Are There Consequences to Having Career Focused Parents? In today’s fast paced society it is not abnormal to see a person working ten to twelve hour days and this does not include the commute time. It is also not abnormal in a family to find both parents working these long hours or even working two jobs. But are these now normal long days having a detrimental impact on today’s youth? Can having parents that appear career focused cause a negative impact on their children? Will not having a parent around for most of the day have a long term psychological impact on the children left waiting at home? Why do parents knowing that they are needed at home still continue to work so many hours instead of spending quality time with their children? The goal of this paper is to explore all of these questions to determine what if any risks are associated with being the child of a career driven parent or parents and insight into why parents continue to work such extreme hours.
THE PAST Work is not anything new; it has been around as long as humans can remember. It has stemmed mostly from necessity, from foraging for food to building homes. But it also has at times been used as punishment or as a ways to achieve power such as the Egyptian pyramids years ago. But if you jump ahead to the early nineteenth century and compare it to current times you can see that work has seen some changes. In the early part of the nineteenth century it was often common to see a person work six days a week for more than twelve hours a day. But from then until the 1930’s there was a significant decrease in the amount of time a person spent working and by the end of the 1930’s the average work week was five days a week with eight hour days (Siegal, 1-20). If the trend of reducing the average work week had continued in today’s world the average time spent at work maybe only