Want to disappoint your kid? Take them to work

TAKING your kid to work is like breaking a fourth wall that separates them from the illusion that you actually do something cool for a living, writes Darren Levin.

I RECENTLY read a statistic that said 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will end up working in jobs not even Elon Musk has dreamt up.

Which is why the idea of taking my daughter to work for the school holidays felt like an excursion to The Museum of Redundant Careers. The main attractions: a ping pong table and a Zip tap with sparkling water.

As any parent will know, holiday programs cost a bomb and it’s important to shatter your children’s dreams early on, so we packed a week’s worth of snacks (for me) and trundled off into peak hour traffic to answer a question every parent dreads: “What do you actually do all day?”

I felt like I was living out that Wonder Years episode where Kevin Arnold follows his grumpy dad to work only to discover that a production distribution manager really does push “papers from over here to over there” all day. Kevin’s dad ends up getting humiliated by his boss, and the episode ends with a typical Wonder Years epiphany: that his dad wasn’t the hallowed, infallible figure he had in his head.

What if her perceptions of me had completely shifted by the end of the day?

One day, my daughters will see me for who I truly am and it terrifies me. Picture: supplied

Taking your kid to work is like breaking a fourth wall that separates them from the illusion that you actually do something cool for a living.

I have an ostensibly cool job, but if you captured CCTV footage of me at work it’d look a little something like this: Man sits at his computer and types furiously all day.

It’s hard enough explaining my unnecessarily complicated career to an Uber driver — let alone a seven-year-old kid.

“Oh, so it’s like a magazine — but on the computer? And do you have to subscribe to the magazine? How do you make money from the magazine? Have you ever interviewed Kanye West?”

One star for you, mate.

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After an important daddy-daughter moment trying to find a park in Melbourne’s inner-city at 9am, we arrived at the office and that’s when I realised she wasn’t there to watch me type words into a Google doc all day. She wanted to do actual work.

“Do you have any filing for me to do Dad?”

Filing? It’s 2018 — I doubt this office even has a fax machine.

“Can I get you a coffee?”

Naw, that’s really sweet but we have unpaid interns for that honey.

“How about a whiskey?”

Hmmmm. Maybe she was a bit too young to watch Mad Men after all.

Darren Levin with his eldest daughter at work. Picture: supplied

Getting my kid to make her bed at home is a challenge, but the moment she stepped into the office she was suddenly obsessed with doing menial work.

So I asked her to rearrange a perfectly ordered drawer, which bought me about an hour of downtime to do my actual job.

She spent the rest of the morning mucking around with the office dog until it took off with her shoe, prompting a Gone In 60 Seconds-esque chase sequence that interrupted at least two conference calls.

Lunchtime rolled around and she saw this as a good opportunity to bond with my colleagues, regaling them with stories about how I like to fart for sport and sing songs from Moana in the shower. Bless her heart. She even helped clean up.

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She approached each mundane task with such unforced enthusiasm that I started to wonder whether this was even about work at all. Maybe she just wanted to understand me — I mean, truly understand me — as if those mysterious eight hours I spend away from her each day are the only mystery left between us.

Maybe the simple act of taking her to work was an important milestone in our journey together. Because how can you expect complete transparency from your child when such a big part of your own life is cloaked? Not that she had any sense of clarity by the end of the day.

“So what did you actually do today, Dad?” she asked, just moments after the two of us clocked off.

Darren Levin is a writer, editor and wannabe dad-fluencer based in Melbourne. Find him on Twitter and Instagram.