What my son said was a little shocking and disturbing, which made me think deeply about the impact of long -range work. My son held a series of poor communication activities at school today, and we found these activities the night before. At present, I can't use my family at all, so this falls on my wife. On the way to the first part of the conference, my son asked her how long she could stay. Unfortunately, my wife called and she couldn't miss it at 9 am. Our son is understanding and "it doesn't matter. Work is more important", which is not what any parents want to hear. My son was very loved, and he and his mother had a very deep bond. So I don't know, how did we get here?
Remote work has become the central chord of our family's harmonious rhythm. Remote work enables us to have a lifestyle, and because of the timetable gap between us to commute, it was impossible before. The Internet talks about a lot of information about long -range work from the perspective of workers, but it is not about it from the perspective of the family, but more specifically, it is children.
My son XANDER is 9 years old and his daughter Ella is just 12 years old. As far as this story is concerned, I will focus on Xander. When my company moved to remote work on March 11, 2019 (thank you Rudy Gobert ) Xander 5 years old. For a 9 -year -old young man, this is an eternal thing, accounting for more than half of his life. He has no true memories of my wife and my office every day. At first, there seemed to be few backgrounds, until I started to consider how to structure his psychological working model and how this psychological model is associated with him and his value.
When the family was somewhere in the morning, we woke up. We all did the routine work in the morning. The children went to somewhere, the parents went to somewhere, and then we reunited at the same time. How to use time during the day. Even at a very young age, our children can think of "Mom and Dad are doing such things like this!" This is a "request" to share your experience with some people. Then, when our new reality began, Covid hit the memory of these shared experiences.
Now, my child seems difficult to associate with long -range work with promise. Part of the reason is that the long -range working timetable is vague to some extent. Our time has changed, and my wife and I work at night, or make up for several hours from the time I missed during the day. Because work is not correlated with local and specific time, work seems more like a choice, not a promise.
When I was in Xander, we saw this list when we returned home from the school. He will ask us if we can play chessboard games, or he is boring and needs to do something. It is difficult for him to consider we "not there." Each refusal work supports work, and it will be tilted in his mind, leading to statements such as "work more important".
We never spend time discuss the nature of remote works in detail, because we rely on his memory of different times. Recall that he no longer has it. This is not a problem for my daughter, because she is old and still has some unprecedented memories. The problem now becomes the essence of how we talk about remote work with our children and the knowledge we need to rethink?
My initial bullet list is:
- We have also cooperated with family and promised others. It is important to ensure that people can fulfill these commitments and share time with our families within our work sharing and overlap time.
- It is important to arrange something. In this way, everyone knows when it needs to be available and when to arrange other things.
- Sometimes we can do personal affairs during the day vacation, but this will not change our expectations.
The difficulty of my hard work is how to explain the value part of the dialogue. If I choose to work with him to play chessboard games, in a sense, what I say is that work at that moment is more important. It is more important than him as a person, but it is more important than he hopes that what I want to do at that particular moment is more important. I hope the subtle difference will pass.
I really want to hear whether others have experienced such things. We are raising children in a new world, which has caused new problems and obstacles. My parents and in -laws have no experience obstacles, making them look like in the dark.