children are well-founded. Research suggests that when
fathers work very long hours (more than 60 hours a week) and also feel overloaded,
their relationships with their adolescent children suffer, and that both
adolescents and fathers in this situation have more difficulty seeing one
another’s perspectives.
“For both mothers and fathers,” Crouter
says, “we have found that high levels of work pressure are linked to feelings
of being overloaded. And feelings of overload, in turn, are related to higher
levels of conflict with kids.”
But the good news, both Crouter and Scarlett say, is that most research
shows that work itself, and even children’s participation in it—helping a
parent put together the handouts for the next day’s presentation, for
example—doesn’t have a negative effect on kids. How and what children learn is
really based on how parents handle their obligations.
In the end, in order to prepare children for work, parents need to be
conscious about their relationships with their children and their own work-life
balance. “We depend on their being attached to us, their parents, enough to
identify with us when they are older children,” Scarlett says. “So that if we
value work and lead good, productive and balanced work lives, the process of
identification will help to prepare them to do the same.”
Introducing
Children to Your Work World
The
Ms. Foundation For Women, sponsors of the annual Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day,
offers these tips• Take a photograph of your workplace
home to your children, so they have a visual image of where you spend your time
at work.
• Tell them why you work. Sure, most of
us work for money, but there’s usually more to it than that. Let your kids know
the full array of reasons you do what you do. Even if you are working mainly
for the paycheck, you can explain why you are in that situation and what you
hope will be different for them when they’re working.
• Take advantage of life lessons. Some
parents like to use their work stories to teach kids how important it is to be
able to get along with a wide variety of people. Emphasize how important it is
to not just complain about problems, but to try to fix them.
• Pretend to switch roles. A doctor can
let her daughter play with her stethoscope; a secretary can help her kids set
up an office, complete with a phone, a headset and an old computer. Kids learn
through doing, and when you watch them pretend to do what you do, you’ll get a
good picture of how they view your work.
• Know when to leave your work at the
office. For some of us, it’s hard not to go on and on about our jobs—if only
because we spend so much time and effort on them. But our kids need us to focus
on them, too.
Reprinted
with permission from Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.
