When it comes to career guidance of a teenager parental support and assistance is necessary because children are not familiar with the labor market, the prospects of different professions, and have never worked before. However, a child's ideas about their future may diverge from the opinion of their relatives. In this article we will tell you how to come to an understanding with your child and help them choose a future profession without harming them.
Determine how ready your teenager is to choose a profession
It's no secret that all people are different. Some people dream of a specific occupation from a young age, while others think about their self-determination at the very last moment. How ready is your child to choose his or her path? Your next steps depend on this, for example, if he or she has already thought about it and offers to discuss several options, you can proceed to the next paragraphs of the article.
If the situation is the opposite, you will need to introduce your child to the world of professions and opportunities for realization, as well as to make them understand that at a certain stage, career guidance is extremely important for further growth. You need to form a proper understanding of the word "work" in your child. What are the main types of activities? Physical or mental work? Give them examples of specific jobs, point out the characteristic differences.
How well does your child understand what he or she is striving for?
Common stories about conflicts in the family are based on the grounds of mismatch between the desires of adolescents and the ideas of their parents. Is this a trivial misunderstanding or is there a more serious cause for concern? It depends on the situation.
On the one hand, On the one hand, the dreams of a child in vacancies and the economic situation may turn out to be unrealistic or bend under the weight of alternatives offered or tried to impose by relatives. In this case, it should be realized that the ability to influence the child's choice means greater responsibility for your actions. Perhaps their idea will actually turn out to be a winner both materially and spiritually, meaning how much he or she will enjoy the job later on. But maybe you do need to point out the pitfalls that, due to lack of experience, your child cannot see for themselves.
On the other hand, such conflicts can happen on the basis of personal expectations of the family. For example, in a family of hereditary surgeons, the eldest child is passionate about becoming an artist, which is met with misunderstanding and resistance. In this situation, everything depends on the personal qualities of the parents and their child.
Important!
Whatever the case, it is illogical to purposefully incline your child in the direction of choosing your version of the future profession, no matter how thoughtful it was. If your goal is your child's well-being, it should be remembered that it is not only the prospects, the prestige of the profession or the size of the salary.
Making a choice for a teenager, their parent deprives them of the main thing - independence in such an important aspect of life as work. Hence the confidence in themselves and their abilities is undermined, the effectiveness of learning failures and the feeling of uselessness grows.
To summarize:
In all of the above, the counselor position is excellent. First, advice is taken into account much more readily by teenagers than lectures or exhortations in an orderly tone. This will help to create an atmosphere of trust.
Secondly, this ground for mutual understanding in career guidance will help to prepare questions. Ask what profession your child is interested in most of all and why.
Thirdly, you will create the necessary space for free and independent choice, only guiding and helping your child. In most cases, this is what he or she needs. And this will be quite enough.
