What Comes First in the American Dream: Economic Success or Family Values?

The United States is built upon the idea of the American Dream, which at its core, is the idea that the social and economic equality and opportunity provided in our country allows for financial success and happiness. In order to achieve these goals, one must put in the time, the effort, and the money. Without the fullest of one’s ability, there is no chance of achieving the American Dream. Many people take this challenge and work, from daybreak to the late of night, sweating, bleeding, crying, and always trying to push forward. They focus on this one goal and do everything in their power to achieve it, sacrificing their time, their effort, and their money to achieve it. However, there is a point where this dream engulfs the entirety of a person, pushing out anything the other valuable things in life. There is a point to where they start to lose themselves in their work and every ounce in their being is poured into this glass with a leak that never gets filled. These people labor extensively and then they realize that he or she had just missed their son’s first steps, or missed Mom and Dad’s fiftieth anniversary, or missed their daughter’s dance recital, all because he or she had work today. They begin to wonder why they poured themselves down the drain their entire lives and missed the important things in life. The American Dream seems all about economic status, but a family is also equally important to keep in mind when thinking about one’s goals in life. For many people, the reason behind following the Dream in the first place was to give their family a better future than what they had as children. Clearly, family values should come first in the American Dream, but people in our country forget this fundamental aspect of it and put their goals of economic success ahead of their family.

The American Dream is based on bettering the futures of our children, yet our society flips the idea of the dream by putting our work in the center of our lives. In the United States, our employers expect us to be able to take care of our family and get our work done without any issues. This is why we lack paid maternity-leave laws, policies that protect those with family obligations from discrimination in the workplace, or the right to negotiate work-time flexibility without retaliation. And even though most families have multiple employed individuals, employers expect family work to be done by someone at home while the worker is at his or her job. This mindset of putting our careers ahead of our loved ones plagues our country, dividing our homes and preventing us from spending time with our children. This may result in our children thinking that it is normal to only see their parents a few times a day or even a handful of times every week. Our children will then later believe that working 45+ hours a week is normal and the cycle repeats to their children. All of this occurs because one person, most often our employers, think that careers should come before one’s home life. The belief of the importance of our career goals above everything else is ingrained so deep into our society that 42% of employees feel the need to check in on their workplace while they are in vacation and 47% of employees feel guilty when they are sick and cannot attend work, based on a study by Randstad. We worry about our jobs when we should be worrying about our families or even ourselves. Even during our off-days, we spend only eight hours a week with our families. Our society has geared us into orienting our lives toward our careers when we should be spending time with our spouses or children. We cannot allow ourselves to be run by our jobs and leave our families behind because our families are also part of our goals in life. The American Dream does demand that we work hard into achieving our goals, but we should do it for our families and we should know where we need to call in sick for a day and spend some time with our kids for the weekend.

Though we have centered our lives around our careers, it is possible to balance a productive work life and a healthy family life. If we have more family-friendly corporate policies on maternity, paternity, parental, and sick leave we will be able to focus more on our families and ourselves without having to worry about not being present at our jobs. We are then able to balance out our time at the workplace and our time at home through more flexible hours and more days to take care of urgent matters with our families. As for the conflict between the amount of work we need to put in our jobs versus the amount of work we need to put in our families, technology is the answer. New innovations having been developing at a faster and faster rate every year, making our lives easier with every passing day. With new ways of communicating and sending information, we are now able to work at home, relieving the stress of having two different, conflicting behaviors due to the different environments, which is one of the three main types of work-family conflicts. We can also use this technology to communicate to our family via email, text messages, or even through social media. We can keep our eye on our families and make sure that everyone is getting picked up from school or preparing tonight’s dinner while we finish up our last few tasks before we go home. Technology makes our jobs easier, taking a large burden off of our shoulders. And as for problems with money, if corporations consider their employees’ families when making policies on paid leaves or bonuses for employees with more family obligations, it will prevent workers from having to choose their jobs over their families in order to pay for our family. It will allow our children to have nice presents for Christmas and give us the money to take our spouses on a romantic weekend out of the house for their birthdays. It is possible for us to be able to balance our family life and our work life, but it is up to our administrators to realize that in order to fully realize our goals of achieving economic success, we need our families with us. Without them, all we have are worthless green papers that are incomparable to the value of being loved by our families.

The founders of our country wanted to live in a land where everyone had a chance to work their way to the top and reach the American Dream. But this dream means nothing when an aspiring and ambitious man’s wife says she is taking the kids and leaving him because he turned into a greedy and unpresent father. Or when a busy single mother has to work overtime in order to get her kids through college. The American Dream should be about giving one’s family the life that they deserve and giving a brighter future to our children. However, selfish people believe that families are things that anchor one from being the best they can be. Having a family should not be a burden. They should be at the center of our lives and as long as we put them above all else, then we are one step closer in truly reaching the American Dream.