Embracing family motivation at work

Fast internet, smartphones, lockdowns and forced homeschooling have only muddied the lines further. “I do think that flexibility is the future of work, and I generally think that’s positive,” says Jessica Wilen, a leadership coach and consultant focused on working parents, based in Connecticut. But we need to be careful that we don’t “trade increased autonomy for the expectation of near-constant availability,” she says.

Yes, the fading boundaries often stink. It takes effort, time, and support to stay sane and present to different roles. But I also appreciate being able to bring these important parts of my life together, rather than having to downplay my family self—and my personal life, more generally—at work (happy events, childcare constraints, ailing relatives, whatever).

Wilen warns against this “hiding and minimizing” (1) in her newsletter A Cup of Ambition:

“What would it look like if we stopped apologizing for being parents? What if we set firmer boundaries, said ‘no’ more often, and owned the fact there is more to our lives than work (and that this very fact has the potential to make us more empathic and effective leaders)? What do we have to gain if we stop hiding one of our most important identities? What do our colleagues gain? Our daughters and sons? And, more importantly, what do we (and they) lose if we don’t?”

I asked Menges about potential abuses of family motivation. It’s easy for me to talk about this concept from the comfort of a job that I’ve chosen, with genuine flexibility, interesting tasks, and decent money. Couldn’t family motivation be misused to compensate for exploitative job setups—as if family picnics with your boss could make up for dismal work conditions?

As I researched this post, I kept thinking about this quote by paediatrician and parenting author Carlos González, who says that blending parenting and work is not only inevitable or desirable, but necessary. He writes (3):

“Our current economic organisation is too stressful, it clashes too much with our biological necessities. Of course, there are many workplaces where it would be dangerous or impossible to bring a baby. But in many other places, children are banned out of habit, not for any rational reason. One day, the hotel receptionist, the tax office employee, the woman at the cinema’s ticket office, or the travel agent will attend to us with their baby in arms. […] One day, our grandchildren will be surprised to see old movies where people went lots of places without their children. And it will only be a first step, because one day fathers, too, will get the opportunity to reconcile, for real, our work and our life. One day children will run around offices and shops, just like they used to run around fields or workshops in the olden days.”

When I first read this paragraph five years ago, that tableau seemed far-fetched; two years into the pandemic, much less so.

As Menges told me: “Work has such a dominant role in people’s lives; maybe it’s time for family to come into work.”

1. Wilen links to this Atlantic piece by Brown economist and parenting author Emily Oster, who lists similar examples.

2. Family motivation is one type of prosocial motivation: being motivated to do work because it benefits other people. I wrote about this in #9: Can everyone afford intrinsic motivation? (Part 2)

3. This is from González’s book Breastfeeding Made Easy, which is available in English. I translated the excerpt myself from the original in Spanish.