Do you remember the days where companies would host “Daddy-daughter work day” or “bring your child to work day”? These are events of a past time when businesses incorporated family values into their goals and allowed time to be spent not only on the company growth, but on the personal growth of each employee. Unfortunately, this idea is a distant memory from a bygone era, and I am starting to wonder why. Why do we no longer want to expose our children to the workforce from a young age? Why would we want them to be less educated about their parents’ work or left unexposed to a normal office environment?

Children need to know what different career fields look like, what kind of work their parents are expected to do, and how interactions occur in an office environment. They are eventually going to grow up and enter that workforce, so why should they not be educated about it as they learn the lessons that will allow them to have careers? Bring your daughter to see what an IT technician does, show your son how to manage a group of marketing executives, or take your kid and teach them about running a store and working with employees. The younger we show kids about adult life, the better prepared and excited they will be about the choices they get to make when they become adults. How can we expect them to know what they want out of a company if they have never seen someone work at one? We push teenagers to take jobs and find they have no clue how to interact in the environment because they have never seen the other side of the cash register.

Parents are supposed to guide their children and teach them how to grow up into fully functioning members of society, and part of that society is their careers. Companies need to reinstate the “bring your child to work day” not only for the benefit of their employees and their families, but to their own advantage as these children will grow up to become a more competent workforce.