Comments on: Is your high-powered job setting your kids up to fail?

By: Kelly@SHE-POWER

Kelly@SHE-POWER — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:12:11 +0000

This study doesn’t surprise me at all. My son is only 4, but he already knows what a weekend is because he knows that’s when mummy and daddy are both home. Kids love to be with their parents. I know this changes as they get older, but I think that as long as you are present with your children and accepting of who they are, they will always gravitate back to you.

My husband works long hours and commutes so he’s not around much during the week. But in that hour or so a day he is here with our son he is so focused on him that it keeps their connection going until the weekend when we all try to do stuff together.

I had a lot of pre-conceived ideas about child rearing before I had kids, but now I don’t understand how people can tell themselves they’re doing the right thing by choosing work and money and STUFF over quality family time. I think this lifestyle just encourages our kids to be emotionally empty consumers. I don’t see dad and mum but hey I’ve got a PlayStation. Yeah, that’s really going to help them know who they are and find their place in the world.

Great article.
Kelly

By: Personal Time Budgeting - Part 2 | Agile Personal Development

Personal Time Budgeting - Part 2 | Agile Personal Development — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:41:34 +0000

[...] likey to be a little controversial, but I’ll proceed anyway with reckless abandon. There is a recent post by Jonathan Fields about how spending time at work and not with your children can have a negative impact on them. He [...]

By: My Three P’s of Good Parenting | My Super-Charged Life

My Three P’s of Good Parenting | My Super-Charged Life — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:21:09 +0000

[...] of what he would do differently involves taking more time with his daughter. In his article, Is your high-powered job setting your kids up to fail, Jonathan Fields cites a study conducted by Harvard that concluded that the single most important [...]

By: Being Present with Your Kids | NezSez

Being Present with Your Kids | NezSez — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:58:02 +0000

[...] Field’s recent post, Is Your High Powered Job Setting Your Kids Up To Fail, got me thinking about my own kids. He points out studies and experiments that show kids whose [...]

By: How Well Are You Really Supporting Your Kids?

How Well Are You Really Supporting Your Kids? — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:57:58 +0000

[...] long work hours and other office frustrations in order to provide a better life for their kids. But an interesting blog post from Jonathan Fields at Awake at the Wheel makes a powerful argument that the value of your daily presence far outweighs the value of a big [...]

By: Brip Blap

Brip Blap — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:57:03 +0000

I had some good comments to make but Dana made most of them before I did. Time with kids is almost completely discounted in the corporate environment. I’m a contract consultant – I went that route to cut down my hours as much as possible – and I say, with no exaggeration, that my coworkers think of me as being “whipped” or anti-social because I rush home at 5 instead of hanging around for evening bull sessions or drinks after work. I have made it a point every day for 2 years to get home before my son goes to sleep. I have a tough commute and usually don’t get home until 7, but I can say that my son – in 2 years – has never gone more than 1 night a week without saying goodnight to Papa, and most nights has dinner with me, too. And I do think it makes a difference. Great article, and something that has to be hammered home again and again and again if we want to restore some sanity to our society.

By: Financial planning and wealth building blog » A Very Belated Easter Edition Roundup - Backdated!

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:40:55 +0000

[...] Is Your High Powered Job Setting Your Kids Up To Fail – My parents made us eat as a family every night of the week my entire childhood, I’m glad to hear that’s significant to having well adjusted kids. But the studies didn’t say anything about eating together 7 nights a week, ha… [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:04:03 +0000

Dinnertime with the family isn’t very beneficial if the parents have a corrosive and dysfunctional relationship. I’m an only child and when I was a teenager, dinnertimes were very tense. It was only a matter of time before my mother and stepfather would start arguing. This would happen five or six nights of every week and the arguments would continue to the early hours of the morning.

Suffice to say that I no longer have any contact with my stepfather and my mother passed away a few years ago.

Funnily enough though the dinnertimes I have with my two sons and wife are usually pretty calm.

I think that having parents “present” only benefits the child if the parents don’t have a lot of unresolved anger about their childhoods.

By: Dana

Dana — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:19:33 +0000

Oh, and @Johnathan: I think some of that choice to not be with one’s family comes from having made bad financial choices before starting the family and having to run and play catch-up after the family has been started. Speaking as someone who had to deal with that with my first child, years ago.

People run up credit cards, or they take on huge amounts of student loans, or whatever, and then the bill comes due, and you have to pay it whether you have kids or not. And it’s easy to say “put off the kids,” but most people who have these debts are not ever going to get a handle on their finances, I don’t think, or they’re going to get a handle on them so late that having kids is almost going to be out of the question.

Plus the “sunk-cost” fallacy of, “I ran up $60k or $100k on student loans and I’m gonna USE my MBA, dang it,” which also translates to long hours, as most professional employment does.

By: Dana

Dana — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:14:45 +0000

Welcome to the reason that so many single moms wanted to continue in the old welfare system, if it was not going to be improved, rather than be forced to turn to workfare. But society got all caught up in the idea that being an at-home mom was about sitting around on one’s butt eating bonbons and, as such, a single mom doing that was doing it on the taxpayer’s dime. Poof, we have workfare. And it’s not even *good* work. It’s penny-ante low-wage crap that forces moms to work long hours if they want to make up for the drop in benefits and still take care of their kids in that way.

I know you probably meant this discussion in a middle-class vein but as you said, the money matters much less, and a kid is a kid no matter what their parents’ income level is.

This whole thing was what got me NOT wanting to trot out and grab the first job I could find when it became obvious my little girl’s dad wasn’t going to be there for us as much as we needed. I figured one of us who made her needed to stick around and actually parent her. So that’s what I’ve done, and she’s turned out pretty well so far.

I’ll disagree just slightly with Jenn too, in saying that there is a happy medium between being totally distracted by work all the time and in always being there “in the moment” with your child. You can work, but you should play with your child too, and children both need time with you and time to figure things out for themselves. Centering your whole life around them 24/7/365 makes you all, parent and kids, a bit loony in the end.