<p>I’m new to the forum, so please excuse this Thread if it has been done extensively already.</p>
<p>My children are young still, but for them and others I sometimes grapple with the question of what I would encourage a young person to pursue career-wise. (And I know they probably won’t listen, but I’d like to offer sensible advice.)</p>
<p>So what careers do you think offer the best shot of a middle-class livelihood in the future?</p>
<p>Careers I’d thought of:</p>
<p>High-school maths teacher</p>
<p>Careers I thought would be more risky, jobs-wise:</p>
<p>I think it is better not to worry too much about careers when your children are young. Just help make it possible for them to explore themselves and their interests, and if you notice a particular area developing, provide an opportunity to deepen it.</p>
<p>People seem to think of careers in terms of categories. The idea seems to be that you pick a career category, and then go to college for it. The reality is different for most people. Your children can finish high school and go to college without knowing what they want to do. In fact, it is fine to go to college undecided about a major, unless they are sure they want to do a vocationally focused major like nursing or engineering.</p>
<p>Many students graduate without a clear idea of what they want to do, too. Career interests zig and zag, and are not straight lines. While grad school, med or law or business or nursing school are always possible, most college grads enter the work force in a job that seems to fit, then change many times.</p>
<p>The job market is varied and complex and the neat categories our children are taught to think about don’t really reflect reality. Read craigslist for a few days and you will see what I mean.</p>
<p>Let your children enjoy growing up without this kind of pressure or worry about future career and income. I have read that overplanning can actually prevent opportunities, because being open to possibilities is the most important thing.</p>
<p>I agree with compmom so much. I’d encourage you to encourage your kids to explore more in what they are interested in and go from there. </p>
<p>Some personal experiences: My dad encouraged me to pursue career x and y. I tried but hated it. Not only that but I felt so much pressure and stress! My mom encouraged to do what makes me happy and explore what I like career-wise. I changed my major after my freshman year and I have never been happier and never more sure about what I wanted to do.</p>
<p>Your kids still sound pretty young, so I think they have a lot of time. Honestly, many people enter college not knowing what to do but end up finding what they have a passion through exploration. Just encourage curious minds to grow!</p>
<p>Steve Jobs once said “The only way to do great work is to love the work you do.” :)</p>
<p>I’d recommend that they keep their options open and figure out what they are good at and what they love to do. My youngest is a senior in college and just figured out (via a summer job) that his favorite part of the job has been developing a product - a program for handling room reservations that will make the job much easier for the future. I think it’s pretty funny since he wrote one of his college essays about what he learned from making origami earrings. </p>
<p>You’ll see architecture on lots of don’t do this lists, but I’ve found that while I’m not that well paid and have been laid off twice, that’s it’s one of the few jobs where it’s very easy to set off on your own and be a sole practitioner. It meshed really well with family life and I was able to work part time when my kids were young and grow my business as they got older. I always find the work interesting.</p>
<p>Dh is a research scientist. It’s stressful - especially in these days of budget cuts - but he loves the work and he knows he’s making important contributions to the health field.</p>
<p>My older son is a computer programmer - he’s got a real gift in that field.</p>
<p>I second lullabies and mathmom. It’s a mistake to try to steer your kids in a direction you think will be lucrative in the future when they are so young. You don’t know what their talents and interests are, and more importantly, they don’t know what their talents and interests are. Also, what looks good economically right now may be very different in 10-15 years.</p>
<pre><code>Encourage your children to try different things and talk about what they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy about them. Help your kids discover what gives them a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Help them develop the qualities that will serve them well in work and life in general. If a young person has a positive attitude, perseverance, creativity, resilience, and knows how to work hard, they will go a long way. Teach them to work well with others and to deal with delayed gratification. If your children have developed strong characters, they will be successful in whatever they choose.
</code></pre>
<p>You can suggest all you want, but trying to put a square peg into a round hole can be frustrating and futile. My kids might all not mind or even enjoy teaching, but getting them to take the math needed to become a math teacher which is where the demand is for jobs vs any of the other subjects is too much of a stretch for all but one. And he’s the one who has other choices he prefers. I have one that wanted to go into musical theater, and if I’d pushed any more academics for college for him, he would have most certainly not gotten through. He barely did as it was, with the minimal academics he had to take, and he had APed and tested out of most of the few requirements. </p>
<p>We have some high achieving physician friends who have been not so gently pushing their kids towards the medical field. Kid flunked chem at college first year. That took care of that. And really, I think there was some rebellion in this. He wanted to quash that option. Another really steered the engineering route and with the kids’ stats, it shouldn’t have been a stretch. He flunked out of Cornell his first year. He’s 30 years old now and a successful CPA; finished college in about 8 years through a cobbling of various local schools, online courses and community college. Not at all what his parents had wanted and were willing to provide and pay for on a silver platter for him. I see this a lot.</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with keeping them aware of options and the situation with the job market, but pushing can often create the “equal and opposite reaction”. I swear that the road to adulthood and maturity often includes a stint in insanity for some. Right around the college years.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses. (And for what it’s worth, I’m sure that if I asked my daughter what she wanted to be she’d have one answer: gymnast.)</p>
<p>Of course, the goal is for them to find their own strengths, and path. And I’m good with this.</p>
<p>But I pause whenever I hear someone talking about pre-law. Do you really know what you are getting into debt-wise with law school? Do you know what your chances are for getting a reasonable-paying job as a lawyer? I don’t think the opportunites in Law are anything like they were a generation ago.</p>
<p>Same story with English. I love it. But would I encourage someone to go to graduate school in English as a means to a job at a University? No way. Most Ph.D. teach as adjuncts, for very little money, no benefits, and no security.</p>
<p>Life has risks and rewards. We all want to keep our children safe and happy, but sometimes we risk stifling creativity and healthy risk taking. </p>
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<p>Yet some people do get those jobs. What a shame if your kids were talented enough to be one of them and they didn’t even try because they were discouraged at an early age. </p>
<p>Let your kids pursue their passions. Let them fail on their own. If you fail often enough, you’ve learned a great deal and can be very successful eventually.</p>
<p>Money isn’t everything. As long as your children can meet their physical needs and have a retirement plan, they may be very happy at a mid-income job. </p>
<p>Pushing them to choose a career strictly on income potential does not encourage them to find ways of working their values, talents and interests into their jobs, and a good way to make them feel miserable and unfulfilled. There has to be some kind of balance.</p>
<p>I have a kid who is a math teacher and makes half of what her sister will be making as a Physician Assistant. Teacher would not have been happy or successful in the medical field. She’s envious of her sister’s salary (as am I - it’s double my annual income) but she loves what she does and makes do.</p>
<p>I got the impression OP was more concerned with stability of a career, not so much with large income. “Middle-class livelihood” is a broad category that can mean annual incomes of $40k or $200k depending on who you ask. The fact that OP cites HS math teacher as a possibility seems to indicate the lower end of that spectrum.</p>
<p>Let the kids make their own choices, but try to let them know enough to make a fully informed decision. E.g. if their dream goal is tenured English professor, make sure that they know it is an extremely selective route to get there, so that they can plan appropriately (e.g. avoid debt, consider backup options, etc. while pursuing the dream goal).</p>
<p>I work at a job that didn’t even exist when I graduated from high school, and many of the steady “middle class” jobs that did exist are now gone. Plus lots of people have more than one career in their lifetime. You don’t want to limit them to early 21st century job classes. Leave this question alone for a while…</p>
<p>The best strategy in high school is to be as strong a student as you can while exploring some interests outside of class to find out what you like. In college, if you don’t have a strong interest in something, you can choose to major in what you like best and try to get internships during the summer. OR you can choose a more professional major like accounting or pharmacy. </p>
<p>Being a lawyer can be a hard path unless you go to a top law school. I wouldn’t discourage it though if you develop a strong interest in it. </p>
<p>It’s been said that you should choose a career where you enjoy what people typically say is the hard part of it, or at the least, tolerate the hard part of it more than the hard parts of other jobs. </p>
<p>A lot of the advice depends on how good the student is. It’s easier to switch from one thing to another seamlessly, the stronger you are. </p>
<p>And remember, some of these professional paths can be chosen later in life if the first choice doesn’t pan out.</p>
<p>I was interested in advertising when I was growing up. I would have been well situated for it at the time with graphic arts and computers taking off but at the time you only had a chance if you were going to New York for a very competitive job. I would have been at the beginning of a new era. So much for that. My parents didn’t know where to steer me for something like that.
My child wanted computer animation–I didn’t even have a clue at the time what that was or what it entailed. I only knew one name and that was Pixar who hadn’t done very much at the time that was widely known. Just saying. In the future the job market will change and sometimes dramatically.
All you should do right now is look at your kids continuing interests and talents and foster them the best you can.</p>
<p>I’m sort of hijacking the thread, but people really think this is a good career?
(I’m a young person. I want to major in math and I suppose I might end up teaching in a high school, so this kind of gives me hope. I expected I would be advised to channel my math skills into engineering instead.)</p>