This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Jeffery Smith, 46, the vice president of production operations at Basis Technologies, about how working remotely impacts his family life. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Our routine was a tight, orchestrated dance. I drove the kids to preschool in the morning, and my wife would pick them up after work before starting dinner.
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, both of us began working remotely.
Nowadays, our kids, who are nine and 12, usually walk home from school and are around in the house in the afternoons. It’s an interesting dynamic because they don’t always recognize that we’re doing work.
I get to spend more time around our kids, but I’m also worried about how the remote environment is shaping their view of work. I worry about how they’d handle a less flexible working environment when they’re older.
Remote work has had a positive impact on my relationship with my kids
I’m an engineering manager for an advertising company, and my wife works for a medical devices company.
My company is remote-first. One of our mottos is “Flex with us, and we’ll flex with you.” It’s pretty easy to step away during the workday as long as your manager’s on board. I’m transparent about any time I take off during the day, letting colleagues know I’ll get my tasks done later that night.
It used to be more difficult to take my kids to the dentist and doctor, but now my wife and I can get to these appointments as long as we communicate our schedules.
The flexibility of remote work has positively impacted my relationship with my kids overall. I spend more time around them, even if we aren’t directly interacting. If I go upstairs to grab a glass of water, I can see what the kids are up to and get the debrief. It’s like the new water cooler, except with your family instead of coworkers.
As a kid, I didn’t know anything about my father’s work. He disappeared at 8 a.m. and reappeared at 5. When I have to tell my kids I can’t be disturbed because I have an important meeting, it opens up conversations about what I do for work. I like sharing this side of myself with them.
It’s harder to separate ‘dad’ Jeff and ‘work’ Jeff
I actually miss my commute. I used to have a 45-minute journey home, which acted as buffer time for transitioning from “work” Jeff to “dad” Jeff.
Now, after work, I have to transition straight into “dad” Jeff. If I’m angry about a meeting I’ve just had, it impacts my behavior with my family.
Creating boundaries with our kids so that they understand when we’re unavailable because of work has also been difficult.
For example, my kids draw a lot. They always want to come into my office where I’m working and get paper from the printer when I’m on a call. My daughter will crawl in on all fours, not realizing my colleagues can see her in the background.
Her attempt at discreetness shows she recognizes I’m working but doesn’t grasp the seriousness of what I’m doing. She wouldn’t crawl into a physical board meeting.
My son once said he thought work was more important to us than he was
Our nine-year-old son is too young to remember us going to the office.
One day, he had an assembly at school. I couldn’t be there, and my wife couldn’t stay until the end because she had a meeting. When she explained this to my son, he said, “That’s OK. I understand work is more important.”
It was a gut punch for us. Work isn’t more important than him, but how could we explain that and still not go to the assembly?
During my childhood, I never expected my father to make it to an assembly. He was the breadwinner, and I naturally internalized that work was more important because he was the one putting food on the table.
Our generation is the first to raise kids in a remote work environment en-masse. You just don’t know how your children internalize the little things you say, and I had to think about the silent expectations my son was building around our availability.
It’s important for my kids to understand when we’re in work or parent mode so they can understand where a particular response is coming from, but remote work blurs this line.
We explained to him that our flexibility around working hours has limits. We also explained what we both do for work and that sometimes our work requires thinking, so even if he can’t hear us talking to someone on a call, it’s important that we aren’t interrupted.
I don’t know if he understood all of it, but he did say he realized that work is only sometimes more important, depending on what we need to do.
I worry that watching me work remotely will make my kids less resilient
I hope that the flexibility of remote work gives my kids a sense of work-life balance. I want to set healthy examples of integrating knowledge work with the rest of their lives. When I take time out of my day to take them to appointments and connect with them, I hope they recognize how important they are to me.
But I also have fears about how remote work will impact my children and their generation.
I worry if they’ll be able to transition into a less flexible environment. If they’re teenagers flipping burgers to make extra cash, shift work doesn’t have the same flexibility. You can’t just leave for 30 minutes to run an errand.
Most people in my circle are knowledge workers, so my kids don’t really have a concept of physical labor, where there’s often more structure to your routine. If their lives were to take them on a trade skills path, they might bring expectations around work with them that don’t exist in that arena.
We’ve taken steps to instill a strong work ethic in our kids. While they’re home during the summer, we give them a checklist of things to do for some structure.
I worry the environment they’ve grown up in will make them less adaptable and less resilient. I wonder how what we’re displaying as parents will form their opinion of what work is.
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