What we teach our kids about work

or, crafting more intentional messages about our work lives

Note: We have two birthdays coming up in the Wilen house next week, so I’ll be taking the week off to focus on family time. I’ll see you on May 30 with Read-Connect-Reflect 🥳

Earlier this week, my son had a friend over for the first time. As he was showing his buddy around, he casually pointed out:

“That’s my mom’s office. She’s an executive coach.”

“What’s that?”

“It means she sits on Zoom calls and types articles all day.”

This is—at least on a very technical level—accurate. And though it misses a great deal of nuance, it’s probably a developmentally-appropriate description for an 8-year-old. But it got me thinking about how our kids understand the work we do and how—whether we intend to or not—we are inadvertently conveying messages to our kids about work all the time.

To illustrate…

My husband is a scientist and a doctor who works at a university, and I am an executive coach who is self-employed and works primarily from home.

Almost every weekday, my husband leaves before my kids get on the bus and drives to his office 25 minutes away. Almost every weekday, I stand at the front door and wave them off as they head to the bus stop, and then walk approximately 10 steps to my home office.

When my kids visit his lab, they get to do experiments with dry ice, look into microscopes, and blow up nitrile gloves to look like balloons. There are friendly and eager graduate students, postdocs, and other lab staff who are interested in talking to them and showing them around. My kids soak in the attention.

My office, meanwhile, sits off our main foyer, and is only exciting to them in that it contains my printer, from which they are constantly stealing plain white paper for various art projects. The only other living being who sometimes occupies the space is our elderly dog, who likes to nap on my chair. My kids complain that he snores too loudly.

Though the specifics of my husband’s job responsibilities are lost on them, they—like most kids—have a basic understanding of what scientists and doctors do. They could tell you that Dad wears a white coat, directs experiments, writes grants, and ultimately helps people be healthier.

When I tried to explain to my kids what an executive coach does, my 8-year-old dubiously asked, “But how can you help a lawyer be a better lawyer, or a doctor be a better doctor if you’ve never done those jobs yourself?” When I tried to explain to him that I help people become more emotionally intelligent leaders, his eyes glazed over, and it was clear that I’d lost him.

Sometimes I fear that because my job is both more flexible and less tangible than my husband’s that they don’t take it as seriously. Because I’ve structured my working hours around their school schedule, they take for granted that I’m almost always available for them. Thanks to COVID, neither child remembers a time when I left them in someone else’s care to go to an office from 8:30-5 every day. I wonder what conclusions they will draw about gender based on the types of work that my husband and I do. And though my identity as a working mother is central and sacred to me (I mean, hello, I’ve spent almost 2.5 years writing about the topic!), I wonder if it even really registers for them.

More intentional messaging

Now that both of my kids are a little older, I’ve been thinking more about being intentional in the messages I send them about work, and I would encourage you to do the same. Of course, these conversations will look different depending on the age of your children. And so I encourage you to think of these as iterative topics, not just “one and done” conversations. As I always suggest, you may want to start by identifying or returning to your core values, since they inform the messages you send.

Some framing questions you may want to consider as you decide your key messages include:

• What is work? Is it something that is done inside or outside the home? Is it paid or unpaid?

• What is the purpose of work? To feed a passion, serve others, a means to a livelihood, or something else?

• What is our relationship to work? Is it a transaction or a calling? What do we owe our employers and what do they owe us?

• What makes a job meaningful? The work itself? The relationships we form? Being tied to a larger purpose?

• What does it mean to be a professional woman? How should women be treated and valued in the workplace? What does it mean when they are not treated/valued in the way they should be? (Note: these are not just conversations to have with daughters—they’re important for sons, too!)

• What does it mean to be a working parent? How do these roles mutually reinforce each other? How do you handle times when these roles conflict?

• Where should work fit within the larger context of our lives? How important is work?

There are no right or wrong conclusions to draw from these questions. Your answers will be informed by your own experiences, priorities, style, and—yes—the examples set for you by your own parents or mentors.

Three examples to make this more concrete…

Given the concerns I shared above, I’ve chosen to be more explicit with my kids about what I do all day and what it means to me. I’ve realized that when I saved these conversations for post-bedtime conversations with my husband, I was making my work invisible to them. Every night at dinner, each member of my family shares their rose, thorn and bud of the day. I used to primarily focus on family moments—“my rose was when you hung up your coat without being asked”, “my bud is your upcoming choir concert”. Though, of course, I still include comments like these, I’ve been making a point of including anecdotes from my day—"My rose is that I finalized a contract for a large consulting client, and I’m really excited to start working with them”. By inviting them more intentionally into this part of my life, they become more aware of my work and more curious about it.

A client of mine recently realized that she was often very negative when talking about work with her family. She knew she needed to change her messaging when she overheard her 6-year-old daughter telling her dolls how much she hated her boss (!) Now, she is careful to save most of her complaining for after her kids go to sleep, and she makes sure to highlight positive aspects of her job at the dinner table—highlighting the relationships that are meaningful to her and the sense of competency she derives from being good at her work.

I recently shared a podcast with paid subscribers about parental leave around the world. It prompted a reader, whose kids are tweens and teens, to listen to the podcast with her kids. She realized that though she’s passionate about the topic, she’s never talked about it with her children. She wrote to tell me that listening to the podcast spurred a great conversation—her kids had never considered the topic before, but it led to a rich discussion about what governments owe families—and both of her kids came away with a more empathic understanding of their mom’s experience.

What are the messages you want to send?

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