Career Choice - What If Your Family Doesn"t Support Your Career Choice?

Families can be our greatest support, but if they disagree with our big decisions, that support can seem to evaporate overnight. One of the main areas in which families fail to support their younger members is in the area of career choice.

Why is career choice such a contentious issue?

Many families have traditional ideas of what a good job is, while others have a family tradition in which just about everyone follows the same career.

In fact, years ago it was very common to expect the young men of the family to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. This was easy to understand when most people spent their entire lives in a small area and there was a very limited choice of jobs on offer. It was unusual to move form one class to another and so if you were born into the working class, there was a high likelihood that you would enter the same trade as your father.

However, things have changed dramatically and young people have many more opportunities to move away from home to work and study and the choice of careers is staggering.

Yet many families still have an old-fashioned attitude towards work and expect their children to join the family firm, whether that is an actual company or a particular profession, such as law, medicine or teaching.

If your entire family, as far bask as everyone can remember has been made up of teachers, it can be very difficult to tell them that you want to do something else.

Of course, there are also plenty of families which don’t have career traditions, but this doesn’t mean they don’t have strong opinions about what their children should do.

How can it be that parents claim they want what is best for you, yet try to force you into a career which does not hold the slightest attraction for you? If you dig a little deeper, you’ll often find that this type of behaviour is usually rooted in fear.

It might be parents’ fear of having to watch their children, you in this case, failing miserably and ending up unhappy and in debt. This is a typical reaction to young people who want to pursue a career in the arts – parents have visions of their offspring ending up as actors who spend more time waiting tables or artists starving in a bed-sit.

Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself what you are going to do with your life. If you give in to pressure from parents you may live to regret it, if you find yourself stuck in a job you hate. It’s not easy to go against family advice and it may cause a strain in your relationship. But you do have the right to make your own decisions and even your own mistakes.