It didn’t matter to my mom, bless her heart, if I wanted to be a musician, I should be a teacher. If I wanted to be a pastor, I should be a veterinarian. If I wanted to be a doctor, I should be a lawyer. What a way to undermine your kid’s drive, ambition, and self-confidence.
My father on other hand had a simple, never changing message, “Its not work if you don’t get your hands dirty.” Those were the two sorts of messages I heard in my family. My wife and I tried to do it differently with our children:
We’ve tried to be encouraging of our children no matter what their passion. When they wanted musical instruments, they not only got instruments, but lessons. When they were into baseball, we devoted Saturday mornings and sometimes afternoons to that sport. When snakes were in vogue, we had snakes in the house and went to “herp” shows. I don’t think there is a pet we didn’t have at some point in time.
So why should it be any different when it comes to the children’s careers? First off, we encourage them that they are unlikely to finish in their first college major let alone find a career in whatever they major in. Neither my wife or I ever worked in the field of our college degrees.
So far we have only one graduated college child and she happens to have gone directly into her chosen field. Maybe precisely because we told her not to stress about it? Who knows? Our second kid, our oldest son, started out a psychology major, graduated with an English degree and then promptly went back to college for a music business degree.
One other thing we tell them is to follow their dreams instead of chasing after the almighty dollar. To date doing so has us with one kid earning a great living although her work is contract to contract. Unlike many children who pause for awhile after graduating, she was already was working jobs in her field before graduating.
Now she intuits that waitressing will probably be an inevitability from time to time in her field. We tell our children that its all right to be an artist or whatever. Just don’t count on living high off the hog in that case. We tell them they can be anything they want to be. But we also tell them there might be a price to pay.
Is it a better way to do it than my parents did? I guess time will tell. But so far, it seems like it. Our kids seem mostly happy when it comes to career choices.
