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Nancy Reddy's avatar

I really love this. When my kids were younger, I had the same realization that I was making my work invisible to them--my husband works from home, so they see him working all the time, but at the time, I was either teaching on campus or *not working* while at home with them. (Which is a whole other thing about how I reduced my own working hours to accommodate caregiving.) I've become much more deliberate about talking to my kids about my work in the last couple of years.

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Sarah Miller's avatar

This is great. My job is incredibly difficult to explain -- even my parents barely understand what I do and I've been doing it for a decade -- but I think I do a pretty decent job of showing my kids how much I enjoy my work. I talk about it in front of them -- usually positive things, because I usually only have positive things to say. They know my coworkers; they know my office. They also understand that when I travel, I don't like being away from them (and work travel is 1000 times less fun than personal travel), but I love what I do and traveling is part of that. This doesn't even include the many, many conversations we've had about why I work instead of staying home with them, why mothers and families might choose to do it the way we do it instead of that way, etc.

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