We tried to go along these lines. In high school we said getting good grades was their “job.” Fortunately, they always seemed to see the merit in pursuing a path that gave them the most options - like getting good grades, or starting off in a more competitive/marketable major.
When my kids expressed interest in history, acting, music performance, and creative writing, we suggested that at the very least they might want to get a teaching certificate in addition. And all along we offered our opinions that we thought science and math would be useful skills - even in teachers. Pointed out examples of people who engaged in those activities as avocations.
When they got close to college, we sat them down and discussed money pretty openly on a couple of occasions. I remember asking them what they thought about our current lifestyle, and told them what kind of income it took to maintain that. Of course we told them money isn’t everything and they would be best off if they tried to pursue a career they thought they had a chance of liking instead of just whoring for money, but said they ought to pursue a career in an area that would be likely to support the standard of living they wished.
Also told them we could only afford to help them through 4 years of college, so they would be best off studying something that would give them some marketable skills in that time.
So far, they all seem to have found a way to pursue their personal interests. My eldest is a senior studying music ed - wants to be a HS band director. I hope she is able to find a job! My son is a sophomore studying aerospace engineering - has been thrilled with air/spacecraft since he was a toddler. My youngest is a freshman and is totally geeked about molecular biology - wants to be a geneticist, just got hooked on DNA her senior year of HS.
I think the main thing we did was try to encourage them to develop interests. My wife and I both ended up in law largely because we had not decided anything else to do. We are both quite pleased that none of our kids express any desire to go to law school!
My father is a laborer and my mother ultimately was a homemaker with a splash of part-time work that rolled into a full-time teller job at the local bank. The only thing they explicitly wanted for me was to “not have to lift anything heavier than a pencil,” figuratively speaking. The only real direction they offered was that I should go to college.
They didn’t pressure for any particular career, but that’s not the same as supporting my choices. I left high school completely directionless. My college choice was based on who was offering the best scholarship while also having a marching band… being far away was a plus. I may have stayed in school if I had some meaningful support along the way.
For my kids (both under 3 years of age), I plan on steering them to getting a degree in an employable field that will earn them enough to live without needing to survive on ramen. After that consideration, it will be based on talents and interests that I’ll have noticed and fostered. In other words, a math, science, or business degree will be fine. An arts degree will be handled on a case-by-case basis.
It was expected of me to have good grades but aside from that I was given absolute free rein. In fact, my parents were so against the notion of meddling in my education (bad experiences with their own parents as I understand it) that they didn’t even endorse any specific career choice. I didn’t really take advantage of such freedom, though, as I chose a fairly conventional degree.
This, however, is pretty atypical. In my country colleges are often outright selected by the parents based on what sounds prestigious (as filtered trough slightly outdated perceptions). This results in a great number of EE/CS students who show up in first year looking rather lost and forlorn.
We’re trying to help the kids know what jobs are out there that coincide with their interests. The oldest boy wants to be an inventor right now, so we talk about how engineering degrees can help him be a better inventor. Oldest girl wants to be a psycologist, but is also a talented musician, so every once in a while I point out that music therapy is a growing field and may be something she would enjoy. I’m trying not to be pushy, though. I want them to find their own path.
My mother was very pushy about my career choices in a very subtle way. Anything I brought up was immediately shot down as not being marketable. Fashion design? Well, isn’t it almost impossible to be the next Ralph Lauren? She just had no clue how many clothing companies existed and how each of them would have whole teams of designers working for them. I don’t know where she thought her JC Penny sale dress came from.
Then there was architecture. I’m very visual but I am also quite competent at math and science. I love houses. What could be wrong with that? Well, my uncle is an architect for a large company. He doesn’t like his job and isn’t paid that well for it.
Plain Art? Well, I’m certainly not the next Picasso (and she was right about that even though she never came out and said it.) But if I had tried art I know a professor or two could have shown me all the other career opportunities in art that would have fit my talent and skill. Illustrator, graphic designer, etc.
I truly believe she had her heart set on me being a teacher. I knew this and deliberately have chosen not to be a teacher. She was fully supportive of my English Literature degree because I’m sure she believed that I’d eventually break down and add an education component eventually.
Why I let her influence me in any way I don’t know. She made it clear from a very early age that she and my dad could not pay for my college education and I would have to put myself through school. They never contributed a cent, but she sure got her say in what I ended up with.
One of these days I want to go get a masters in Architecture just to have it. It would be wonderful to design my own dream house. The older I get the more I learn to love houses and I adore remodeling. It would be so fabulous to actually have more real knowledge.
My mother recently claimed that they had never put any pressure on me (then again, my mother lives in a parallel universe). She was surprised to hear that the “jokes” she’d made about wanting me to be a teacher like her (perma-unemployed you mean, Mom?) or a nurse in order to better care for her (excuse me, gotta run) had been taken seriously; also that whenever I mentioned something like “Juancar was saying he may go into architecture” (and Dad or herself shot it down faster than Lucky Luke), I was actually going down a list of “majors I think I may be able to survive schooling in and then get work and actually not hate it.”
Their strategy or lack thereof backfired. I mentioned Chemistry, it didn’t get shot down, but when I talked with people about Chemistry they talked about “hard major but easy, routine work” and when I talked with someone about Chemical Engineering he talked about “hard major and the jobs can take you anywhere… international… many different fields…” Add in that the only ChemE school in the country was 400km away while the closest Chemical school would have had me going back home to do the ironing (literally, promise) every weekend and gee… “I’ve figured out I want to be a Chemical Engineer!”
Both IT/CS and Business Management were in the verbotten list (I didn’t have the slightest interest in going into BM but like computers more than mice like cheese). For the last 9 years I’ve made my living as a consultant, installing this big-ass computer program used to manage businesses
For me, the closest thing I felt to pressure was my father telling me that I should take some business classes in college to fall back on. Since I was studying computer science, I thought this was pretty amusing.
My oldest daughter is an interesting case, since she had a career in fifth grade, in acting. She never wanted to do that forever, but did get interested in film making. This made me nervous, since she had acted in a few NYU grad student films, and we learned from the students how expensive it was. Luckily she got into the Cal Arts summer program one summer, learned to edit, made a couple of films, and decided it was not for her. She got interested in economics and psych, which is what she’s in grad school for now. She had too many strong interests for us to do anything but give support.
I have enough trouble living my life without trying to live my sons life too. I made good grade schools , high schools and college available for him. It was up to him to do what he wanted with it. He has graduated college and gotten involved in politics. It was all a surprise to me. I backed his decisions right or wrong. Screwing up is also a part of life.
I don’t have kids, but my parents tried very hard not to pressure my siblings or I about career choices. I got a lot of pressure from other people (teachers and relatives) to go into science because I was good at it (though no better than I was at math or art or history), but my parents didn’t pressure me at all, despite both of them having majored in biology in college.
Mom and Dad did want all three of us to go to college because they said the things we’d learn would enrich our lives even if we never did anything with our degree, and they were right about that.
I majored in science, my brother in the social sciences, and my sister in art. My job most closely resembles my field of study in college.
I really appreciated not getting pressured from Mom and Dad, especially at times when everyone else seemed to have a goal for me.
For an example of pressure, my wife’s best friend really wanted to be an art history major but her father (career Army, Colonel) ordered her to major in business. After she graduated she worked for a benefits consulting company, made good money but was never happy with it, and retired as early as she could. Enough people hate going to work already, it is a shame to make your kids part of this population.
My uncle made a fortune doing computer engineering stuff, but of course this was around 1980 when there was no one else to really do it. However, because of my uncle’s success, my entire life my mother pressured me into pursuing a career with computers.
Almost anything else my mother discouraged me completely and now that I’m in my mid 20’s, I resent the hell out of her for it. I always wanted to pursue something creative like fashion design or writing and my mother would retort “Do you know how many starving fashion designers there are?” and refuse to buy me a sewing machine for my birthday or whatever. I started college doing what I thought was a decent compromise between computer science and what I really wanted (Business) and hated it, did miserably. I finally couldn’t put up with school anymore so I switched majors to something I really enjoyed and got shit from her non stop for it. I make a decent income now but I always wonder “what if…?”
The irony is that if I had majored in computer science, I probably would have started out as a 32,000 a yr low level programmer since now the field is so inundated with comp sci people. Yet my mother still refuses to believe this and it has caused a major wedge between us now.
So moral of the story, parents, please encourage your children to pursue their dreams, no matter how hopeless or far fetched they may seem. I would have been perfectly happy being a starving artist type vs being a decently paid cubicle drone yet thanks to a lifetime of nagging by my mother, I can’t bring myself to give it all up and pursue my dreams.
My sister and I basically always knew we were expected to major in a science degree (or other “practical” more-or-less quantitative degree, like economics, would probably have been okay) in college. I don’t think that either of us for one minute seriously entertained the possibility of majoring outside the sciences. And I think that pressure was a good thing. It saved both of us, I think, from aimlessly wandering around doing stuff that we liked okay but wasn’t marketable (I like and am good at music, and my sister likes to write, enough that we might have majored in those things, but not enough that I think either of us would have been happy making a career out of it). If either of us had been really horribly terrible at math or science, or really incredibly talented and motivated at the arts, it might have been different, but then expectations would probably not have been quite the same.
There was also pressure for specific career paths. My mom strongly pressured both of us to be doctors, and my dad somewhat less strongly pressured us to go into business or law. This was not such a good thing. I had a horrible sophomore semester knowing I could not stand biology and knowing I had to go and tell my mom that I couldn’t be premed, and a horrible Thanksgiving break doing exactly that where I was unsure if I was going to be disowned. (Of course I wasn’t, but I was in the throes of angsty adolescence and thought I might.) My sister, who was the rebellious one, spent years denying her pull towards medicine because my mom wanted it so much. (She’s now in residency and loves it.)
For our kid(s), we want to do something along the lines of Dinsdale and Bubbadog – I’d like to encourage them to think fairly hard about the marketability of whatever they decide to do, without quashing anything they’re sincerely passionate about. I think if they’re passionate enough about it to research the marketability, and commit to following it even if they find out they can’t expect a high job security/income level, that’s okay, but if they’re not they should find something more marketable.
My oldest is 13 and in her first year of middle school so we’re not yet at the career-deciding stage. I caught her getting stressed out about grades one evening though (she’s bright but not gifted) and gained some yardage with: This is just 7th grade. Marks won’t matter until 9, maybe 10th. Meantime what you need to do is not fall behind and focus on figuring out who your friends are and what kind of person you want to be. I got a disbelieving stare and, “So if I get a bunch of Ds on my report card I won’t get grounded?” To which I joked that she wouldn’t allow herself to get below a B so I wasn’t worried about that, I was mostly concerned that she’s ok with who she thinks she is. Because if she hasn’t got that sorted by 10th grade then it’ll be a horrible distraction when the real academic learning starts.
I plan on encouraging her to go to college because I think she’ll enjoy the challenge of it all. The other three kids? Well I plan on asking them “Why” a lot without actually steering them. If it looks like they’ve put some thought into what they’re doing then that’s good enough.
My parents have largely been supportive of my academic and career decisions, no matter how dumb they were. The exception is when I was 22 and applied for the Peace Corps. I got nominated to serve in Sub-Saharan Africa and my mom kind of freaked out. She just thought it was too dangerous or something. I wasn’t scared, but I didn’t want to upset her that much, so I decided not to go after all.
Of course, several years later, I decided I wanted to do Peace Corps after all, I reapplied, and this time they decided to send me to Eastern Europe. This was acceptable to my parents, and I everything was fine. (I think it might have also been that I was twenty-seven and more mature, though, not necessarily the location.)
It never even occurred to me not to go to college, so maybe my parents didn’t really pressure me that much. At any rate, my younger sister is now 25 and still doesn’t have her BA (she’s kind of working on it…slowly), so they’re obviously not iron-fisted dictators when it comes to higher education.
I didn’t pressure them into any specific arena. I would have been delighted had either of my sons followed my interests in the biological science, but one has an MBA and is an executive with a software company, while the other has a pHD in Economics and teaches.
My goal was to have them think and be independent, so I’m pretty satisfied with the results - not that they live to meet my goals.
And they are good men. That’s really enough for me.
Hell fucking yes my parents did. Growing up there were only two acceptable careers for me and my sister-medicine or engineering. The brain washing started really really young.
My parents later expanded that to add law and finance (they consider themselves very “liberal” in this regard and are completely self-congratulatory about their broadmindedness).
However, my parents didn’t really care about what we did for undergrad because we knew going in that it wasn’t going to end there. That said, they semi-talked me out of Classics because it was a little too on the basket-weaving side for them. I ended up in Poli Sci, which was a big mistake. I should have stuck by my guns with Classics.
They definitely wanted me to be self-sufficient and hopefully in the usual types of career (CS, law, engineering, medicine). Paleontology was out of the question because who expects people grubbing in the dirt after bones to get rich? (damn.)
After trying a bunch of stuff in school, I ended up drifting into English because that’s where my skills lay. Parents worried a lot about what I’d do after graduation (burgers? teaching?), and pretty much forced me to intern like crazy at software companies in the summers. Looking back, I’m not sure it ever occurred to me to say no and try something out of the ordinary, the pressure was that strong.
Guess their cunning plan paid off since I’m now a software technical writer and actually do enjoy it. They do still want me to get an MBA and be just like my middle management cousin, though. (oh HELL no)
