Tags
career, career path, career woman, feminism, red pill, single independant woman, working girl, working mom, working woman
A meeting with my oldest’s guidance counselor led to an interesting teachable moment afterward.
The meeting was a fairly standard, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” one. Would she go to college? Trade school? Etc.
After the meeting she expressed some valid concerns, including feeling like she wasn’t ready to choose. And to be honest, she is fairly young to make such a decision.
I explained it was just the start of the discussion and that she really has several years to figure it out. There are tests she can take to help her narrow things down by identifying her aptitude’s and interests.
Seeing the opening I dropped in a red pill. “You know when I was your age, there was a really important job option nobody ever talked about.”
”Really?” she asked. “What?”
”The job of taking care of the homefront,” I replied. “Supporting a husband so he could work while the wife took care of all the tasks that help keep life running smoothly like cooking, cleaning, gardening, and childcare.”
I explained when I was her age they told us what a “waste of our potential” staying home and taking care of things would be.
But as she has seen firsthand as the child of a “career mom,” what happens is that stuff either doesn’t get done or gets done on the margins.
I pointed out some people we know who have taken that path, and how well it has worked for themselves and their families. I explained how I often felt I had been sold a half truth, and that had I chosen a different path my life might have been far less stressful, difficult, and overwhelming.
I could tell she liked the idea that maybe she didn’t have to be a career gal like myself. That maybe there was another way.
She said she did want to have an education, and job skills, and to have some work experience, “just in case.” I used her former babysitter as an example of someone who had done just that, and how if her husband ever needed her to take the lead because he was ill or something, she had the education and marketable skills to do so.
It was a really good discussion and one I hope she factors in as she chooses her life path.
Time will tell. But at least she and I are having the discussions I wish someone would have had with me at her age.
What do you think? Please share in the comments!
Perhaps an eye opener for your daughter and some readers here this is
Well done, Bloom! Excellent parenting. 🙂
@yoda maybe cutting edge parenting advice?!? Post-feminism.
Thanks Liz! I could see she was taking it all in. And I could see a sense of relief, too. I am so glad to have had our babysitter in our lives so she has that frame of reference.
That was a good mom moment. Whether your daughter takes that route or not at least you planted the seed as an option instead of squashing the choice like I think many women in the previous generation did.
Some great, if little told advice. I’ve got a 12 year old daughter and I tell her to pursue the path that is most meaningful. That does not necessarily mean a highflying, corporate career. Bring a homemaker is surely one of the most fulfilling roles out there – and yet it is seen as somehow second rate. Strange.
you are a good and wise Mommy, Bloom 🙂
“She said she did want to have an education, and job skills, and to have some work experience, “just in case.”
Sounds like a smart girl. I’m sure she’ll make the decision that is best for her.
One good thing about thinking on this path, she’s much more likely to choose a family friendly career option. I know that’s kind of restating the obvious, but here is an example. At the last base, one of the spouses was an optometrist. Her husband was the commander of the medical group there, and they’d met in optometry school. She could make her own hours, and had a really good paying job any time she wanted to. He has since retired, they have one kiddo left at home for another two years and she’s started a practice. I asked her how she chose that career, and she said when she went to the eye doctor at 12 years old, it was a female. It dawned on her that would be a really good career for a wife and mother….
Contrast this with my mom who told me career was everything. I never thought about juggling family and went into engineering first
There seems to be a real lack of good information to help kids think about career choices. I don’t know about this particular one, but I suspect most guidance counselors are pretty clueless about what’s really out there and what it requires. Books on the subject tend to be rehashed Bureau of Labor Statistics data. TV shows mostly focus on doctors, lawyers, cops. and criminals. Parents may not have a good feel for job possibilities outside their own sphere, and may also be influenced by social prejudices. And so on.
The point about considering family-raising flexibility or lack of same when choosing a career is an important one.
Indeed David Foster, not only flexibility but also the cost of the education required, and the ability to “pause” that career path without losing all ground in the meantime as some skills date quickly or simply are a steady path vs. being perennial. When I was young the ultimate seemed to be being an “executive” in an office job (or a dr. Or lawyer or president!) but the thing with all those paths are not only they very limited and highly competitive career paths, they aren’t ones you can really do part time or pause. Not to mention the educational debt involved, and the high salary that becomes golden handcuffs. Nope, it was sold as all upside and available to all! What a sham! Hopefully today’s girls are wiser to the situation, likely few have had top exec moms or any of the rest or if they did they rarely saw their moms. Before it was all “in theory” and girls/women my age had not seen the generation before actually try to achieve that. I am curious if they are less easily sold “the dream?”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22716557-what-color-is-your-parachute-for-teens-third-edition
This is a spin-off of “What Color is Your Parachute” that has been around for ages, and has been updated every so often. Search Google on that title or “What Color is Your Parachute for Teens” and you will find multiple reviews. I posted this link just as a starting point.
Throughout history, until the last hundred years or so that we have become more mobile, sons learned their father’s trade and daughters learned their mother’s trade (homemaker usually). Not much angst there in making a career choice. Now, options are more variable and the angst sets in.
We can’t go through all the doors in front of us at once. So the trick is to pick the one that we think we give us the broadest base for options later. Books like what I linked to help kids get their heads around what is available and what it will take to get there. I’ve not read the teen one, but the “grown-up” one was a wealth of information about where to go to find other information the last time I scanned through it – but that was before the Internet became the go-to place for info. So – the more recent versions may be on-line, and less comprehensive.
At any rate, the point is not to make the perfect choice, because that is impossible to do. Make a choice that doesn’t horrify you, and one where you can actually earn some money, and one that isn’t a blind alley but that will help set the stage for branching out into other areas when you are more experienced and want a change. One of the statistics that was in the early versions of Parachutes was that folks nowdays make three or four career moves (into different fields) over the course of their life – unlike our fathers and grandfathers of yesteryear who married the company for life.
Very true Richard, I will look into the book too, thanks!
https://www.bls.gov/bls/occupation.htm
This is a list of resources. Note that the “Subjects” tab, upper left, has been selected (at least it should be). Click on the “Home” tab and others for more resources and info.
Sunshine Mary posted a list of careers that she thought were suitable for women who wanted to incorporate earnings as well as marriage and motherhood into their lives. I’ll see if I can find it on my hard drive. If I do find it, I will post it here.
Daughter hung out with the smart kids at school, since she was one of them. We got exposed to all of the angst that parents – particularly mothers – heaped on their kids, particularly their daughters. Lots of AP classes, absolutely must make top grades so the kids can get into the “right” University. Approaching graduation from University last spring, they all began talking amongst themselves about what they were going to do once out of college. Out of a gang of about eight, having attended shools such as Yale, Washington University of St. Louis, Scripps College at Claremont, Grinnell, etc. – which cost their parents an arm and a leg – none of them had any clue what they were going to do after graduation. Sort of like the computer adage, garbage in, garbage out – for them it was, don’t know what I want to do at the end of high school translated to don’t know what I want to do at the end of college. One in particular, who went to the very expensive Clarmont Scripps college and studied neuroscience – because she could (she was smart enough to), is currently waiting tables in a restaraunt – because she doesn’t really like working with neuroscience.
I saw a cliche once about the stock market – “If you don’t know who you are, the stock market is a very expensive place to find out”. That could be customized to college – if you don’t know who you are, college is an expensive place to find out. So be careful about it.
Wife and I coached daughter starting in high shool – you don’t have to be a speech and language pathologist all of your life. But getting that degree under your belt will allow you to earn some significant money while you are figuring out what you really want to do. And, as college graduation neared and her friends were emoting that they had no clue what to do next, we suggested that she, too, could have a personal crises of that sort – just wait until she finished graduate school first.
Point being, it is not possible to make the perfect choice. So we have directed daughter on a path that will allow her many options, many more doors to open, when she gets out of school. She will have a skill that is valued in the market place so she won’t ever have to say “I have no clue what to do next”. That is a goal to strive for, and I think was the point of Sunshine Mary’s comments on her blog from time to time. Daughter will have options for making money if necessary, and marriage and family life as well.
I will take exception in part to what Ashe said upthread: except in rare circumstances, kids don’t have the frame of reference to figure out “what is best for them” while they are teenagers. They need the guidance of people who do have that frame of reference.
Hmmm, yeaaahh, I’m just gonna leave this right here:
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2018/12/there-are-only-npc-women-to-date.html
🙂
Throughout history, until the last hundred years or so that we have become more mobile, sons learned their father’s trade and daughters learned their mother’s trade (homemaker usually). Not much angst there in making a career choice. Now, options are more variable and the angst sets in.
We can’t go through all the doors in front of us at once. So the trick is to pick the one that we think we give us the broadest base for options later.
i think that one thing the ‘information age’ has done is taught us that most people are capable of being really good at a lot of different things, and this makes choosing one thing to do next overwhelming sometimes.
i am capable of doing a lot of things really well, but i don’t enjoy all of them. when i was working full time b4 kids, the company wanted to pay for me to finish my degree. thing was, i didn’t love that career. i enjoyed what i was doing, but i certainly didn’t want to make a life out of it – i wanted to be a Mom. that career and being a Mom enslaved to a company for paying for my degree would not mix. i told them no.
our kids are exposed to so many things that i think it gets overwhelming. how do they choose? there’s so much out there, and many are capable of being really good at a lot of those things.
with my Oldest … when i pulled her out to homeschool, we tried several different ways to school her. as she was already in high school, we were in a very different situation than if she were elementary. she did really well in maths and sciences, but she didn’t enjoy them at all. we visited our local junior college and talked to the guidance counselor there to see what would be required for her to get into college after high school. through that and process of considering things, determining what she liked, what she excelled at, what she didn’t like, etc, we decided to work backwards with her. she decided she wanted a business degree, so what would she need for that … and what did she *not* need for that. she did *not* need upper level maths and sciences, so we ditched those. she would need those for a high school transcript to get into college, but she would not need them for a GED, and she could get into where she wanted to go with a GED. so … she took her GED, did not take upper level maths and sciences, and got into the college she wanted. she’s doing online school and is extremely disciplined and loves living at home. it works for her.
if we were super wealthy and school and degree didn’t matter, she would have gone for a music degree. but she knew that was a waste of money and time.
Aspie Girl is a whole-nother story.
my friend and her husband saved X amount of dollars for their son for college. he’s going into engineering, like his dad, and wants at least a masters … probably a phd, too, like his dad. he got a full scholarship to a local college but really wanted to go to a the big-name school. his parents let him decide but laid it out for him. X amount of dollars. these educational career goals. one school full scholarship. big name school small partial scholarship. kid made smart choice and went with full scholarship and plans to use X dollars for graduate school. lived on campus for a year and then moved back home and commutes, saving a ton of money.
i think it’s also important to teach them to not get into situations where they have little to no control … such as accumulating a lot of debt. debt enslaves and takes away control and freedom to choose.
college debt is a complete waste and enslaves.
it is better to go slower, if upper level education is necessary, work and pay for it as you go, and to graduate debt-free … than to take out a loan and go thru faster and graduate enslaved before you even begin your career.
it is also good for our kids to earn at least part of the funds to do what they want to do … we really do appreciate things more when we have to work for them.
…maths and sciences – she didn’t enjoy them at all.
There are some academics that, although maybe not enjoyable, are useful simply for the mental discipline and understanding of natural laws that they encourage. Even in the business world, the manner of thinking that is encouraged / enabled by studying math and science becomes an asset. Examples:
– we lose 13 cents on every product we sell, but we’ll make it up on volume selling. Knowledge of math will help a business person not think this way, which will increase the likelihood of the business succeeding.
– we had neighbors from a third-world country whose daughter became fast friends with ours. Neighbor’s dad was diagnosed with cancer. All the women in the greatly extended family, as was their custom, took to wearing elastic bands of certain colors on their wrists – to help dad heal from the cancer. Fortunately, dad allowed the hospital to treat him with something other than those colored bands, so he did recover. Was an interesting teachable moment with daughter. Daughter knows to not fall prey to the medical charlatans who are selling those certain-colored elastic bands. And then those certain-colored bands can beome a metaphor for all of the other things one won’t fall prey to if they have a good understand of how natural laws work.
she’s still good in math and science … she just didn’t take the courses for credit.
the book, Now Discover Your Strengths, teaches that it’s okay to have weaknesses and that we don’t need to force our weaknesses to become our strengths. however, when our weaknesses interfere with our ability to use our strengths, then we need to strengthen our weaknesses. they still don’t need to become our strengths, but we need to improve them enough so they don’t hinder us using our strengths.
i’ve thought that was a great lesson, so i’ve taught it to my daughters along the way. and while math and sciences are not her weaknesses, she doesn’t prefer them. she doesn’t have to excel in upper level maths and sciences to do well in business, she just needs to do well enough so that she is not hindered in excelling in business.
i think this is what it’s evolved to (i read it when it first came out in 2001, and it’s expanded and evolved since then): https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/home/en-us/strengthsfinder
this one’s free … interesting: http://www.high5test.com
she’s still good in math and science … she just didn’t take the courses for credit.
Good. Just so long as she knows enough to not put certain-colored elastic bands on her wrist in an effort to help you heal if you should ever contract a life-threatening illness. 😉
Somewhere along the way I ran across the advice to build on your strengths rather than focus on shoring up you weaknesses, except in the case that you mentioned. Now Discover Your Strengths was published in 2001, so maybe it was that author. I think that is good advice.
Good. Just so long as she knows enough to not put certain-colored elastic bands on her wrist in an effort to help you heal if you should ever contract a life-threatening illness. 😉
lol!
she’s very skeptical and very *not* trusting – some by nature, a lot by all the experiences in her life.
her sister, though, is very peer-influenced and has a very difficult time telling people no even if she disagrees – one of the reasons we keep her close. if/when her brain and reasoning ability develop enough to where she proves over a good period of time that she is capable of reasoning well and saying no when appropriate, then we’ll relax on that. i am thankful, though, that she accepts this is true about her and acknowledges she needs protection and therefore doesn’t fight me on it; very thankful.
Ame,
Hi kid, hope that you are feeling better. Thought about you a couple of days when the Lab hollered that there were varmints in our driveway. It was a perfect tiny little doe and her twin fawns busily eating the last of the rose flowers. The food quality is far superior to that available in the shady woods so it is not likely that I would complain, and you might have appreciated them being that close.
When they were pups I always took the kids to the woods to sneak up on the deer as we neared Christmas. The kiddo’s eyes are better so he usually saw the spooky bucks before her, but both learned to hunt. Our nearest meadow looks down on a SE slope over the brush, perfect for deer bedding down in cold mornings, so they usually got to see the deer as they noticed us. The sweetie once claimed to have seen the red nose, gotta say that girl wants to be a believer, but we need that too 😀
From Cappys brilliant article George cited. Highly relevent.
“Now I could go on citing other instances where resources have been purposely spent on conditioning women to become NPC’s, but my larger point is how much has been spent on conditioning women to become good wives? How many trillions in education budgets have been spent on teaching women to be good mothers? And what institutions of our society (government, educational, media, corporate, etc.) actively promote motherhood and wifery?
And the answer is “none.” Not one cent, not one second, NOT EVEN BY THE PARENTS OF WOMEN THEMSELVES, is spent preparing, educating, explaining, or conditioning young women to be wives and mothers.
Of course, many women (being the conformist NPC leftists they are) will champion this. They will celebrate it, pointing out that they are now officially “free” to do what they want and are no longer shackled to the evil patriarchal expectations of being a wife and mother.
But that is not the point of this article. The point of this article is merely one of economics:
How much in resources has society spent on convincing women to be NPC leftist careerists?
vs.
How much in resources has society spent on convincing women to be good wives and mothers?
And what you will sadly conclude is that you get what you pay for.
“There are Only NPC Leftist Women on the Menu, Sir”
This is the key point I’m trying to convey to my clients of the past and any marriage-minded men of the future. The supply of quality, marriage material women is simply not here. There are not enough marriage-material women to go around. And the shortage is so bad that I estimate nearly 90% of men who want to get married will have accept one of two things:
1. You’re not going to get married, or
2. You can get married, but it will not be to a woman who puts you and the family first in her life.
Understand, this isn’t because the women themselves are inherently low quality, or unqualified to be wives or mothers. It’s that we have spent NO resources training them to be either, and have instead spent trillions convincing them their careers, educations, and (ultimately) politics are more important in life. And while I’m fully aware most women SAY they want to get married and some have kids, as I’ve said before;
“Getting married only requires saying ‘I do.’ And having kids only requires forgetting a condom.
To be a wife and a mother takes infinitely more work, and women today have been trained in neither.”
The sad truth is like sausage, rolls of sod, reams of blank white paper, most women have been purposely conditioned to become mass-produced, boring, unmentionable, unnoteworthy, borg-like NPC leftists. It benefits the democrat party through votes. It benefits the government through increased taxes (both via increased rates AND having women working and paying taxes as well). And it benefits the media/corporate/college/materialist industries as women spend their money on trinkets, bobbles, handbags, and Masters in Social Work degrees. But it will NEVER benefit a husband, children, a family, or loved ones. And I’m not here to tell you some kind of “comeuppance” story, where women in their late 40’s hit menopause and ask “where have all the good men gone” while cuddling their cats.
I’m telling you because you’re my clients. You need to know the truth.
Do not have the expectations of getting married in today’s world. The majority of women are not qualified to be mothers or wives. They are qualified to be social workers, human resource directors, non-profit directors, CEO’s, and any other form of worker drone. But they are not capable of being a wife or a mother.”
“After a decade-and-change of failing to find wife material, he wondered if his life would be OK if he just kept sleeping with hot, lingerie-clad, 20 something prostitutes each month.”
Roger says, “Ah, let’s make that twice per week.”
Thanks, horseman. I knew someone would pick up on it. 😉
ahhh, BG, i love it! that sounds … peaceful. beautiful.
we see some wildlife where i live but not much … although, of all crazy things … i actually saw a roadrunner run straight across the road in front of me a few weeks ago! crazy wild! i had no idea they were in our area 🙂
– – –
thanks for asking 🙂 … very s.l.o.w.l.y moving forward w/the health stuff. i’m having a few more good days than i was. bad days are still bad, but that they’re less frequent, even if just a little bit, is a VERY good thing 🙂 . i’m working at not being frustrated with how slow it’s going but am VERY grateful my docs know what they’re doing, are not surprised by anything that comes up, know how to adjust and handle every.tiny.thing that does come up, and they are both very, very encouraging.
had some more tests run recently … while the ‘bad’ is still bad, there were also some really good things such as my whole cardiovascular system is in great shape! was told that the chances of me ever having any kind of heart disease are very slim, so i was very happy to hear that 🙂
my family is very patient with me in this process and very encouraging.
so … i am blessed 🙂
(though still not able to eat the ingredients in won ton soup 😦 )
Ame
Glad to hear that your health is improving and it’s good that your family is supportive. So hang in there kid, because attitude does matter.
The kiddo went back to Saskatchewan with his Dad to hunt with my youngest brother. They got five deer and two are theirs, plus 15 “fat ass” chickens from my brother’s Hutterite friends, and half a dozen partridges that the kiddo shot with my wife’s twenty gauge.
thank you, BG 🙂
because attitude does matter
yes, very much so. oddly it’s been a struggle – and that has been frustrating b/c it’s not usually so for me. taking it one day at a time. moving forward. finding patience and forgiveness for/ with myself. appreciate your encouragement 🙂
– – –
love the stories about your family … Dad’s and sons … hunting, passing down family heirloom guns … doing life together. so awesome 🙂
LOL, well there will be no partridges on a pear tree, because the kids ate them all ;-D
Good job RPG.
I find it sad that this idea needs to be taught. It used to be common knowledge…. not anymore.
Having thought about this a little more;
I would suggest that part of teaching this concept should also include teacher your daughter that young men get no equivalent choice. This will give her a better chance of developing empathy for any young man she does end up with.