Teach Your Children

We recently attended Curriculum Night at Hannah's school, and the class had spent a couple of weeks learning about themselves and their families. There was a list of parental careers, and Hannah said "Daddy works for computers." I didn't have a label. I can't really blame her, as I'm not sure how to label myself most days.

I work in finance - something that isn't exactly easy to say these days. My particular job isn't all that affected by the current crisis, but at the same time it is completely affected. I'm not one who should be pontificating on it by any means, so I'm not going to do that here.

However, I just read an editorial in The New York Times, "The Borrowers" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/opinion/03mclean.html?ex=13807 (hope that link works, never tried that before!), and it reminded me that in some small ways, I have tried to talk to Hannah about finance. "Remember those ads telling you to let your home take you on vacation?" was what jogged my memory. I remember sitting with a 1 or 2 year old Hannah in our condo in Brookline and listening to adds telling me that my house had money in its walls. I would knock on the wall behind our heads and yell, "House? Give me my money!" It used to make Hannah scream with laughter.

Marc and I settled on a description of "Mommy makes money" for now, and that works for Hannah. We have a lot of discussions on why mommy and daddy work, how much things cost, why we have to wait to make certain purchases. Hopefully, all of these small discussions will help us have a conversation about what I really do some day.

Additionally, also when Hannah was younger, I'd answer her incessant demands of "I want" with "Well, I want a yacht!" I don't actually want a yacht, much less do I think I'd ever be able to afford one, but that answer had to have popped into my mind influenced by my career as well!