My kids just watched yet another movie about a girl with a dream of becoming a dancer. There’s a lot of kids’ content about pursuing your dreams of becoming a performer, fashion designer, or artist, probably partly because this content is made by people in the arts.
Some jobs make it into children’s media because they’re easy to depict: doctor, construction worker, baker. When it comes to white-collar jobs, it’s hard to depict what we even do besides sit at a computer. Children will more likely become nurses, delivery drivers, IT administrators, or project managers than ballerinas, but you wouldn’t know it. Even the behind-the-scenes jobs in the arts (editor, stage manager, graphic designer) are harder to depict.
Children’s media also overhypes the social benefit of arts careers. The Magic Misfits series annoyed me for implying that performing stage magic is a socially valuable career because it brings Joy and Delight to people’s lives, when it’s kind of obvious that there’s no shortage of people who want to be performers.
This isn’t to say the arts aren’t valuable! But I think much of their value is in doing them for fun, not trying to make a paying career out of them. When I first met Jeff it seemed possible he’d want to be a professional musician. When I look at his friends who have gone that route — on the road a lot, stressed about money — I’m glad that he’s done it as a part-time thing.
I expect to give our kids a message like: Follow your dreams to some degree, but be realistic about the student debt on your modern dance studies and what kind of life the typical dance major has at age 30. I’ll give you a hint, it does not involve full-time work as a dancer. If you end up with a job that doesn’t make you tear your hair out, and that pays enough for you to do other things you want to do, that’s a good outcome! Even better if you can do something that’s especially valuable for the world, too.
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Sesame Street gets credit for Ralph Nader singing “A consumer advocate is a person in your neighborhood”, even if his job typically involves filing lawsuits rather than personally destroying some guy’s sweater. Also credit for Sonia Sotomayor informing a puppet that “Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career.”
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I also see people place value on their children continuing a family business or way of life, in a way that sometimes seems weirdly disconnected from what will be good for the children. E.g. an interview with a sheep farmer and author who spoke about the beauty of continuing his family’s way of life:
“I’m a sheep farmer on the farm that my father and my grandfather lived on, not far from where we’ve lived for all of that period of time. And it’s absolutely alive all around me. So, the work I do is a continuation of their work and a continuation of everybody’s work before me.
A lot of modern thinking —and we can talk about this later — a lot of economic thinking centers on the individual and the individual’s happiness or the individual’s utility. . . . really I’m in a very long chain of people. Hopefully a chain that stretches on far into the future. I’m quite insignificant. The sheep were there at least a thousand years before me. The mountain was there for millennia, forever before me. The work goes on in cycles.”
But he also says about the daily experience:
“Farmers all around the world . . . don’t see economics as impersonal. They feel it absolutely personally. So, you take over this farm that was your father’s and your grandfather’s. If you don’t make any money or you’re going broke, you’re failing. We don’t think the farm’s failing, the economy’s failing, the technologies have changed. We go to bed feeling absolutely crushed because the farm isn’t really a business in our minds. It’s an extension of who we are, an extension of our identity.
And the experience of the modern farmer is one full of debt. . . . the actual economics of farming is really quite crushing and depressing.”
I can see the loss of giving up this chain of generations of working the same land. But the current state of small farming seems like an awful thing to wish on your children.
The real question becomes, what are parents’ responsibilities when it comes to their children’s career pursuit. As you point out, they can range from “grooming” (i.e. preordaining the outcome) to “curating” (sensing a child’s wishes and then going all-in to promote it, think tennis) to “exposing” (making sure one’s child sees a variety of real-life work, and letting them choose — with guidance/information). The idea of choice *is* important, I think, but it’s hard to make informed choices about the rest of one’s life when one is still in one’s teens. What might be under-emphasized ny parents is education/training that is *versatile*, i.e., allows one to change careers mid-stream if the first chosen path isn’t satisfying. I remember working with a young engineer who was smart but just decided that this wasn’t for him, and at age approx 28 or so, quit and decided to become a lawyer. That took some flexibility.
One overhyped career in my upbringing, that was completely disconnected from the reality of it, was becoming a professor. I performed well academically up until high school, and there was no doubt in my family that I was on-track to become a professor.
Except, there are so few openings for jobs each year! And it is involves committing to years of underpaid, gruelling labour, when you could be doing something else.
I quite liked the movie `Dance Academy` for its depiction of the brutal reality of professional ballet. There’s a character who appears exclusively as a villain throughout the film, but toward the end, on the opening night of the show she has produced as such terrible cost, the camera glances down into her lap and we see her fingertips are bleeding. Even she’s not having a good time.
The best part is that this is otherwise a totally formulaic teeny-bopper straight-to-DVD film. But I watched it and I thought, this was made by people who knew something about subject matter and decided not to sugarcoat it.