I have 3 kids in elementary school. So far my career advice plan for them is as follows:

Pick something and try to get really good at it. If that doesn't work, pick something else.

(Privileged, top 5%-er) parenting in 2019 is a constant battle against the temptations of over-scheduling and over-enrichment. Kids need time to relax and goof around without being under pressure.

I too have 3 in elementary, and offer similar advice, adding:

Don't look to me to tell you what you should do; the hottest vocations of my generation will likely not even exist for yours (example: petroleum engineer). Look externally, experiment, measure, iterate. (essentially your first point)

* Make lots of mistakes, because mistakes mean you're trying new things, but with 2 caveats:

1/ try not to make any fatal mistakes

2/ don't repeat the same mistakes

* You have the resources of multiple generations of lucky & hard-working people at your disposal; don't waste them but make sure you use them (meaning educated families, diverse experiences and money)

* Your overall goal is to do your best to leave the environment you were born into better-off than it was when you started, meaning you've worked to improve the position of your family, community and the broader world.

> * Make lots of mistakes, because mistakes mean you're trying new things, but with 2 caveats:

This is all well and good when they're in school and still dependent on your financial support. Once they're on their own (say, at age 22), and start making mistakes, the stakes are a lot higher and the margin for error a low narrower.

Let's say you majored in something but did poorly overall. That's mistake #1. You won't have as wide of a berth for mistake #2, because you are likely still suffering the consequences of #1.

My 5 year old kid is really good at the iPad. I don't see that as a negative at all. All of these runner games. Better than me at them.

Does your child have screen time? If so, whats the weekly time?

It's different than the pressure to do well in life. It's the pressure that a child is made aware that if they choose to sleep in instead of volunteer on Saturday, or if they choose to play a pick-up game of baseball instead of join a competitive traveling league, that they are behind.

It's so sad.

To mitigate this (though not sure it's the right mitigation), if your kid doesn't specialize incredibly early and show promise they'll be kicked out of the performance stream into the recreational stream.

Example: sports start splitting kids at ages 5 and 6. They call it "assessment" but it's really try-outs for the competitive teams. From this point on the majority of effort and resources go to the predictable audience. Better hope your preschooler is coordinated for their age. Growing a foot in middle school will no longer get you on the basketball team as everyone else has 10 years of club ball.

Arts and academics is no different. Our local gifted school screens per-kindergarten and you won't even be considered without a private (read: $$$) assessment as part of your application.

That's the system here, and it seems to favor only individuals who are either purposefully held back a year (in the case of athletics) or whose parents have wealth and connections (in the case of athletics and the arts).

Not sure it's a great system, is what I'm saying.

>Summary: the anxiety is driven by pressure to do well in life, amplified by technology constantly reminding kids of this.

And by the shredding of the safety net, meaning that failure will result in a lifetime of indignity and struggle that you will likely never claw your way out of.

There never was a "safety net." It was just that times were good and there was other opportunity. If you failed out of college in 1950 you could still get a good job in a factory without being crushed by debt. If you committed a crime you could move across the country and not tell anyone.

That's the biggest difference between now and then. Back then if you needed to you could easily get a job doing something that paid decently and work your way up. Taking a risk is a lot easier if you have a reasonable plan for getting back on your feet should your fail. Nowadays it's all about not having gaps on your resume, making sure your involved in clubs, in open source, or that you're blogging and we'll known. Kids, I think, feel as if they need to have a plan for their lives at a young he and that they need to execute on it. It's not enough to just live this days.

It's such high stakes at such a young age. It seems like we've a very narrow definition of success, and so kids burn out trying to walk such a narrow path and not feel like a failure.

Or there's less success to go around so people have to start competing for it at younger ages.

Compare the possible career and life paths of a middle of the road person born in the US in 1930 vs 1960 vs 1990.

An average non high achiever had much better prospects in 1930 than 1960 and better prospects in 1960 than 1990.

If born in 1930 you could get a high school diploma and then buy a house and raise a family on your factory worker salary. You could just go through life with no strategic planning and do well enough and live comfortably.

Someone born in 1960 would do well to get a degree and a white collar job if they want that life. Strategic planning is nice but not necessary, you can probably do ok without it.

Someone born in 1990 needs to have a 4yr degree in something lucrative (STEM) and even then buying a house and starting a family is not a given. To succeed you need to have figured out your strategic plan by about age 15 and then execute on it in order to have the same life that someone born in 1930 could just happen into without much thought.

> Someone born in 1990 needs to have a 4yr degree in something lucrative (STEM) and even then buying a house and starting a family is not a given. To succeed you need to have figured out your strategic plan by about age 15 and then execute on it in order to have the same life that someone born in 1930 could just happen into without much thought.

This is not remotely true, but I grant that it's the currently popular narrative.

Yes, and it's the fact that it's the popular narrative that drives this anxiety and ends up being a sell fulfillkng prophecy. Everyone says this is the case and then a kid gets filled with anxiety when they think about doing something else and boom, there you have it, stress addled and burned out at the age of 25.

I have STEM degrees, but barely any strategy, and have done alright for myself and my family. My childhood was homeschool until high school, and pretty free range. Did zero extra curricular activities except ROTC in college, which got me my first job right out of college in the Air Force.

It seems like there are plenty of non STEM blue collar jobs that afford a nice life, but the problem is they are looked down on.

I think part of the problem is that everyone is optimizing for the same niche, which makes that niche very crowded and requires extreme amounts of optimization to succeed.

Kids are fine. It's the idiotic parents that need to relax a little.

Excellent summary, but can you somehow put the word 'parents' in it ? Because they play a significant part in all this as well.

I think that's an incomplete summary; a major driver of this is the difference in availability of success (at least according to older generation's standards) between older and younger generations.

Not sure I understand the above - would you ELI5 please?

I believe they are saying that the American Dream of owning a house and having a good job all one's life is much more difficult now that it used to be.

Ah, well that's certainly true. I'm from the UK, and it's been more or less impossible for young people to buy their first home before they're 30.

Thanks for summary. Appreciated