How parents can help in careers guidance

A G Watts

Almost all the research which has been done on how young people make their career choices has shown that the most important influence is that of parents. Not teachers, not careers advisers, not friends of their own age, but parents. In this short article I would like to address three issues. First, I will consider in a little more detail how parents influence their children. Second, I will discuss some of the traps that parents can fall into, and ways in which these traps can be avoided. Finally, I will explore how schools can harness parents' help and integrate it with their own careers work.

Forms of influence

Simply to say that parents are influential is to disguise the fact that there is a variety of ways in which they exercise this influence. Some research carried out at NICEC by my

colleague, Jenny Kidd, suggests that there are at least six forms it can take.

The first is simply by example. Young people often identify with their parents, or react strongly against what they represent. Either way, the `model' provided by the parent can be powerful. Thus the attitudes of parents to their own work, and the way they are dealing with the career decisions they themselves may be facing in middle age, can both exert a strong influence. Girls, for instance, are likely to be notably affected by whether their mother has a job outside the home and by her attitudes towards her employment and domestic roles.

Second, parents can exert influence by feeding back information about what they see to be their children's strengths and weaknesses. We all tend to be highly influ

enced in our ideas about ourselves by the impressions that are passed back to us - both in words and in more subtle ways -- about what we are like and the things we are good or bad at. Parents are particularly powerful here, not least because they see so much more of their children than most other people, and do so in intimate and unguarded moments.

Third, parents can provide their children with information about careers. In particular, of course, they can provide information on the fields in which they themselves

work. But they can also give information on other fields based on their own general knowledge. In addition, they can make available published information in the form of books and booklets (the CRAC `Your Choice' series, for example).

Fourth, parents can go further by in effect matching the last two elements together, and making judgements about the suitability of their children for different types of careers. Sometimes there may be emotional pressure built into such advice in the form of expectations, whether spoken or unspoken - `I think you should become a....'

Fifth, parents can exert influence by providing contacts. If their son is interested in entering the law, for example, they may have a friend or acquaintance to whom he can talk. Perhaps the contact may be able not only to talk about it but to allow the son to spend a day or so with them, seeing what they do (the jargon term for this is `shadowing'). The contact may even be able to offer a chance for the son to experience aspects of the job for himself, either through unpaid `work experience', or through doing a part-time or holiday job for pay.

Finally, parents can help in a more sensitive way by simply providing support. Listening, being attentive and showing active interest and concern can be enormously valuable in helping young people to talk through what they are thinking so that they are able to make up their own minds.

Some traps and ways around them

Each of these forms of help has possible traps attached to it. For example, it is very easy for parents to use their child as a way of fulfilling their own needs. This may include their need for social status: many parents love to boast of the `success' of their children and to bask in reflected glory. There can also be a deep wish to have one's child continue in one's own footsteps, as some kind of clone: in a very real sense, this can reflect our longing for immortality. Alternatively, children can be used to fulfil the parent's frustrated ambitions: a parent who always wanted to be a doctor but was unable to do so can now see a vicarious opportunity to achieve his or her long-suppressed desires. Even if these traps are avoided, there are others. Parents sometimes believe they know more about their children than they really do. They usually see them in a limited range of settings, and what young people are like in the intimacy of the home or in the company of their parents may not always be as relevant to their future working lives as what they are like in more formal and more independent situations. Also, because parents tend to see less of their children as they grow older, they may tend to under-estimate the extent to which they are growing and changing.

Parents can also be seriously misleading in the career information they pass on, especially if it is outside their own direct experience. If they then proceed to offer advice about their child's suitability for a particular occupation, they may underestimate the jump that this involves: it assumes that they know enough about both their child and the occupation concerned to be able to make a judgment of this kind.

There is a further, more philosophical point here. It seems likely that young people who base their decisions passively on the advice of their parents and others will identify less with the decision, and this may reduce both the effort they put into their chosen occupation and the satisfaction they derive from it. Furthermore, they will have learned little about how to take responsibility for their own lives, and so will not have developed skills and attitudes which they can call upon when they are required to take career and other decisions in the future. In a world where technological changes are increasingly requiring people to make adjustments or changes at various stages in their lives, this is a pressing matter.

This rather imposing list of traps may seem to be arguing that parents should avoid interfering in this area altogether, and should say to their children, `You do what you want to do: it's your life'. Not so. Such statements on their own can easily be felt by young people as expressing a lack of interest and concern. Young people desperately need the support and understanding of their parents. They need opportunities to talk about their concerns, their experiences and their anxieties. They also can benefit considerably from the experience and contacts that their parents can provide, so long as the parents recognise the limits of what they can offer. The important point is that all these valid forms of help should be based upon a respect for young people's own individuality and a trust in their capacity in the end to make their own career decisions. As Martin Katz succinctly put it, in helping young people to make career decisions we should be concerned not with helping them to make wise decisions - with the assumption