Half Changed World

TGIF: Thank God it’s Friday. I’m looking forward to the weekend, to hanging out with my kids, to taking them trick-or-treating.

An article by Sue Shellenbarger that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week, however, raises the question of how parents’ attitudes towards work affect their children. Interestingly, the CareerJournal site carries the article, which talks about both moms and dads, under the neutral headline “Use Caution When Discussing Your Career with Your Children,” while the original WSJ headline was “The Right Way to Answer the Question: Mommy, ‘Why do You Have to Work?’“

The silliest part of the article is the statement that parents are “acting as if they don’t have a choice” when they say to their children “Sorry, honey, I have to go to work.” I say that several times a week, and Schellenbarger acknowledges that she said it too. Actually, most parents don’t have a choice whether or not to work, not if they want to eat. And even if they do have an overall choice whether to work, they don’t have a choice on a day-to-day basis.

Citing the Families and Work Institute, the article includes the statistic that an impressive 69 percent of the mothers and 60 percent of the fathers said that they liked their jobs a lot. I thought it was interesting that the mothers were more likely to like their jobs; my guess is that because of gender roles, women are more likely to be able to take jobs that interest them even if they don’t pay as much, and are also more likely to drop out of the labor force if they’re unhappy. The loss of this flexibility is the hardest part of the “reverse traditional” family arrangement for me.

Shellenbarger emphasizes the gap between the percentage of parents who said they liked their jobs and the smaller percentage (about 40 percent) of children in 3rd to 12th grade who thought their parents liked their jobs. She makes some good points about how people often fall into the pattern of talking about the day-to-day frustrations of our jobs, and rarely about what we like about them, and how this can give children a distorted sense of what work is like.

The article includes a quote from a portfolio manager at a hedge fund who tells his children that he loves his job. Is it too cynical of me to wonder if he’d still love it if it paid $40,000 a year? (I’m reminded of the scene in Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, where the hot-shot trader’s kid asks him to explain what he does for a living. The kid says “so and so’s daddy is a publisher. He makes books. What do you do, daddy?” And the wife jumps in and makes the analogy that he’s passing out slices of cake and whenever he cuts a slice, some crumbs fall off, and he gets to keep the crumbs.)

The article doesn’t, however, offer much in the way of advice for the 30-40 percent of parents who don’t like their jobs “a lot.” Should they worry about the example they’re setting for their children? Shellenberger quotes a parent who says telling her child “we need to buy groceries” “didn’t make a lot of sense,” but I think there are worse answers. I don’t think it’s terrible for a child to learn that the way we get money to buy groceries and clothes and toys is to work, and that when you spend money you’re really spending “life energy.”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2004 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Magazines and Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.