Lucky parents raise children who want to be better than their parents, children who go to school longer or aim for higher jobs than their parents did or who aim to have jobs that are different from the ones their parents had.
This and other parents' issues related to job choice can sometimes make it hard for parents to come up with family ideas that help.
Short of bowing out of a child’s life, the only way to have any input is to either give tried and true advice about career job training (some of which has worked for over two millennia), or to try to find a way to work with other people in the community.
Working with others is what I did.
My daughter’s desire to be a veterinarian emerged almost as soon as she knew fuzzy animals were in the world. Terri loves them. She wants to help them. In fact, she would rather spend a day with any old dog, cat or cow than with most people. But neither my husband nor I knew anything about the world that produces vets, so we had no family home activities to offer. How could we help her?
This is a common problem. Doctor’s kids want to be dancers. Factory workers’ children want to be doctors. To make it happen, the family has to go outside of itself for help.
I call that the “stool approach.” A learner’s stool can be short, or it can be tall. The important thing is that it can stand because it has three legs.
In a manner of speaking, parents and their child are two legs of the stool. If the stool is to stand, it needs another leg. If, as the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child,” the third leg is the village.
It Takes a Village
So we turned our daughter over to the village. I was working at the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University and met a professor who liked kids. He invited Terri to visit his lab class. She loved it, but she didn’t get to work with animals.
Fortunately, the College of Veterinary Medicine offices were in the same building as my office. I knew some people there and they told me about a program for kids who want to be vets. Terri went there.
She was assigned to work with horses, not cows, so that was a disappointment — but not the biggest one. A few weeks of sniffling and sneezing, watery and red eyes showed that Terri was very allergic to animals with hair — that is, the warm, fuzzy ones. Somebody would have to make a decision about whether Terri would go on with her dream.
Good parents make decisions for the child’s good. But her doctor said it would be better if Terri made the decision about her life’s work. We, her parents, should wait for her to make the decision.
Terri struggled through the summer half-sick, stuck on allergy drugs, sniffing from inhalers and gulping pills to help her breathe. At work, she spent as much time as possible walking the horses outside. To make up for what she couldn’t do, she worked extra hard looking at molecules in the research laboratory. And she cried.
At the end of the summer, Terri was worn out. She decided not to be a vet.
Friends had helped Terri check out her dream job, and the doctor had helped us to let her put that dream away on the shelf when it became a nightmare. It does take a village to raise a child. It takes solid support under parents — something like a three-legged stool.
Other people can be very helpful and useful in raising children. Let them help you.
Dedria A. Humphries Barker is a writer and parent in East Lansing, Michigan.