Derek knew that he had been burning the midnight oil to keep up at work. He also knew that his work late into the weekday evenings at home and on the weekends, after full days of work during the week, had cut deeply into his family time. Indeed, he really hadn’t spent any recent time with his wife and children other than brief dinners before he retired to his home office to resume his work. Derek had expected his big work push to last just for a brief season, but it had instead stretched into weeks and then months. His wife hadn’t said anything, but she didn’t need to do so. Derek could tell from her attitude and demeanor that he was not caring for her and their kids as he should. And the sad thing was that all his extra hours at work hadn’t really gained him anything at work, not even any overtime since his employer had put him on salary and made him a so-called manager the prior year. Something had to give, and Derek wasn’t ready to let that loss involve his family relationships.
Foundation
You may wonder what your family has to do with job success. We tend to think in terms of two separate worlds, the world of the workplace and the world of the home. Yet you build job success on a foundation. Indeed, anything you build of value is going to have a strong and deep foundation. Care for your family, along with your family’s reciprocal care for you, is a very solid job foundation. You might find short-term success in a job by ignoring your family. But before long, your neglect of your family will crumble the foundation of deep and caring relationships that you need to sustain your drive, motivation, energy, joy, purpose, and health. Neglect your family, and you’ll soon find that you have little or no sound reason to apply yourself to work.
Family
Families are the foundation of society, not just the foundation for work. Families hold that revered status for good reason. They are and always have been the fundamental procreative unit on which all society depends to birth and nurture our young through two decades to relative maturity. But never mind that families are essential for birthing, nurturing, and raising children to maturity. Families are also the traditional unit of care, concern, and purpose for adults. Indeed, we strangely need not just to receive the consistent loving society of intimate others closely related to ourselves, but also to provide that love for those others. Work, or more specifically a job, is a primary means of providing the resources for that consistent care. For many of us, we could think of nothing greater to accomplish in the world than to provide for our own families through the arduous and long effort of earning and holding a job. One answer to the question of how to care for your family is to work, or more specifically, to get and hold a decent job. You care for your family when you earn a living sufficient to provide for its needs.
Time
A decent and consistent income is not all that you need from your job in order to adequately care for your family. You also need your job to give you family time. American society honors the convention of the forty-hour work week for a reason, to enable the worker to spend a reasonable amount of time awake and at home each day and with the family over the full weekends. Indeed, federal law requires payment of overtime to non-exempt workers who work more than forty hours in a week, to discourage employers from retaining workers beyond that reasonable limit. Many workers do exceed forty hours of work in a week, whether out of need or desire for the extra income, to satisfy seasonal work demands, or for advancement. But if your work is depriving your family of significant time for extended periods, you may need to make an adjustment. You may need to start your day earlier so that you can get in your work hours but still be available to your family in the evenings. You may need to get your household on a stricter budget so that you don’t need the overtime to make ends meet. Or you may need to take on a different role at work, reduce your work assignments, or find another job. Just don’t deprive your family of significant time for an extended period, only to find that you’ve lost your family as a foundation and reason for a successful job. Family first.
Attention
Your family needs more from you than your time. Your family also needs your attention. If your job is consuming your attention at home with after-hours telephone calls, texts, and emails, your family will notice. You may be physically at home, but your mind will be at work, not on your family. Make the necessary adjustment. Turn off devices. Check messages at home only after your family members have retired for the night or are on their own outings. Let those from work who are contacting you in the evening and on weekends know that you won’t be responding to anything other than emergencies. Even if you’re not getting after-hours calls and messages, you may find yourself so mentally preoccupied with work that you’re not paying attention to your family. In that case, you may need to do some soul searching. If you can’t compartmentalize work matters from family time, then you may need to adjust your work responsibilities, taking on fewer highly stressful and preoccupying matters. If you can’t make those adjustments, you may need to find a different job. Don’t let the choice come down to your work or your family. If you do, you could lose both.
Health
Your family also needs your mental and physical health. Workplaces can be dangerous, toxic, and mentally or physically degrading. A serious injury at work can disable a worker not only from the ability to continue in the job but also to care for the worker’s family. Chronic exposure to toxic substances in the workplace can lead to serious illness, while chronic overuse at work can lead to physical breakdowns causing periodic or even permanent disability. Chronic mental and emotional distress at work, especially involving trauma of the sort experienced in the military, emergency services, and law enforcement, can lead to depression, emotional withdrawal, and other mental issues. Your family needs you to be healthy in the home, not just to be present to give them attention in the home. Take stock of your mental and physical health. Don’t wear yourself out at work to the point of disability. Your employer doesn’t benefit, and may instead have worker’s compensation or other liability, if you suffer work injury or illness, or just have a slow breakdown from work stress. Let your supervisor and the personnel department know when work begins to adversely affect your mental or physical health, before you reach the point of breakdown. Let your employer help you make the adjustment with extra equipment, extra support, different furnishings, different assignments, or altered roles and responsibilities.
Breaks
One way to stay mentally and physically healthy while working a demanding job is to take periodic job breaks. Your family may also need those breaks to spend extended time with you. Those are the twin purposes of vacation time as a job benefit, to let you recover and give you extended time with family. Use your vacation time. Some employers permit employees to bank vacation time for a monetary payout at year end or on job termination or resignation. While getting a lump of cash for unused vacation time can be a nice bonus, that’s not vacation time’s point. The point of vacation time is to refresh you and your family. Plan something special for your vacation time. If you can’t afford or arrange a trip, then do something different locally in a staycation. Don’t kill yourself doing home repairs or remodeling, but if you can accomplish with reasonable effort something special of that sort for your family, then do so. Plan your vacation time backward from the way that you want to feel and want your family to feel when your vacation is over, refreshed, reinvigorated, and appreciative of one another.
Purpose
Your family also needs to draw purpose and meaning from your job, just as you need to draw purpose and meaning. If you believe that you are doing a dead-end job that has no beneficial purpose for you or anyone else, then your family members will know it. They will see it in your poor attitude and downcast demeanor, and they will feel the same way about your work and about themselves. By contrast, if your work calls you to a grand mission and heartens you out of the good you know that you are doing through it, then your family will see it in the verve you have for your work, and they will feel the same way about your work and about themselves. Your family is your extension, just as you are your family’s extension. What you gain, your family gains, and what you lose, your family loses. If your job is not calling and leading you on, then your job is likewise not encouraging your family. Your family members want to support your great and beneficial work, not see you drag yourself around bitter over a wasted worklife. Make the adjustments you need, if not for yourself then for your family.
Security
Your family also needs reasonable security from your work. Your job may provide amply for your family today. But your family needs to know that your job will provide amply for them tomorrow, too. A secure family, one that knows that you and your job are both sufficiently stable for them to expect things to go well for them indefinitely into the future, is a happier family than an insecure family, one that worries every day whether they will have enough for tomorrow. Family members can understand seasons of change. Families are generally reasonably resilient. Indeed, your family should be helping you through unstable seasons. But long-term instability from a job that has such continual ups and downs that you never know whether there will even be a tomorrow can hurt a family. No one wants to live with a specter over their head that they can’t control. Don’t put your family in the position of constant worry over your job. Manage your job uncertainties as well as you can without unduly stressing your family members. And if you can’t manage job uncertainties with equanimity, and you see it affecting your family, then consider making a change in jobs.
Leadership
Families also need leadership. Families don’t need tyrants who dictate every decision and course. But families need to know that someone can and will take charge when the situation calls for it. A good job, one that enables you to care for your family, can give you the standing, respect, role, and voice within your family for effective leadership. To put it another way, when your job clearly provides well for your family in all of the above ways, your family should welcome your leadership. Indeed, you are already leading, simply by meeting your family’s needs through your employment. Your family members should accept and respect your leadership for your having done so. If they do not respect and appreciate you for what your job provides them, then you are well within your rights to remind them. Do so gently but firmly. Remind them that honoring you is their moral obligation and will do well for them and for you. Just as your family’s welfare is the foundation for your work, your work providing for your family and the honor your family owes you for that work are foundations for your family. Let it be so. Help your family members see and value your leadership through work.
Faith
Another way that you care for your family through your job is in the faith that you show that you can work and will continue to do so. When you start out in adult life with a job, everything is new and strange. You have no idea that you’re truly capable of earning a living good enough and long enough to support a family. As your family grows, your need and responsibility to earn a living grows with it. But your confidence that you can fulfill that need and duty also grows or should grow. Indeed, your family members need your confidence nearly as much as they need your income. Your family members need to see that you have the faith that you can and will provide. Share that confidence with them, even when you cannot necessarily see the reason for it. Faith is confidence in the absence of reasons for having it. And in many instances, with jobs and families, faith is all one needs. You may not see good job prospects for tomorrow. But faith implores that you express to your family good prospects anyway. Your family needs and deserves your confidence. Show them it. Faith may be exactly what you need to pull through a rough patch into a better tomorrow, both at work and at home.
Reflection
On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your job in its role enabling you to care for your family? On which of the above measures, including income, time, attention, health, vacation, purpose, and security, does your job need to change to raise your score? Make a list of things you need or want to do to improve how your job serves your family. Then rank those things in order of priority. Then, for each item, plan practical steps you can take toward making those improvements. You may not be able to make all or any of the adjustments immediately, but sticking to a plan might move you forward on several of those improvements soon. Share your plan with your spouse or other adult family members so that they can see, guide, and support your initiative. If you have a reasonably sensitive work supervisor, don’t hesitate to share that you desire to make certain changes for your family’s benefit. Don’t manipulate their sympathies, but supervisors and managers can be more appreciative of a worker’s need to make work adjustments for family reasons than for the worker’s individual reasons, especially selfish reasons.
Key Points
Your job success depends on serving your family well as a foundation.
Your job should allow you to have ample family time.
Your job should enable you to give your attention to your family.
Your job should not disable you from caring for your family.
Take vacation breaks from your job for your family’s benefit.
Your family draws its purpose from your job, just as you do.
Your family needs reasonable income security from your job.
Your job gives you a leadership position that your family needs.
Reflect faith that you can and will continue to provide for your family.