I am raising a person.

"One day, my child will have a job. His boss won't care about him. His boss will only care if he's following the rules and doing his job. That's why I have to do this right now. How else will my child learn if I don't make rules and enforce them?"

This is a refrain that I hear quite often.

There are a number of things that I find troubling about this:
The idea that I am raising a worker bee who will become an adult, trudge into a job that is bleak and unfulfilling, waiting for quitting time so he can go home and prepare to do it all again tomorrow.

The idea that we, as parents, have the ability to prevent our children from learning life lessons by not creating rules just so we can enforce them.

The extraordinarily unrealistic expectations that our every move, our every choice, our every wrong decision will result in our child not being prepared for adult life. Which leaves little room for error. The only constant I have found in my parenting journey is that I will make mistakes. How terrifying it would be to think that every mistake I made would irreversibly condemn my children to failure.

But I think the thing that worries me most is how many people believe that we are raising workers. That jobs are the most important part of our children's adult lives. Don't get me wrong: jobs are important. But when it comes down to it, my children's jobs will be a fraction of their lives.

Think about this: in order for a person to spend 50% of their time at work, they would have to spend 84 hours a week at their job. While I don't doubt that there are jobs out there like that, we can't call them common. In fact, according to this, the average American workweek is 34.5 hours. That's about 21% of a person's life. We spend a lot more time during our weeks being mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, partners and friends.

With this in mind, I wonder if we should be teaching our children to give up their self-image in order to please a future boss. Should we teach them to sacrifice their moral compass for the rules of the workplace? Most importantly, should we be teaching them that life's greatest lessons are about how to get a paycheck?

When I look at my children, I do not see future employees, whose days are filled with preparing for work and working. I see little boys who will grow into men. They will laugh, love and cry. They will be friends, lovers, maybe even husbands and fathers. They may choose a career that defines them or they may choose an entirely different path. I hope, if I fail at everything else, I will have raised them to be people first, workers second.