If you’re a parent confused about how to help your child choose a college major, you’re in the right place. Do any of these descriptions resonate with your experience?<\/p>\n
Situations like these are common in households across America. You want to support your kids in whatever they want to do, but you also don’t want to see them fail to achieve the life you know they could have. So, the challenge becomes figuring out how to help your child while maintaining your sanity.<\/p>\n
This page will help you do just that. As a fairly-recent college grad, I can still vividly recall my own experience in applying for college. And as an adult with a few working years under my belt, I’ve experienced the realities of the job market. While I have no experience as a parent, I think I can help bridge the gap between you and your child.<\/p>\n
There won’t be any easy answers, and you may not like the conclusions I come to. But, hopefully it will give you some ideas about how to handle this situation. Let’s get started.<\/p>\n
If you’re reading this, then you already know that your child (I’ll assume a daughter for convenience) doesn’t think like you do. While you may sometimes be on the same page as her, more often you end up surprised by how different her conclusions are from your own. Similarly, your teen may tell you that you’re “weird” or “old”, by which she means you’re out-of-touch. Considering that you raised this child and she lives in the same house as you, how is it possible that she disagrees with you on what feels like everything?<\/p>\n
The answer is your life experiences\u2014and your resulting perspectives\u2014aren’t nearly as similar as you might think. As a parent, you have decades more experience with life than your daughter. You’ve worked for your money, and you may have had to make sacrifices to be able to support your family. However, you probably don’t know what it’s like to be a student in today’s world. In contrast, your daughter has first-hand experience with the modern educational environment, but little experience with the outside world or with having to earn a living. Neither you nor your daughter has the full picture, but both parties feel personally invested in deciding how to spend those magic four years of college. It’s a recipe for disagreement and maybe even some door-slamming arguments.<\/p>\n
Let’s try to bring harmony to your household by bridging the gap between perspectives. We’ll start by breaking down each perspective in detail, then we’ll develop a three-step method for reconciling those perspectives and having productive discussions.<\/p>\n
You’ve put vast amounts of time and energy into raising your daughter, caring for her from the time of diapers to the time of SATs. You were responsible for making sure she had the best possible chance in life, so you made sacrifices\u2014both big and small\u2014to give her what she needed. You protected her, guided her, taught her, and loved her.<\/p>\n
When you imagine her future, you want her to be happy and successful. You have hopes and dreams for what she will accomplish, and with those high hopes come worries about what could go wrong. From your experiences and the experiences you’ve heard from friends, neighbors, and coworkers, you have first-hand knowledge of all the different ways things can go wrong in life. And now you worry that one of those same problems could stop her from reaching her potential.<\/p>\n
Finally, you’re concerned about money. College is expensive, and you don’t want to let that prevent you from retiring or achieving financial security. Thus, you think about her college education as an investment in her, and you want to make sure she’ll get a lot of value from it.<\/p>\n
So, the parent’s perspective is a mix of pride and concern. You feel proud of your daughter\u2014proud of her accomplishments and proud of who she has become. And you feel concerned about the things that could go wrong and could stop her from reaching her potential.<\/p>\n
Do you remember how your daughter was a little bit scared every time she started a new school year? She was probably worried if she’d like her teacher(s), make new friends, and succeed in an unfamiliar environment. Well, the experience of going off to college is similar, except much more intimidating. This will be her first time living away from home, taking sole responsibility for her welfare, and setting her own life trajectory. It’s likely the single biggest change in her educational experience since she started kindergarten. So, expect her to be nervous and uncertain, and don’t be surprised if those nerves manifest themselves as defensive or combative behavior.<\/p>\n
She has to try to figure out what is best for her, and she probably doesn’t know what she wants to do or who she wants to become. Her mental image of careers and college majors have been limited to what she’s seen in school or heard from friends, and so they’re probably not representative of what things are really like. Even if she does have strong beliefs about where she wants to head, she may end up changing her mind along the way.<\/p>\n
She probably feels optimistic about her future, and excited about college. College is deeply mythologized in the American student’s psyche, which has left her with a mixture of expectations and aspirations for what her experience will be like. Some of these are based in fact, and others are pure fiction. The truth is her experience will probably be a mixture of satisfying and disappointing, and she won’t know how much of each until it’s over.<\/p>\n
So, the teenager’s perspective is one of hope tempered by fear of the unknown. Every path seems possible, yet no path seems to be a guarantee. And it feels like the pressure is on to make the perfect choice all before graduating from high school.<\/p>\n
Now that we’ve laid out the two different perspectives, let’s see how we can reconcile them.<\/p>\n
Although you have more life experience, you don’t necessarily have all the answers. If you jump straight into giving advice, your teenager will likely push back at your suggestions. And for good reason\u2014how could your suggestions address her concerns if you didn’t even wait long enough to hear what they are?<\/p>\n
So, step one is to listen. Listening means providing space for her to talk, without judgement or unsolicited advice. Although it can be tempting to try to help her along, she’s likely capable of making good decisions on her own if given the opportunity. If she starts talking to you about college majors, don’t steamroll her with a list of “best majors” you heard on the news. Ask her questions that help her think her own thoughts out loud, and pay attention to what she says is important to her. If you know other things are important to her that she’s not mentioning, ask about them but don’t be pushy or overwhelming. The goal is to give her time and space to work out what matters most to her and what that implies she should be doing.<\/p>\n
Next, tell her that you have a few ideas and ask if it’s OK for you to share them. If she says OK, continue below. If she is hesitant or pushes back, consider putting the discussion on hold until another time. The best way to prove that you are listening to her is to respect her wishes, so tell her that you’d like to talk more about this some other time but you don’t have to discuss it right now.<\/p>\n
When it comes to giving advice, the key is to couch it in terms of what the other person cares about. For your daughter, that means any suggestions you provide need to be justified in terms of her priorities, not what you think her priorities should<\/em> be. You can also mention her strengths and how those strengths align with your suggestions. Is it a good fit for her because of her proficiency with math or her detail-oriented nature? Does she tend to succeed most in solitary endeavors or group projects? By showing that you’re thinking about things from her perspective, you’ll be able to get her to take your ideas more seriously.<\/p>\n On occasion, you may find that you and your daughter have different ideas of what common terms mean. For example, she may not have any clue what an engineer really does (Do they conduct trains?), so any suggestions to consider engineering are lost on her. As you notice gaps in your mutual understanding, try to address them without making a big deal of it. In the engineering example, you might address it by telling her why you think engineering would be good for her, making sure to include a description of what the major and job would actually entail. Your ability to contribute will be limited by the extent of your knowledge about majors (and resulting careers), but it’s still worth trying to get on the same page.<\/p>\n If your discussion has been positive so far, the final step is to tell her about your own college and\/or work experiences, and the decisions you made that lead you there. Don’t try to moralize or imply that her experience will be the same. Instead, give her an honest retelling of the key decisions in your life and how they turned out, both for good and for bad. If you have regrets, it’s OK to tell her what you wish you had done differently. The goal, though, is not to presume that your experience means your opinion is right. Instead, the goal is to give her comfort that everyone faces hard decisions, and they usually end up working out OK.<\/p>\n During this discussion, don’t hold back from talking about your experiences of working a job and being an adult. Focus on communicating the daily tasks you spent your time on, not the high-level interesting things that were happening in the field. If your job involves aspects she would recognize from The Office<\/em>\u2014cubicles, HR training, meetings, and bad bosses\u2014tell her about those. The truth is that most teenagers don’t really understand what goes on in an office, and all they know is that it looks boring. If you can help her get a grasp of the daily realities of working a job, she’s more likely to understand your perspective.<\/p>\n Of course, she may push back. Teenagers don’t want to believe that they may end up compromising on their goals, and I think there’s an admirable quality to that. It’s good to try to do what you think is right in the world, and we shouldn’t blame our kids for believing in themselves. They may have to reckon with hard choices and compromises in their future, but at least we can help them now by sharing stories of our own trying experiences.<\/p>\n As the adult in this relationship, it’s your job to reconcile the differences in perspectives so you can have productive discussions with your daughter. That isn’t always easy, but you’re a parent of a teenager so you probably have plenty of experience with difficult situations. The best thing you can do for her is listen to what she has to say, help her figure out what that means she should do, and share your own experiences with her so she can learn vicariously.<\/p>\n I strongly believe you should let your daughter choose her own major. If you’ve grown accustomed to making decisions for her based on what you think is best, it can be hard to let go of the reins. But, one of the important steps of adulthood is becoming responsible for one’s own actions. And, for your daughter, that will likely begin when she graduates high school and goes to college. It’s her life to live, even if you believe you have a better idea of how she should live it. She’s inevitably going to end up making mistakes in life; your goal should be to support her through it all and make sure she’s able to get back up when she’s knocked down. Being a good parent means trying to help her as much as possible, and sometimes that might require letting her make her own choices. This is one of those times.<\/p>\n There is one other complication: money. College is expensive, and the burden to pay for it often falls upon parents. Many parents then feel that they should get a say in college decisions, since it will impact their “return on investment”. It’s your choice whether or not to fund her education, but that doesn’t change my recommendation: Let her choose her own college major.<\/p>\n This page has been 2,500 words aimed at helping you help your child. If you know of other parents that might find this page interesting, please share the link.<\/p>\n The rest of this website\u2014and the 18,000 word Main Sequence<\/a> it contains\u2014is aimed at helping your child make her own decision. It’s written to be accessible to high schoolers, although it will require her to do more than just scroll through Instagram or TikTok. If you think your child could benefit from it, consider sharing the link with her. Once she’s read it, use the strategies discussed here to try to help her make a good decision. I can’t promise she’ll make a decision you agree with, but at least she’ll be more thoughtful in the process. Here are some other pages that might be useful to share with her:<\/p>\nFinally, Share Your Story<\/h4>\n
<\/a>Perspectives Conclusion<\/h3>\n
Who Should Get to Choose, Anyway?<\/h2>\n
<\/a>What This Website Can Do for You (And What It Can’t)<\/h2>\n
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