Training Your Child Part 2 - The Coffeeshop

While I'm waiting for Vicki to complete the questionnaire from the viewpoint of a careers' advisor, I decided to take my 9th grader to coffee and talk about his future as Part 2 of my exploration of careers for my teens.

You may recall in Part 1, my eldest who's in 11th grade was inspired by a book to decide her career with no further discussion.

The last time I had a chat with "Killer", my number 2, he said he was thinking of going into animation for NASA. That was in 2015 as we hiked for 10 miles for my Moon Walk training.

London Moon Walk: with Kim and Jenny

I thought it was time - now that he's 14 - to re-visit the topic, and it's interesting how differently the discussion went this time around.

Killer has done a lot of growing up in the past two years. He has been accepted onto the youth group's leadership training course and completed its first year of it; he volunteers weekly for the library, trains in our swim club's highest squad, and recently was promoted to First Officer in his Trail Life troop.

The highest "boy" office in a TL group

We had some time to kill after his dermatology appointment today, so I took him to the local cafe for a chat.

I did not order a large latte - it was a mistake by the waiter!

We first brainstormed about things that interested him: guitar, animation, computer programming, building computers, careers associated with his lovely voice and English accent such as radio DJ, event announcer, director of films, lighting specialist. Some of these, he thought, were hobbies and not careers. Some of these might be his job. Which ones for a career? He wasn't yet sure.

Then I wanted to establish some ground rules. Given his academic strengths, I wanted him to consider a degree in something "solid" like English, math, science, history, etc. It's best, I said, to be sure to make good grades and to finish, not necessarily to worry about which subject you do it in as long as, at least at this stage when you're not really sure what to do, it's a broad and traditional one.

Next we talked about the God-oriented view: God has made us with certain strengths. He knit us in our mother's wombs to do something. There are seven mountains of influence, one of which we are probably gifted to work in.

And then we had a revelation together: Killer feels called to the mountain of arts and entertainment. This is a complete shock to me: a child who just loves electronics, who can hug a computer to make it work, who knows which buttons of a thousand to press to get the right responses from a machine, an introvert of introverts, and he wants to produce things that make people happy and bring them joy.

For an introvert, he can be quite the comedian!

So with this in mind, I have suggested to him that he has a great opportunity as a 9th grader to spend the next four years in exploration, but not just random exploration: intentional exploration; otherwise, there's a likelihood of frittering away these opportunities by time-consuming use of electronics.

He's a checklist kind of guy, so we'll be looking into creating a checklist of careers to look into this year, and in the meantime, keeping our spiritual ears attuned to what circumstantial opportunities that God might put in our path.

When was the last time you had a "date" with your high schooler to talk about their future? Why not put one on your calendar right now?

In the meantime, put your best guess in the comment box about what you THINK your child wants to do, then update with what he or she ended up surprising you with! We will all enjoy the broad opportunities available to our children.