Giving Your Kid Career Advice

One of the most important roles a parent has is giving your kid career advice.

If more parents would take the effort to discuss the importance of minimizing massive mistakes in their young life, then younger people might not make those massive mistakes and have a chance at a better life.

Parents want their kids to have some type of job where the kid makes enough money to not need the parents help.

The thought of taking care of your adult children sends chills down a parents spine.

Not because you don't love your children.  But because taking care of adults is massively expensive.  When a child is less than 18 years old, they are cheap to care for.  With children you just keep saying no to their wants and only provide the bare minimum of needs.

Most children

  • Grow up eating cheap food.
  • Wear poor quality clothes.
  • Are squeezed into a small home shared by many.
  • Have no privacy.
  • Spend most of their time in the free daycare called public school either being bullied or bored.
  • Are forced to be involved with things they hate.
  • Are continually told no.
  • Are reasoned with, manipulated, guilt-ed, yelled at and even beaten to be kept under control.
  • Are not happy.

If adults had to live how children lived they would rebel or be driven out of their minds.

Adults don't live that way.  I certainly don't.

I have left behind everything I hated as a child.

I don't do things I don't want to do.  I leave people who do not treat me well.  I keep making changes until I am happy.  I feel no guilt and cannot be manipulated anymore.  I buy what I need and want.

I do whatever it takes to be in control of my life.  I especially avoid taking on more responsibilities that I just do not want.

That's why

  • I had a vasectomy after my second child.
  • I left my wife.
  • I keep changing jobs.
  • I would never get married again.
  • Talk to my kids all the time about waiting to have children until they can easily afford them.
  • I do not want a full-time girlfriend with all the drama.
  • I am happy.

You cannot treat adults like children, no matter how much "they" would like to do so.  Self aware adults are impossible to keep under control.

Giving Your Kid Career Advice

It is so difficult to tell someone else what to do with their careers.  Even a person you know as well as your child.  There are so many options and there are so many that are so good.  The choices are endless.

So I don't get into all that.

It's better to talk about

Rather than exact careers.

Point Your Kids toward experts in career planning.

From Penelope Trunk

The Worst Career Advice Parents Give Their Kids

The old advice does not work anymore.  Giving your kid career advice takes effort and research.

At Least Tell Your Kids What NOT To Do

The most important advice a father gives his children is what NOT to do.

I spent hours discussing what I did not want my son to do. 

Hours. 

Over a period of years.

I kept talking about the only thing he should not do and not so much on what he should do.

I did not want him to join the military.  And I knew there would be enormous pressure on him. 

I know how the sweet talking military recruiters make it sounds so good

  • Get in great shape.
  • Free room and board.
  • A decent wage.
  • Money for college.
  • See the world.
  • A big pension.
  • Serve your country.
  • Get drunk with your army buddies.

But here is what they don't say

  • You may get maimed.
  • You may get killed.
  • You may maim an innocent person.
  • You may kill an innocent person.

I spent a lot of time talking with my son about these things.  I pointed out that the job is to kill.  Can you live with yourself being a hired killer?

When you have a good job, you don't kill yourself

You have an only 20% chance of being fine with a military career.

You have a 40% chance of hurting yourself.

You have a 40% chance of hurting someone else, having to live with that guilt.  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is real.  It happens.  It's horrible.

There is no way for you to know personally that whoever you killed is guilty or not.

You are too young to make that kind of mistake with your life.

From Happier Abroad

20 Reasons Not To Join the Military

Another good perspective on giving your kid career advice.

I Am Not Against Killing, But I Am Against Being Told Who To Kill

You have to know why you are killing someone.  It has to be personal. You have to personally know why they need to die.  You cannot just be told to kill them.  You have to have first hand knowledge of what they have done.  You cannot just be hyped up into a frenzy from your superiors.

Killing because you are ordered to is wrong.

If we could all just get out of the mindless idea of someone being superior to us, there would be no war.

Stop taking orders.  Start doing what is right by giving your kid career advice that does not involve killing someone.

› › Giving Your Kid Career Advice

The only way I could become the happier man I am today was by leaving my wife.  You might be in the same situation I was in.  I suggest you take a look at my book - Leave Your Wife & Become a Happier Man with the 3 Step System.

Click to go to learn more about the book

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