agonyaunt | (no subject)

I am the father to three teenagers. When I was growing up, my father was not very involved in my life, and I never felt like I really knew him. As a result, I want my own children to be able to understand and relate to their father. I have dedicated my life and career to my greatest passion. I love my job and the fact that my work allows me to explore my area of interest. You cannot separate my identity from my work. I like to teach my kids about what I do: the ins and outs of my field, details of projects I’m involved with, my colleagues, my career history, the history of my field and people who are “famous” within my line of work, and the nitty-gritty on how my work is done. The problem is that my kids act bored when I talk about my career and have asked for a ban on “work chat.” To be honest, it’s a bit insulting that my kids don’t seem interested in my life. I wish that my own father had told me about his life, but I never had that opportunity. My kids are animated, insightful, and funny when they talk to their mother or amongst themselves, but when I talk to them they sit there with blank looks on their faces and quietly nod or say “okay” and “mmhmm” in monotone voices. How am I even supposed to relate to them if I can’t discuss my work? I have put my heart and soul into my career and you cannot separate who I am from what I do. This is what I enjoy discussing and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do to have meaningful conversations with my children. How can I get my kids to be more interested in our conversations?

—Kid Talk

We have in common that we’re both dads, and we both have careers that we’re extremely passionate about. But I don’t take it at all personally that my kids don’t have the same level of interest in my work that I do. I’m self-aware enough to know they would be bored out of their minds if all I talked about was my work. It’s simply not that interesting to them.

You mentioned that your career is what you enjoy discussing, but have you given any thought as to what your kids want to talk about? I don’t have any interest in tween YouTube personalities, Pokémon, and fidget toys, but I’m happy to sit with my daughters and learn more about this stuff because it’s important to them. If you’re truly interested in bonding with your kids, don’t make connecting with your kids about you. Make it about your kids.

I also think if you finally take a break from talking about or thinking about your work, it might benefit you, too.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/02/curbing-social-media-use.html

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LW, your children are not your work buddies, nor are they a substitute for therapy. Stop trying to bore them with the minutiae of your work, because it's not all about you.

"Dear Agony Aunt, I am clearly boring my kids. How can I make them change?"

Ah, yes, good advice or not, he’s always Doyin “I’m better than you” Richards.

Seriously. He pisses me off.

You cannot separate my identity from my work. I like to teach my kids about what I do: the ins and outs of my field, details of projects I’m involved with, my colleagues, my career history, the history of my field and people who are “famous” within my line of work, and the nitty-gritty on how my work is done.

'I am a boring person who has no interests outside my work'
The kind of man who goes completely to pieces when he retires? I suppose he could carry on researching the history of the field and the 'famous' people in it. (Yaaawn.)
We don't hear anything about conversation with his wife, I note...

The letter writer sounds like he wants his kids to fill the emotional hole that his father left. I mean, I actually have sympathy for the guy -- it genuinely isn't fair that when he was a kid he never got that "you are lovable, and what you care about is worth caring about" message that parents are supposed to give their kids.

This would be something to discuss with a therapist, or with siblings, cousins, friends, or other adults in his life.

When it comes to his kids, though, it's his turn to be the grown-up and listen instead of talking.

(Also, from a practical perspective, as a parent you get a limited number of messages to deliver to your kids, and you might want to save some slots for "kindness matters" or "it's a good idea to write thank-you notes" or "always check to see that the hand brake is on before you get out of the car," rather than squander them all on "you see, it all began with Thomas Edison ...")

I think LW is overcorrecting bc they felt like their dad was a stranger. I agree with other advice to engage the kids about their interests, but also, maybe keep a diary/journal with the idea that your kids can read it later if they are interested. I think that could be a way to let go of some of the fear of your kids feeling like they never knew you. (Which is a separate issue from having a functional and close relationship now)

>> I have dedicated my life and career to my greatest passion.

LW, if you were female you'd have known that in a letter like this you're expected to follow that up with: "my kids". Try putting yourself into that mindset for a bit and see what happens.

Ooh. Yes.

I was a bit taken aback when "my greatest passion" wasn't "my kids" in this context. This dude needs a life-work balance readjustment, not because his greatest passion *should* be his kids, but because he can't see who they are for all the work in the way.

You have meaningful conversations with your children by talking about things that have meaning to them. I'm not inherently interested in tabletop gaming*, Minecraft, kaiju movies, military weaponry and vehicles, etc., but these are things my kids are interested in, so I listen to them tell me about the stuff that interests them, ask them questions about it, and generally get to know what they care about.

Sure, I try to share my interests with them as well, but I accept that they may not be interested in those things. Neither of them is interested enough in knitting or crochet to get over the initial fumbling, though I have hopes for cross-stitch given that it's something Grandpa does; neither took to piano lessons; neither gives a flying leap that ONIX is the best thing that ever happened to book metadata and that Thema is far superior to BISAC and it's really annoying that our new distributor lets you enter Thema subject codes but not the Thema qualifiers, which are the most glorious part of the system. (That last is such a niche interest that even my coworkers would be bored if I talked about that.) My job as a parent is to give them the chance to find out what they're interested in and encourage them to pursue that in age-appropriate ways, not to mold them into Castiron clones.

* Especially the games with cards that have too fine print for my middle-aged eyes to see, which I otherwise might enjoy playing. The game designers are in for an unpleasant surprise in another decade or three.

Okay, someone corroborate my math? It has taken this dude at least a decade and a half to realise his kids are not interested in his job?

Edited 2022-03-07 18:52 (UTC)

Yup. And he still hasn't realized that it's not their job to protect his feelings.

Right? If he does want a closer relationship with them he's got a lot of work to do/damage to undo. And no guarantee that especially the oldest kid(s) are going to be on board.

I think that's the really critical thing. It's almost inevitable to bore your kids sometimes - telling the same jokes over and over, or talking about people they never met and don't care about, or just having regular adult interests that kids don't share. But this guy's resentful because he thinks his kids owe it to him to put more of an effort into keeping him happy in their relationship.

your problem didn't start at "teach", bro, but it's sure going ahead from there.

It doesn't sound like you are particularly good at discerning the interesting-to-others parts of your job from the interesting-to-only-you parts. Try paying attention to your kids' interests, and limit yourself to one sentence to them per day about your work. Definitely no more than five minutes.

This letter is obviously real, but the level of clueless assholery is so high that it almost sounds fake.

It actually reminds me of my grandfather a little; he had a tendency to talk overly much about nature, birdwatching and native flora type stuff, and he became a volunteer park ranger after he retired. Even if you declined to go on nature walks with him you couldn't avoid this, and he didn't relate well to children at all, so as a child I found this very exasperating - it was ALWAYS more information about that stuff than I could stay interested in, even though I was actually a curious and science-interested child. So there was always a disconnect in communication between him and children, I think, but not really a mean-spirited one; he never got butthurt about other people's lack of interest, he never had Feelings about the stuff he was interested in that he tried to make other people's responsibilities, but he also never really met a child in what THEY were interested in, if it didn't have some relation to something that he could explain and lecture about (so... vaguely sciencey, or mathy, for the most part).

Anyway, sometimes you can only connect with a person in one area or subject, if that's all that's really exciting to them - although admittedly at a minimum it makes them a pretty terrible parent. But still, relating to them within that sphere only, adult-to-adult, might still work out. My grandpa was a charming and charismatic man, in spite of a sort of strong streak of oblivious assholery, and he made a fantastic guide for a nature hike. Once I was an adult a lot of conversations with him were interesting in the same way that a good guided nature hike is. On the other hand, he also went out of his way to remember what subjects interested the people he cared about and he saved up news and discussions for all of us individually, which... does sound a lot less selfish than this LW.

I find it extremely telling that in this whole letter, we learned a great deal about the LW, even if only in vague terms, but learned nothing about the kids: not their specific ages, not their genders, not their favorite subject in school or their hobbies/activities, not even what they'd rather talk about than Dad's job. Even their "failings" are about him rather than about them.

I'm honestly not sure this is a salvageable situation.