"Daddy, what did you do all your life?"

My kids are currently studying for their end of year high school exams. A teachers' strike here in Southern California has meant that they have been home for the last two days - and will probably be home Monday too. So I have been helping them review. Not in math, they outpaced me there some time ago. But I am helping them review in history. One is studying European History and the other World History and both cover the Industrial Revolution.

And it got me thinking: We owe a lot of benefits to the Industrial Revolution, but making a mystery of how we spend most of our waking hours should not be one of them.

The Industrial Revolution started in England around 1750. One of its outcomes was an increase in the production of goods - textiles at first, then other products. And the consequences of all that have been mostly good - more products, cheaper prices, jobs, greater overall prosperity. But there has been another consequence of the whole factory system, a cost you might say, whose impact is harder to measure.

Because the Industrial Revolution was also a domestic revolution. It brought a halt to the "putting out" system under which production was carried out in the home. And it coincided with the "enclosure movement" which shut the ancestral fields to farm workers and forced them to go to the towns to look for work. Increasingly, "work" was something that had to take place some place else.

Families, which before the Industrial Revolution had been poorer but more cohesive - afterwards became richer but fractured. Some parenting experts believe that for all the good that the factory system did for the economy and general prosperity, it was a giant step backwards for parenting. Kids were no longer raised by their parents - skills and values were no longer passed along as children followed the plow or sat by the loom. Instilling knowledge became outsourced, as all of society became more specialized.

Course, in the early days, the children had the "privilege" of working in the factory right alongside their parents (and often chained to machines). When that ended, the split in the family was complete. Mother would typically stay at home - no longer engaged in paid work - and Father would troop off, often leaving before dawn and returning well after dark, to make money at some far off place.

Fast forward to today. Things haven't changed all that much - except perhaps that more women now follow their husbands out of the house each day for paid work. And the children go in their own direction.

So a connection between generations has been broken. And more than one child has wondered, if not always asked, "Daddy, what did you do all your life?". (And over the previous decades it most often was the man who spent the most time out of the house.) "Work", is the obvious answer - and the conversation does not always go much further.

Sadly, when it comes time to reflecting on life - and preparing memoirs - many of us pay scant attention to the decades we spent working. Maybe because we feel that we have already robbed our partners and families of so much time away, best not to make it worse. (I seldom come across a retired man who does not regret so much time spent away - it can become a source of guilt.) Added to that is that "work" can be complex - it goes on in an industry, within systems, requires a vocabulary, and often even some technical explanation.But business stories hold an important place in our family histories. Because for most of us, work is more than the sale of our physical and intellectual energies. It is a career, a business, a field where our powers were tested, a place where we built and created, a world where we formed alliances and built relationships, an arena where we strove and succeeded - and sometimes faltered. It was the source of much of the family's wealth and prosperity.

The career story and the business profile needs to come out into the open and takes its place among the other topics more often covered in memoir. And it was in recognition of this that we formerly launched a new product line this week: the video business biography: Tools Down, Camera Up: Video Business Biography Launched.

Work was and is a big part of life. And we need to have a better answer to the question "Daddy, what did you do all your life?". The better answer for many retired entrepreneurs and business folks will be a video business biography recording the ups and downs and the strivings and struggles that filled the best years of their lives.

We owe a lot of things to the Industrial Revolution, but making a mystery of how we spent most of our waking hours is not one of them.