Figuring out what you want to do with your life career-wise can be a challenge for anyone. Even as an adult, you might find that you're in the wrong line of work... but how do you discover what the right line of work is for you? And if you're a parent, you most likely want to help your children figure out these types of things before they head down the wrong path. You want to give them the freedom to explore without having to spend years of their life (or a lot of your money) wandering without direction.
Here are some tips for guiding your child towards a successful career as an adult.
Help Your Children to Develop Interests and Talents:
If you think back to your own adolescence, you can probably identify those pivotal moments when you discovered an unexpected passion or had an experience that changed you and maybe even led you to the work you are doing today. You can make it more likely that your child will have these same types of serendipitous experiences by encouraging them to try new things, like audition for a play, take a creative writing class, babysit, get a part time job, or volunteer at a local homeless shelter or hospital.
Another approach is to help your child to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and then explore careers that overlap with those natural aptitudes. There are many different personality and aptitude tests available for free online, and while no single assessment is definitive, these tests can give your child some useful information or suggest careers that they didn't even know existed and could be a great fit.
Help Your Children Choose a Major:
We all know many successful people who are in professions completely unrelated to their major in college. So how much should you worry about helping your child choose the right major? The answer is: it depends. If your child is interested in pursuing a career that requires a high level of technical skill, like medicine or engineering, then choosing an appropriate major early on is probably pretty important.
If that's not your child's situation, help them to weigh the pros and cons of different options and encourage them to consider what they might do with a degree in that area. But don't worry if your child is undecided or doesn't seem to be making the "right" choice: it's pretty common for college students to switch majors part way through their degree, and having a degree in the first place is probably more important (for undergrads, anyway) than completing your studies in any specific area.
Let Go of the Outcome:
While there are many things you can do to help your child find a career that inspires them and allows them to be self-sufficient, you can't do the work for them. Many modern careers (YouTuber? Social Media manager?) didn't even exist just a few years ago and may be more "real" (and lucrative) than you think. What's more, it is far more common for today's young professionals to switch careers two or three or even five times. So if your child isn't doing exactly what you would have them be doing, or if the career they've chosen is an untraditional one, don't fret. As long as they're still learning and growing and starting to pay for their own phone and car insurance they are probably going to be just fine.
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