Re:For 20-Somethings, Ambition at a Cost
by nostrademons on Sunday March 03, 2013 @09:29PM
(#5316226)
Couldn't that have been easily avoided with "Follow your dreams, but here's what you're likely to get paid with each of your career choices..." advice?
My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams, we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various fields we were looking at.
Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.
There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather, teenagers are ignorant - they lack life experience, so they often don't have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the decision for them.
My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams, we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various fields we were looking at.
Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.
There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather, teenagers are ignorant - they lack life experience, so they often don't have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the decision for them.