The majority of students are greatly influenced by parents academically, who usually play a major role in their career and study choices. However, this should not be happening, as parents should not interfere to this extent with their children’s careers.
There are, of course, cases of almost companion-like parents that support their children in whatever they wish to spend their time or life doing. On that side of the spectrum, there is a small handful of parents that are very lenient toward their child’s career planning and helping them base that around what they’ve always enjoyed doing.
However, based off of the statistics alone, most parents try to steer their children toward a financially stable path than the ones students are actually passionate about. One way or another, this way of parenting leads to many unhappy children (especially when the options are practically endless).
Take a community like Diamond Bar for example. Here, the pressure is set even more so in Asian households than any other ethnic group. The demand to do whatever possible to attain certain high-paying jobs in the future is seen as a bare minimum requirement for children of Asian background.
The majority of the asian student population play the piano or some musical instrument to a certain level. It is also likely that the majority of these students attend an after-school tutoring class or have personal tutors to help them with certain subjects. These efforts are then expected to be paid off by the student going to a highly respected UC school or perhaps a prestigious private university.
The continuous mantra that is repeated all throughout our lives is then more heavily implied in college, where the choices we make play a major part in our paths in the future.
Parents really do mean well, but what happens, as explained by professor Larry Nucci of UC Berkeley: “Excessive parental control regarding adolescents’ occupational decision-making results in negative outcomes,” he wrote in Mothers’ Concepts of Young Children’s Areas of Personal Freedom. “Parents should be cautioned against imposing their own goals on to their children or seeing their child’s accomplishments as a reflection on themselves.”
Often, students, are seen as a second chance for parents to make the right decisions, and that more or less leaves an unhealthy expectation that that was never our own in the first place. These expectations-turned-pressure leaves many students with a career that they find little satisfaction with, and thus, starting the cycle all over again.
Edward's Blog 