New York Times

MANY years ago, my son was sitting in his booster seat at the kitchen table, scribbling madly on a legal pad with a crayon. When I asked him what he wanted for breakfast he waved me off with a shake of his head. “I working Mommy or my editor will be mad with me,” he said.

He was parroting me, of course, and it was the first time I realized that my feelings about work could color his. So I set out to change my tune. No more shooing him away with explanations like: “There won’t be any more toys ever again, if I don’t finish this article.” No more describing my writing as the chore that prevented me from doing what I really wanted to do (which, from his point of view, would surely be to play with him).

Instead, since then, I have talked about work as the linchpin in the construct of my life, giving him new words to parrot — ones like “excitement” and “satisfaction” and “joy.”

That toddler is now a teenager, and part of a generation whose members are so convinced that work should be personally fulfilling that they see photocopying as beneath them. Any generalization has its exceptions (my son, I should note, in the interest of family harmony, works far harder in high school than I ever did.) But on the whole the workers of Generation Y, the eldest of which are almost 28, have a sharply different attitude toward work than their parents did.

And that’s probably their parents’ doing.

This time of year, when middle schoolers are about to mob offices nationwide for Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, read more.