My work as a therapist takes place at my home office, so my last session was often top of mind as I walked upstairs to start making dinner for my two sons and husband. When my older son was about 6, he’d greet me earnestly, “Mommy, were your patients sad or mad, bad or glad today?” I didn’t feel I was breaking confidentiality to answer this Dr. Seuss- like question. I’d tell him most nights that my patients were sad or mad, or often both. The lion’s share of our dinner conversation revolved around their school days, of course, but as they got older, they became more interested in the time my husband and I spent making a living.
The world of parents’ work is full of interesting tales about taking chances, falling down and pulling oneself up, about creativity, about getting along with others and having conflict and disagreements, about leadership and following, about getting things done and struggling to complete a job. In short, work offers a treasure trove of life lessons. Despite that, I think parents often bypass conversation about their work in order to focus exclusively on encouraging their kids to talk about school. Surely there is room for both.
Talking about work to young children
Children’s capacity to understand their parents’ work life ebbs and flows, as does their interest. As young children, their grasp of the world is quite concrete and self-centered. My husband remembers dropping his father, an engineer, off at the train station every morning, and thinking he drove the trains all day as a railroad engineer. My 18-month-old granddaughter fetches her father’s slippers at the end of the workday, as if to say, “Now you don’t need those work shoes anymore.”
When parents can tell stories about work that are relatable, these conversations often contain new words that boost vocabulary and expand their children’s worlds. In fact, dinner conversation contains ten times more unusual words than words in story books. In the context of a parent’s story about what happened on the way to work—a mishap, or a funny dog anecdote— new words can also be acquired. One direct benefit from telling these stories to preschoolers is that kids with bigger vocabularies learn to read earlier and more easily than those with slimmer ones.
These stories also give a young child a small window on what happens when the parent is out of sight. Of course, when jobs square with what a child sees around them—a police officer, nurse, firefighter, baker, store salesperson—it’s so much easier to describe to a child than, say, working as a death doula or developing a new app using AI. No matter what type of job, however, work is mostly about a place parents go during the day and return from, so it’s not surprising that talk about work is often about transportation, a meal eaten at work, or clothing. Young children can also understand how a parent felt at work on a particular day, and most types of work can be translated in a way that makes sense. My kids understood quite early that their mother helped children and parents with their feelings.
Dinner conversation about work for school-aged children
School-aged kids witness adults doing a variety of jobs at school, at friends’ houses, around their neighborhoods, and on TV and film, so they may be quite curious and savvy about their parents’ jobs. Unlike preschoolers, tweens can understand the less concrete aspects of work, such as the ways it is meaningful, provides for the family, is the source of adventure and novelty, feels like a calling, offers structure and stability and how a parent feels about the work they do. These reflections about work can directly mirror how the child feels about school, such as the idea that some parts are boring and others more exciting. I’m good at some things, and some things aren’t so easy for me, but I’d like to be better at them. Talking about work in this way at the dinner table can help kids make connections between their parents’ experiences in the adult world, and their own experiences at school.
Benefits of work conversation for adolescents
Teens benefit from parents sharing challenging experiences of their own that resonate with what the teen is confronting. For example, as teenagers, my kids seemed to enjoy hearing about goofs and mistakes we’d made at work, like sending an edgy email to a whole group meant for one person. If we were facing a dilemma at work, they were eager to be consultants, weighing in on what my professor husband should do with a student found cheating on an exam. Should he report him and jeopardize his scholarship, or give him a very stern warning that he’d never forget? My sons were split on this, one recommending that their father follow the letter of the law, and one arguing for compassionate leniency.
Teens can also understand the negative parts of work, like unemployment or unfair treatment from a boss or being passed over for a promotion, particularly when a parent can talk about what they are planning to do to improve and change a situation.
And then some parents have jobs that are intrinsically fascinating, like my friend who is sexual health educator. Her kids, now adults, remember their friends sharing “the talk” their parents gave about sex and sexuality. But they found that weird, as there was not “one talk” in their home, but daily conversations around the dinner table that just felt like “the wallpaper” of their lives.
So just as we may ask our children, “How was school today?” we might expect that children will eventually return the favor, “Daddy, did you do anything interesting at work today?”