Probably about 10 years ago this week — on the night before Thanksgiving, actually, if I remember correctly — I was in this bar in midtown Manhattan, near the Empire State Building. My friend and I were having a few pops before the holidays and family stuff commenced. We were in the bar area, and at a table in the bar area, you had four women sitting together having some drinks. You could tell from how they were dressed and their accessories that they were probably affluent.
I was kinda buzzed about 1 hour into this. Around that time, one of the ladies says something like this:
“If your husband makes over $500,000, you owe it to yourself to have 3 or more kids!”
Now, again, I wasn’t fully sober. But this was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard. If your husband makes that kind of money, awesome. Great for you guys. But a guy making half-a-mil annually has a tremendous amount of commitments to work. Work probably overwhelms them, or at the very least kinda “is their life.” That means less time being psychologically present for their children.
Phrased another way, if you make half-a-mil and want to keep making that, you probably answer emails at 11am on Saturdays when you should be at the zoo showing your kid a tiger. You know what I mean?
Just the last two Sundays, I’ve seen dudes answering work emails in church. If you can’t put down the mobile in church, you’ve got a problem. I don’t know if those guys doing that are making $500K, but there’s a big issue with men and their commitment to work anyway.
That has a lot of emotional repercussions.
And if you think this is just me saying how I feel, well, it is. But there’s also some research about how our careers affect our children, including this section:
Children were more likely to show behavioral problems if their fathers were overly involved psychologically in their careers, whether or not they worked long hours. And a father’s cognitive interference of work on family and relaxation time — that is, a father’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when he is on his digital device — was also linked with children having emotional and behavioral problems. On the other hand, to the extent that a father was performing well in and feeling satisfied with his job, his children were likely to demonstrate relatively few behavior problems, again, independent of how long he was working.
Read that over a couple of times. Tell me what it says to you. I think it screams “Work is breaking our ties to what should actually matter,” but maybe that’s just me.
Oh, and the end of that story above: I kneeled by those women and tried to explain why their rationale was shitty. They called security on me. I was asked to leave the bar. The affluent always seem to win, you know?
What do you think about the tie between “your tie to work” / “how much money you make” and your children?
Here’s what I’ve found in raising my now adult children (25 and 24); Both were adopted from China by my Chinese wife and I (daughter Shao Lin at age 15 months in 1994, and Son Jason at age 13 months in 1995). What my wife and I decided is that we would spend time with our children from the get go doing almost anything. My wife Lin was a stay at home Mom and I worked long and hard but we always made Saturdays and any other days we could squeeze in(all thru HS) time to spend either together or separately (father/daughter ; father son etc.) with our children exposing them to the world. So no matter how hard I worked we spent time with our children. In the Socal community we live in ; the Asian parents (mostly Mainland Chinese) pay other people (think after school programs each day, ballet, music lessons, SAT prep starting in Kindergarten) to spend more time with their children then they do. Their children never get to know them or have a close relationship, they go to college leave and never come back. My wife and I have been successful, our Daughter (now married to another Chinese Adoptee) and Son both have good close relationships with each of us and together. Its exclusively because we SPENT time with them through their upbringing; we always had things to do, places to go and people to see. Too bad more parents do not adopt this strategy.
Great post 😁
This was the funniest post yet, I love your posts! Raising children requires parents full attention. No matter what you give them, or where you take them, you, being present, is what makes it or breaks it.
They may mention the great trip to Yellowstone or to South Beach – but they will definitely remind you of the times you weren’t there ‘AND’ they will tell you exactly what you were doing and where you were doing it (as if to point out that was more important than them).
Family really is (or should be) #1 – or you’ll hear about it. -K