Feedback welcome: on parenting

[threadwalker]

My current question:

I see a ton of teens getting out of high school with no idea what to do with their lives. They hate school, so they don't go to college. Or they go to Junior College and putter around there for 10 years or so. To me, they appear directionless and with no drive to do anything with their lives.

I want my kids to pick a career path or vocation, regardless whether it involved college (although I prefer them to go to college). I want them to grow up, move out, and be big people in the big-people world. How do I get my kids to choose a life path that doens't involve laying on my sofa watching TV or plugging into computer games and guzzling Purple Flrup(1)?

All thoughts and feedback welcome. Feel free to ramble. You don't need to be a parent to have an opinion or insights.

Later I'll post what I've already started doing. I suspect the soft-fuzzy folks who prefer to solve family conflict with cookies and hugs will think of my house as being run by the Boot-Camp Mom from Hell.

(1) Jimmy Neutron reference.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

We started talking a little about this, but I'll repeat some stuff for the rest of the class. I'm not a parent, so I can't speak to that end. And if you look at the results of my parents' parenting, it's obvious that the results can be strikingly diverse. But here are some ideas of what led me down the paths I walked.

The biggest thing was a matter of default expectations. Parental expectations can be daunting and intimidating, but on the plus side, they create our "expectation of normalcy". Is it normal to go to college, get an interesting and reliable job, and take responsibility for your own life? Or is it normal to not carry through on projects, hate what you have to do to pay the rent, drift from job to job without thought of a "career", and constantly find external excuses for not achieving your goals? It was expected that we would do well in school. That was "normal". It was expected that we would go to college. That was "normal". It wasn't that we got disciplined for deviating -- it was more of a bewildered "what can we do to bring the universe back into alignment?" reaction.

When we considered future careers, we were always encouraged to aim at the highest part of the target. When I was a kid and fell in love with the San Diego Zoo and decided I wanted to be a zookeeper, I got steered into transfering that ambition to exotic animal veterinarian. (Didn't take, but it shaped my college career.) I think that exposing kids to the realities of interesting and challenging jobs, and impressing on them what it takes to get those jobs, gives them a realistic sense of needing to work hard to achieve what they want. (And I think that exposing kids to people who love their jobs makes for good role-modeling, with the acknowledgement that sometimes you just have to do what you have to do.)

The other big thing that I think helped shape my path was a conservative and realistic approach to teaching money management. We got allowances that were at a comic books-and-ice cream level, with opportunities to take on special around-the-house projects to earn larger sums. There was some loose tieing-in to performance of expected family chores, but not exclusively. (In-joke: if you think KPIs are arcane and complex, you should have seen some of my parents' allowance-calculation schemes!) When my taste in clothes diverged significantly from my Mom's shopping habits (sometime in late jr. high) she started handing over the monthly amount she had budgeted for my clothes and let me do as I pleased (knowing that I wasn't about to violate any school dress codes). And since I wasn't a fashionista and I liked to sew, I managed to bank a fair amount of it for other projects. But if I'd wanted a fancy stereo system, or my own tv, or a car, I would have had to get an outside job. In sum: we got handed enough money "for free" that there was room for learning about budgeting and saving-up-for, but not enough that we felt much entitlement.

But how much of this is upbringing and how much of it comes from how my personality interacted with that upbringing? I know that I came out of college with such an ingrained assumption that I'd support myself as soon as humanly possible that, when the science-oriented jobs didn't turn up immediately, I took a stint flipping burgers at Dairy Queen followed by half a year doing construction work at a mobile home factory before eventually working my way into the medical industry. When I ran out of teaching eligibility in grad school and hadn't yet landed a career track job, I put in a job application at the local Borders Books and was on the verge of putting one in at Starbucks when something else came through. Supporting myself was the first priority; pride comes second. Where does that come from? I dunno.

But this has babbled on long enough.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should probably mention that along with the default expectation that of course we'd go to college was the default assumption that we would be supported through college. And the carry-through. We all had college jobs too, but not at the level where our rent and groceries depended on it.