In 2010, Gabrielle was four years into the blogging portion of her career (she had started her blog, Design Mom, in 2006). The year 2010 was the heyday of blogging, and Time named Design Mom a Parenting Website of the Year. Design Mom was one of a handful of sites the magazine honored with this title—and it even used the logo Gabrielle had designed for her blog as the visual for the whole article. It was Gabrielle’s first major acknowledgment from traditional media, and it felt amazing. Her friends in the blogging community celebrated the news. We lived in Colorado at the time, and when Gabrielle woke up, the news had already spread among her friends on the East Coast. When she started her workday, she learned about the Time designation from dozens of tweets. The blogging community was so excited—like, wow!—one of their own had been acknowledged by an influential publication. It was a big deal.
A few months later, Gabrielle was giving a talk at a conference for bloggers (yes, there were conferences back then specifically for bloggers). During the talk Gabrielle shared some slides featuring charts and numbers showing how much traffic her blog had received from Time since Design Mom was named one of its Parenting Websites of the Year. And it was a lot of traffic. And then Gabrielle showed another slide showing how much traffic Design Mom had received from her sister’s midsize lifestyle blog in the same time frame. And it was ten times as much traffic. The audience at the conference gasped.
Gabrielle’s intention was to demonstrate how influential new media—like the blogs of all the attendees at the conference—could be. Of course, she was really pleased about Time’s acknowledgment, but what, she asked, was the real point of being featured in legacy media? For Gabrielle, the biggest value wasn’t traffic—it was that her mom now had a way to explain to friends and others in her community what her daughter did for a living. She could say, “You know Time? Well, they called Gabrielle’s website a top website of the year.” It gave instant credibility, an easy-to-understand credential. Before that, Gabrielle’s mother would tell people that Gabrielle was a blogger, which meant nothing to her mom’s peers—the words blog and blogger and blogging were still relatively new, and it all sounded sort of pretend or silly. But Gabrielle’s mom was proud of her and having this recognizable honor from Time made it seem more real and easier to talk about.
Since 2010, the number of parents who don’t understand or can’t describe what their adult children do for work has only increased. Jobs are different now.
Maybe you have a job that is easy to describe. You’re a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or a shopkeeper. When we were growing up, our generation assumed we would all have those types of jobs, jobs we’d heard of and understood. Ben studied to be a college professor. Gabrielle studied to be a graphic designer. And those were our jobs when we first finished school.
But now, we both have jobs that didn’t exist when we were in school, that didn’t really exist even a decade ago. We don’t even know what to call Gabrielle’s current job. Content creator? Blogger? Renovation influencer? Twitter essayist? And Ben’s job title is currently a university president. Yes, that’s the type of job (and title) that is actually pretty old-school—but in Ben’s case, the university is a school he created himself (together with his cofounder), from scratch, with technology that didn’t exist until a few years ago.
There are a whole lot of jobs that exist now that didn’t exist just a few years ago. And there are jobs that have been around seemingly forever that are now disappearing. It makes it a lot harder to talk to our kids about their future.
It’s one thing if your child tells you they want to be a lawyer because it’s a concrete professional goal that can be accomplished with specific, established steps. We can help with that! Here’s an LSAT study guide! But if your child tells you they want to be a Twitch streamer and play Minecraft, you might think: Is that a real thing? Is it something lots of people can do for a living? Or is it accessible to only a few Twitch celebrities? Is there a college major for this? A book we should read? How do we help you achieve this goal?
Because we lived through it, we can draw a line from our past to our present careers. But the mistake is to believe we can likewise draw the line from the present to the future, and that if our kids just do what we did, they’ll have the same opportunities and results.
It’s 2024 as we write this book. Twenty years ago, in 2004, Gabrielle was a senior art director at an advertising agency in New York. She worked in a skyscraper with offices and cubicles. She did graphic design, and her job was easy to describe. This was the job she thought she would have when she majored in graphic design in college.
In 2006, she started Design Mom, an entirely different career. She was a blogger. She learned to write well. She learned photography. She worked from home and tried to figure out how to make money from being a blogger—selling ads in the margins, then later doing sponsored blog posts. Facebook was soon at its peak and pushed bloggers to video. Now Gabrielle was making and editing videos. Then Instagram became the most influential social media platform, and blogging began to fade. Now she had to master Instagram, including Instagram Stories—a totally new format. She started and ran a conference, learning how to host and organize in-person events. She launched a subscription newsletter. She learned to write books and make book proposals, and how to promote books too.
Twenty years later, and guess what’s not really a career anymore? Blogging. Back in 2006, Gabrielle had to learn and build a whole new career from scratch, but now her workday looks entirely different than it did when she started blogging. She’s had six or seven distinct jobs since then. That’s how fast the world is changing. In 2024, a parent might think, I should get my child into AI development because that’s the future. But that would be like telling your child in 2008 that they need to get good at blogging because blogging is the future.
It’s not just blogging/content creator/influencer work that is changing quickly. Journalism hasn’t disappeared (thank goodness) but getting a job in journalism isn’t something you can depend on like you could twenty or thirty years ago. Writing legal briefs is predicted to become a job for AI; so is reading X-rays. Even five years ago, someone might have said, “Well, if you’re a software engineer, you will always have a job.” But that’s not true anymore. Careers that we assumed would always be there aren’t as stable as we thought they were. There is no silver bullet for the future.
It’s not just specific jobs that are changing, the entire nature of work is changing. How we think about work is changing—from assuming we’ll be working in an office building to demanding that we can work from home instead. We’ve seen that shift just in the last few years. Will flexible schedules become a common feature of work life, or will they fade away? We don’t know.
There are ongoing conversations about universal basic income (UBI) and about establishing a four-day workweek as the norm. There are conversations about care work and how people should be compensated for caring for aging parents and young children (instead of assuming women will do this work for free).
It used to be you would get a job, and you would stick with that for forty years. Now, changing careers several times throughout a lifetime is commonplace. And there are predictions that our children won’t work at all—or at least won’t “work” in a way that we recognize as a job.
This is why we don’t worry about our kids’ future professional lives. We can’t control how fast the world is changing. We can’t control what jobs will be available for our kids.
So this is what we do instead: We try to make sure our kids get a good education, that they’re flexible and independent, and that they’re not afraid of hard work. And then we trust that their flexibility and their independence mean they’re going to figure things out. From what we’ve observed, the professional trends are moving toward individuals being able to find or create work that provides value to others and that they are passionate about, instead of being mostly limited to finding and taking established pathways to specific, recognizable jobs. And that hasn’t been the case for most people for most of history. So that’s good news.
We encourage our kids to embrace lifelong learning. If they have specialties that they really like—maybe math or history or D&D—then we lean into those. We encourage them to pursue those interests even if we don’t know what they’ll do with them for a career or if they’ll use them in their career at all. Maybe they’ll teach their interest, maybe they’ll end up in a traditional job, or maybe they’ll end up with a job (or create a job) that didn’t exist before.
We try to avoid the instinct to put all their eggs in one basket or set up expectations for a specific outcome. Even if they take all the established steps toward a specific career goal, careers are no longer guaranteed.
We look for opportunities where our kids can be exposed to lots of different work experiences: Volunteer at a soup kitchen or as a student helper in the cafeteria. Try a summer internship while they still live at home and don’t have expenses. Have them shadow one of your friends at work for the day. Take a tour of a tech company campus. Help out at a friend’s small business. Host a career night for neighborhood families where the adults talk about what they do for work. Point out the jobs of the grown-ups they know. Point out the wide variety of jobs they encounter as you run errands. Help them understand that jobs will continue to change, and there are a million ways to work.