When parents know best

This week, I've been doing a lot of thinking about things past -- not so much my past but my husband's. But let's get to the story.

I have a student. A very good student. A student who emails me this week, after re-enrolling last year, to say he's very sorry, but he has to withdraw from the course. "I'm really cut-up about this," he says. He's been really looking forward to second year. Turns out that his father, in his infinite wisdom, has decided he can't continue with our course, and is forcing him to take up a place in a different course, a course he doesn't want to do.

The same thing happened to my husband. The Gadget Man was accepted into a course that was difficult to get into. His father decided a general science degree had much better employment prospects and coerced him into changing his preferences. TGM did so and ended up in a science degree he didn't like and dropping out. Eventually, after a dead-end career in the public service, he went back and completed his science degree and embarked on a career in research. His father was rapt, and talked of Nobel Prizes. (Nothing like unrealistic expectations, right? Especially because credit for great discoveries usually goes to supervisors, not necessarily the grunt doing the work.) In the meantime, research funding dried up and what was, for a few years, a reasonable career fell apart.

We often think we know what's best for our kids. My student's father thinks he's acting in his son's best interests. His son is a talented writer who is dedicated enough to work hard. Writing's a tough career to crack, true. But who knows? So's acting, and many who try fail. But what if those greats among us had never tried?

I always wanted to be a writer. When I finished high school, the only course for writers was journalism, and I was just too shy to be out interviewing people, and despised the way some journos got in the faces of those grieving just to get a story. I did science instead. Treated my writing as a hobby. If only courses like ours had been around then!

But would my parents have allowed me to do one? I'm not sure. They were always very focused on my having a career. In fact, until I started teaching, my mother considered all the time I'd spent on writing and doing writing courses a waste of time. I think of it as no such thing. I've pointed out to her that all tradespeople have to do an apprenticeship. Her reply is always in terms of how many years I've spent doing this, to which I'll make a quip about how apprentices do their apprenticing for many hours each week, whereas my apprenticeship hours get broken up between trying to run a household, trying to bring up a family, trying to work. I don't spend 40 hours a week on my writing. (I only dream of this!)

The other thing for us to remember is that people can change their careers. There's so much pressure on young people to choose a career when they know nothing of the world. It's a shame they don't all go have a gap year straight after school. Gap years should be compulsory -- a time to learn something more of themselves, to find out what they really might like doing, to find out what the world and the working world is like and to have a chance to freshen themselves up in terms of their studies. I've changed careers -- gone from scientist to arts teacher. My husband has changed careers (a few times). All this angst the kids feel -- do we really need to be adding to it with our own dreams for them? Our own dreams -- and that's the key point, isn't it? Vicarious living is all right for us, as long as we're not imposing those lives on our children as well. It's one thing to want to live through them, but another thing altogether to then try to shape those lives to provide the vicarious lives *we* really want to lead.

Let's just step back and take a breath. Is there anything wrong with letting our kids chase their dreams? What's the worst thing that can happen to them? What's the best? Isn't it better that they make their own mistakes and not ours? Something for every parent to think about . . .