Growing up, every day was Take Your Child to Work Day. For a lot of immigrant families, that’s just the way it is.  In Caribbean countries like my family’s home country of Trinidad and Tobago, the only way that a business could survive was to take the kids to work… and they actually worked – like every day.  There were options, though.  Learn the family business, and help put food on the table, find a family member to teach you a trade that you were more interested in, work for them and help put food on their table, or get an education abroad, get a work visa, and send money back home to put food on the table.  You could also get an education, and step out on your own, with the support of family of course, and start your own business.

One way or another, learning to work was important. The way my mom explained it to me, you worked because everybody has to eat.  My parents paid me for working, as long as it wasn’t part of household chores.  They also supported my businesses as a kid – I could count on them to be my first (and sometimes only) customers.

I homeschool, work outside of the home, sometimes work from home, and I blog – and the kids are there with me for 99% of that, so I had to find a creative way to do Take Your Child to Work Day.  I figured I would give each one of them one of my jobs, and show them how things got done around here.

As you know, Mr. Social has a blog called, “Dave’s Car Show“. His dad and I manage his blog, and he and his brother provide content in the form of photos and video.  I had shown him how to make his coloring sheets a while back, but I had been adding the photos and videos to the blog when I had time.  Lately, Mr. Social has been hinting that I move too slowly.

Solution? Teach him how to upload and publish his own content.  Yes he is 8. I believe that if you can teach a dog to sing, or a cat to use the toilet – and flush – you can teach a kid to use a computer.

Two obstacles stood in front of me. The content management system that I use for this blog is definitely not user friendly like traditional blogging platforms, and he has the attention span of an 8 year old.  We got through it though.  I had to move fast – very fast.   First, I decided that we would start with watermarking and meta tagging photos in Photoshop, and end with uploading images. I taught him to write down his steps in a journal (just like I do), so that he can refer to them later, then we went on to learning by doing.

Sure I could have typed them up for him, but there’s something about him watching, writing it all down himself, and then trying it that makes him really understand it.

Well he understood it, alright. Eventually, he asked me if I could back up some so that he could try it all on his own – politely of course.  I did.  Two great things came out of Take Your Child to Work Day for us – he finally could take full ownership of his website, and there was one less thing I had to be responsible for.  Win-win, right?

He called his dad, turned on his “businessman” voice (him, but deeper and very proper… slightly British?), and told him all about the work he did.  We still do his email and social media (gotta shield him from the meanies as long as possible), but he’s cool with that once we told him how that was how the big companies do it too.  We told him, “it’s called outsourcing”.

After we were done, he says, “so what’s my password, Mommy?” Slow your roll, kid. Slow your roll.

How did you spend Take Your Child to Work Day?  For one mom I know, who takes her kids to work with her quite often, she decided it was Stay Your Behind in School Day.  How did you decide to celebrate?