What do mom and dad do at work?
When you ask a child this question, the answers can be surprising but always adorable. For this reason, we decided to conduct our investigation into children's fantasy versus reality. In this article we will show you, with figures and pictures, what we have discovered.
To gather feedback, we conducted a survey of 226 parents of children aged between 2 and 6 during the second half of May. All participating children have working parents.
To the question «Do your children know what work you do?»,
72.5% answered in the affirmative. Which means that ¾ of parents really
think their children know what they do at work. In reality, things are quite different… And it will take much more than a coffee to make people forget about it!
To deepen the theme and verify if the children really knew what their parents did at work, we later asked their children the question: "Do you know what mom and dad do at work?" We received numerous responses and reading them was a moment of pure enjoyment.
We spent a lot of time picking the best answers, and choosing was tough. The ones we prefer can be found in the infographic below, but here you can already find an example that was not among the chosen ones, but no less curious for this.
«My mother knows all the secrets of the earth and publishes them on Facebook».
In the light of the data that emerged from the survey, we decided to illustrate 8 children's answers to the question «What do mum and dad do at work?». The illustrated answers are below and they are really hilarious!
The answers are absolutely adorable and above all show us that there is a gulf between the imaginative vision of children and the daily working reality of parents. That's why we interviewed two child psychologists to find out more about this difference.
Gitty Feddema and Aletta Wagenaar, two Dutch child psychologists known for having recently written a book entitled "What if we start educating our children again?" they discuss the imaginative vision of children between 2 and 6 years old.
In the preschool stage the line between fantasy and reality is not so defined. At this age children willingly listen to stories and fairy tales and, in fact, the mental process implemented by children when they listen to a fairy tale or a story is not changed. While for the adult who reads a fantasy book, the mental process that is triggered continuously evaluates what is being read, determining whether it is actually possible in real life. In other words, it distinguishes what is real and what is fiction.
Feddema & Wagenaar argue that this "reality check" is influenced by the development of thought and is formed over the years, thanks to the experiences and information we have assimilated. Thanks to this awareness and with the help of our ability to reason, we improve our ability to judge events according to their importance or reality.
Research and infographic developed by Viking IT. Visit the site.
