Me too. Plus I think it removes some of the boundary-crossing and hurt feelings that can go on. And there’s nothing like making your own $$ to make you aware of the value of a dollar. It’s a great gift in the long run.
ETA: ^^and it’s exactly how I’ve been more comfortable with what my son is doing. He has a good head on his shoulders and will make the right choices as they come about. But they will be HIS choices, and that’s what is important imho.
“I’m curious about why so many of you will continue supporting your kids financially.”
This is really a bizarre assumption.My D is a musician but the last time I sent a check for living expenses was her senior year as an undergrad. And the last time she lived at home was her summer before freshman year. Maybe I need to reread these posts but plenty of performing arts students are COMPLETELY self supporting. (BTW she paid for ALL of her expenses and tuition for grad school)
musica, I read some late last night so maybe I misread, too. 
But I did just find some examples on the first page. Absolutely, some people have posted that their kids are making it on their own, which is fabulous. I just know that for us, if my kid says he wants to go to Nashville upon graduation and try to make it as a songwriter, I’ll say OK and good luck, but we won’t be subsidizing his rent or anything. If that’s what he really wants to do I’m all for it, but we got him through undergrad and don’t plan on financing him beyond that.
Just a reminder, be sure to give your child lots of pats on the back, atta-boys, and “proud of you” moments - even if they choose a different path from the one you envisioned. It’s hard enough to make ends meet in the creative industries. Kids need to know that their parents are proud of them (of their efforts, perseverance, attitude, creative thinking, whatever) no matter what. Remember success is defined in many different ways.
@Youdon’tsay, I could see how someone could provide support for awhile for their kid. If they think they are really working hard, trying their best, and the parents can easily afford it, it would be tough to see your kid struggle when you know you could help them. I probably would provide assistance in a split second, however, I don’t think my H would go for it. Plus, I know with this kid, it would probably be the wrong thing to do.
This is an old story for regular CC readers.
Our son was a music performance major both undergrad and grad. He isn’t making a fortune, but he is self self supporting and working many jobs in the music field.
Our daughter was an engineering major. She got the degree double majoring in biology. She will never be an engineer…she liked the courses well enough, but says she can never picture herself working in that field. I wish she had chose a major closer to her passions!
We honestly were happy that our son was a music major. He loves it and he loves his work. No, it’s not an easy and financially lucrative life, but it’s working for him.
I say…your son is young. He has no financial,liabilities right now…doesn’t own a house. Doesn’t have a wife and kids. I say…good for him. Let him pursue his passion now while he is young and doesn’t have huge other financial obligations. He will then have no regrets.
ETA…my husband was a freelance theater techie for 8 years in NYC before he went back to,college to get his engineering degree. He doesn’t regret those 8’years one bit. And some of our best friends are from that time.
We help our kids out financially on occasion, such as buying them airline tickets to come visit us (they live in US and we are in UK). We also pay for their cell phones on a family plan. At holidays, we give a large cash gift. And I do like taking them shopping when they visit. But we don’t pay rent or utilities, etc. That’s small potatoes to how my own family has supported my H and I over the years - down payment to buy our first house, large cash gift each year to help reduce their estate, vacations, etc. Every family has their own rules/issues with money. I would probably give the same financial support to my kids if they had chosen high paying careers.
“I say…your son is young. He has no financial,liabilities right now…doesn’t own a house. Doesn’t have a wife and kids. I say…good for him. Let him pursue his passion now while he is young and doesn’t have huge other financial obligations. He will then have no regrets.”
That’s the thing, this does seem to be the right time. Life only gets more complicated as you get older. If not now, when?
I am curious, though, @thumper1, what did your daughter end up doing, that is so far from engineering and biology? That’s wonderful that your son is able to make a living doing what he loves.
"You have a lot of company on this issue.
This is your son’s life… Not yours"
Yep, I am fully aware of that, @dstark. But it doesn’t seem to stop us parents from worrying and panicking about their choices and any misfortunes that befall them. So much of what we have tried to do as parents is set them up for success, maybe a little too much of that for some.
@busdriver11, there will always be things to worry about. One thing that might help in this situation is to consider your definition of “success.” I too want my children to be successful, but for me, that means them supporting themselves, doing work that they like, having good social lives, not having more physical burdens (e.g., illnesses) than they can easily carry, and being good people.
Those sound like some very worthy goals, @rosered55. I think I’d be happy with that. A fully funded 401K and some money in the bank would make me feel better, too.
@busdriverr11,
I know parents worry. I worry sometimes. Worrying is an energy suck. I try not to worry too much anymore.
I had a very poor relationship with my son for 7 years. I did not understand him and usually I am pretty good at understanding. My son wanted to be independent from a very early age. Like one day old.
And I liked giving him advice. That’s a bad combination.
You know your son so you know where to draw the lines with your son.
Instead of worrying, why not be excited? You can be excited. Your son may have found something he loves and you can share in this. This can be a very positive time in your family.
This close friend, a very very smart guy, became a musician despite the fact his parents wanted him to be a cpa. He had a very poor relationship with his parents for 35 years. He didn’t forgive his parents for their lack of support. I will be talking to my friend in 40 minutes.
Enjoy the ice cream cone. Enjoy the moment. Enjoy your son’s decision. Things are going to work out. Your son may still end up with a more stable career if that is what he wants. These decisions young people make are not permanent.
Ok…that’s enough from me.
My “kids” are 29 and 26. Both are following pretty much the career paths they had in mind when they graduated from college. I still worry about them all the time. Of course their lives are their own. But we parents are invested in our kids’ lives. We just have to fight the urge to interfere (or blatantly ask them to tell us to knock it off when we slip and do start interfering).
Also (and of questionable relevance): The head IT guy in the department where I work is incredibly good at his job. I saw his resume recently. His undergraduate major was in acting. Career changes happen in all kinds of directions.
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that you may need to adjust your definition of success. At the law firm I worked at for twenty years, the night shift of our word processing department was filled with working actors. It was a revolving door; They would leave for a while when they got work and then they’d be rehired again after their gigs were done. I always thought that it was kind of depressing until I became fairly good friends with one of the actresses. She had a Yale MFA, and regularly got bit parts, but still needed the word processing job to make ends meet.
One year, she got a fairly small, recurring role in a very big hit sitcom tor a season, but then when that run was over she was right back in the word processing department. In passing, I said something to the effect that maybe this role in the sitcom will be a springboard into the bigtime, and she got really offended, saying that her role on that sitcom WAS the big time – that you couldn’t get bigger than that particular sitcom.
By my definition, success would be no longer having to work the nightshift in the word processing department but she felt that she was doing fine, and was happy with her choices and her life. Your son may feel the same way – what looks like unsustainable struggling to the outside world may be perfectly fulfilling to the person in question.
Re: #93
OP’s son will have a CS degree. This leads to the following possibility:
I do have to mention one young man, a very good friend of D’s. Talented musician who double majored music/physics. I can’t tell you how disappointed his musician parents were when he chose science over music.(no lie) Now just out of Columbia and pursuing neurosurgery. 8-| When you are in your 20’s you gotta go with your heart. Even if you disappoint the folks.
Although one side of my family is heavily pre-professionally oriented with a large numbers of engineers, they didn’t view a pre-professional major…even ones in engineering/CS as a guarantee of a “low risk career path”.
Part of this is having a few engineering relatives and their friends go through long periods of un/underemployment due to cyclical downturns in their respective fields before being rehired at the same/higher levels due to experience/licensing.
Ironically, back in the '70s, they’d view a prospective HS graduate gravitating to Chemical Engineering with the same levels of horror many parents would reserve for the performing arts. There was plenty of efforts expended to warn HS/new college students within the family and among neighbors/friends about the pitfalls of majoring in ChemE due to the downturn in that field back then.
In fact, one of my first supervisors turned friend was a ChemE major who despite being one of the few in his graduating class to land an actual ChemE job while most ended up unemployed or doing what many struggling actors did(waiting tables, drive taxis, etc), ended up switching to computer technology and programming some years later in the early '80s.
Also, many CS majors who assumed they’ve done everything right to start themselves on a long low-risk career path ended up quite disappointed in 2001-2 when the dotcom economy crashed. Like the ChemE grades of the '70s, I saw/knew of many fresh and recent CS grades who ended up working as waiters, taxi drivers, retail*, etc because the computer technology job market collapsed.
A decade later, I found one sales rep from a large car rental chain was one of those who graduated with a CS degree right into the dotcom bust and never ended up working in his field. After several years of unemployment and working stints in the retail/service sector, he ended up getting hired as a sales rep for a car rental company. He’s financially stable and happy now, but finds it ironic that the very major which he assumed would lead to a low-risk stable high income career was in a field he never ended up working in because he graduated right when the market for CS graduates collapsed.
“I’m curious about why so many of you will continue supporting your kids financially.” For us, we kind of bought onto that idea when he went into music performance, that it will take a period of time for him to establish himself, and we see it as an investment in his future much as sending him to music school and paying tuition was. For some, it is because they value the arts and realize it is a difficult path, for others, it is that they trust that in giving the kid a bit of financial stability, having his back, that he will take it as the gift it is and run with it. We aren’t talking a slacker kid living in the parent’s basement playing video games and pretending to work some goofball job, it is helping them get their legs under them and giving them the room to establish themselves.
The problem with the approach of basically telling them “okay, now you are on your own” IMO is that it may well drive the kid into finding ‘gainful’ employment, but also can likely totally cut off the path to music, too. To me it is like the parents who tell a kid that if they want to go to college, the kid has to pay for it, how the parent worked their way through school and so forth, it may have once been true you could work you way through a decent college, these days it is next to impossible, for a lot of reasons (among other things, a lot of colleges have gotten rid of their night programs, and the online schools that people these days point out to are often basically crap). I also trust my own kid implicitly, he is very mindful and understanding of what we are doing from him, and I think the hard part may be he won’t take help from us and will be living hand to mouth, rather than ‘coasting’ on dear old mom and dad. I am not saying that parents who feel their kid after college have to make it on their own are wrong, rather simply explaining why we have committed to our son trying to make it in music, including helping him after he is out of conservatory.
With the CS degree, the OP’s kid is in a much better situation than most budding performing artists in terms of being less likely to need parental support while he tries to make a career out of performing arts.
a. He likely can get better paying day or contract jobs more easily to pay the bills while he tries to get to the point of making a career out of performing arts. Indeed, with a stronger personal financial position, he may have more staying power as he tries to get to the point of being able to make a career out of performing arts, while other with less financial staying power give up because they run out of money.
b. If he does not successfully get far enough into performing arts to make a career of it, he still has CS to fall back on, which does not preclude performing arts as an “extracurricular” (like sports and other activities).
Of course, there is no guarantee that CS will always be good to find jobs or contract work in, since the industry can crash. But it better most of the time than the low skill type of jobs that many performing artists take to pay the bills during the time they are not at the point of being able to make a career out of it.
Here’s a question that he needs to sort out before foregoing all on campus recruiting at his school for CS. If graduation is on a Monday, what will he be doing on Tuesday if he plans to go into theater? Is he going to be going on auditions 5-10 times a week – i.e. with so much frequency that he can’t hold down a CS job? If so, how will he be getting such auditions? Does he have an agent and/or will he be able to get one – given that it sounds like his resume consists of HS and college plays? Or will he be attending voice, dance, acting classes multiple days a week? And if that, how does he intend to pay for those?
Since he has friends in Boston, has he talked with them re what the theater community looks like? How do people get their start?
I guess I’m not seeing why he can’t start off with a “regular” IT job. I’m not talking a start up or something like Google, where your life is built around work. I’m talking about a “boring” IT job – help desk, database admin or the like. Sure it is a step down for a CS major, but those jobs tend to be very “punch the clock” at certain employers and he could look for an employer with flex time and/or shift work (as some IT support is done overnight). I know at my workplace, there are IT folks you start their day at 6 am, expressly so they can be done by 2 pm. Something like this gets him a paycheck, health insurance, a 401k, and abundant time to audition/take classes etc. Now if the dream comes true – that he lands SO many auditions that it leads to a steady gig in a theater company that will tour for the next 6 months – great, quit your CS job. But until then, why not work?
Like the poster above, my law firm in NYC had a word processing department FILLED with folks who had been in NYC for 20+ yrs trying to get their big break. Most of them never did – so the word processing job was a necessary fallback. Heck, there was even a litigation attorney (an associate at a firm with notoriously long hours) who somehow kept her dreams alive – was involved in community theater and ultimately landed roles in 1-2 off Broadway plays. Never hit it big, but managed to do both things while working LONG attorney hours. So why can’t your DS do 40 hrs in CS?
A couple other thoughts –
Is he ONLY interested in theater or would he do any kind of acting and/or singing? I know some people don’t want to “sell out” but things like commercials, voice acting, and sometimes even transitioning to writing/singing jingles for commercials actually pays even though it isn’t theatrical.
Also, you know your family best, but it sounds like there’s an older brother who is on the traditional path in tech. While that’s great, your earlier posts seem to say – older bro thinks a few months break is ok but not longer; older bro thinks . . . . While I understand that he’s your source of info re tech, I’d caution you against saying that to younger DS with any regularity. Just because one kid pursued his tech career in one way does NOT make him an expert on the entire industry, despite what he may think bc he’s been in the workforce for a few yrs. I know as a younger sibling who studied the same thing in undergrad as my older sister and whose parents CONSTANTLY said that, I know I resented that (i) the 3 of them were talking about me behind my back; and (ii) my parents viewed my sister as some kind of authority and assumed she knew EVERYTHING about the industry, while I was constantly assumed to be wrong bc I was younger. Your mileage may vary on that though . . . .