Your children have vivid imaginations and the future is an exciting prospect. All around them in movies and games they’re exposed to fantastical careers like healthcare, space exploration and caring for animals, and this shapes their view of the working world.
No 5-year-old has ever answered being asked what they want to be when they grow up by proclaiming that they aim to be an actuary or accountant. Their imaginations are too wild, and the world is too broad to worry about insignificant things like finance and accounting. Talking to kids about their career and what they might like to do when they grow up can therefore be quite a challenge, but there are some things that can help.
Expose Your Children to Different Career Options
Children are constantly observing and noticing what goes on around them. Getting them some exposure to different careers or working environments will mean that they have had the chance to take it in. Increasing their awareness of the many different careers available to them by talking to them about each or even exposing them to each can help this. If you see a police officer when you’re at the grocery store, point them out and talk to your child about what they do for work. Encourage trips with your kids to different destinations that might have some careers on display like museums or farmyards.
Don’t Discourage Exploration
Often many parents can be too critical on those fantastical ideologies of growing up to be an astronaut or firefighter and struggle with how to ground their kids and demonstrate what careers are practical and which aren’t. Striking a balance between blindly supporting your child’s dream of getting drafted into the NFL and encouraging a strong backup plan is a balance that requires tact and positive reinforcement. Don’t completely dismiss the passion for football but encourage your child to explore other things too. Using real world tests like the CAT4, arguably the most widely used cognitive abilities test, can also help inform you and your child where their strengths lie and what they might focus on in their schooling.
It’s Their Career, Not Yours
Too often parents try and push their kids into a career that they deem as a mark of success. Often these are high earning or high-profile careers like law, medicine and business management. Understand that your child has their own interests and ideas of how they want their future to look and putting pressure on them to confirm to what you think is best for them in their career might just have the opposite effect of pushing them away from those careers.
Playtime is a Great Time to Learn
In younger children, playtime presents a great way to introduce your children to different careers and give them a rudimentary understanding of what each might entail. So many playsets are designed around this world of make-believe work, like police officer or doctor sets, and getting them to dress up and roleplay in these jobs does well at exposing them to the kind of thing they might experience if they were to take them up as a career. Explain to them what each part of the playset is and what it does and show them how it’s used in the career.
You can start to address the idea of a career with kids at any age, even as young as elementary school, and because many careers rely on your child’s performance academically at school, it’s actually a good idea for them to know early on what is expected of them to achieve success and reach the career they want.
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