Parenting Thoughts

Your children will likely have many careers in their lifetime. That is what our fast-changing world demands these days.

Children need to start early to think of careers in terms of many possibilities, not just one. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is no longer the best question. I suggest you ask instead, “What are three things you want to do when you grow up?” It will encourage your children to think they have lots of things they can do in the future. How exciting is that?  If they want to dance, they can. If next they want to build cars, they can. And even later, if they want to write a book, they can.

Don’t worry about your children being too young to think about their interests and talents as a future job. Just make sure they know that changing their mind is OK – not only just OK, but one more thing that makes them special. All their interests and talents are like building blocks, and how they stack them up over time will be very different than how anybody else stacks them up.

A child can learn a lot about medicine because of a strong interest in medical things, even work in the medical field, and later become a great anthropologist – because of all that he or she learned about the human body and the human skeleton while he was into medical things. Or, she might develop high-level tennis skills and later be very successful in sports medicine because she learned so much about how to make her body perform at its best from playing tennis.

Inspired by IGGY PECK, ARCHITECT by Andrea Beaty

For more information about children’s talents: Your Child’s Special Talents, Part 2