This is an excellent (and personally highly relevant) post by Ian Ybarra about parents and their kids’ dreams. It wisely takes the point-of-view of the parents and explains why they often don’t support projects that could be incredible for the child, instead encouraging them to take a more traditional career path.

I suffer this very problem because I can barely contemplate working a traditional office job. If it’s temporary then fine, but the idea of taking on a permanent position sends pulses of dark death cascading down my body.

It’s well worth your time to read Ian Ybarra’s full post, but below are my personal responses.

Parents don’t get much of the reward, but absorb a lot of the risk

While I get oddles of reward for researching and writing, none of that reward is evident to my parents. I’m really bad at explaining what I’m researching and getting them excited about it. I expect them to just read what I write, but why should they if they don’t have an interest? I didn’t expect them to read all my essays at school or reports in college. It’s up to me to sell my ideas to them just like anyone else.

Even when I was at university, my weekly phone calls were often less than enlightening. My mum is very good at telling stories of how her week has gone, but I lack this ability.

When I can afford to join a public speaking group this should improve, but I should also keep in mind the problem whenever I converse with them and push myself to talk more and share my ideas. In fact, not just with my parents, but with everyone.

This is a great quotation by Ybarra:

I have a friend who quit his high school teaching job in Kansas to move to Nashville to play music. He sends a documentary video of his new life to his parents about once a month. And they get so excited that I hear about it the next day from my mom who heard from my dad who works with Scott’s dad.

It makes a lot of sense. If I can tell the story well, they can live my dream with me. It’s all about sharing that dream.

Losing Face - Failure isn’t just a problem of taking care of your child. Its also dealing with questions of “what is junior doing these days?”

I find answering this question difficult myself, so it must be really difficult for my parents. What makes it particularly difficult is the fact that at the moment I’m making very little money from ventures. This makes the work I do seem like a hobby rather than real work. Again, this would be easier if I was able to sell what I’m doing to my parents, but it would still be difficult. They need something like ‘he’s a writer’, or ‘professional speaker’, or ‘psychological researcher’. But I don’t have a title and I probably never will.

This is Ian’s suggestion:

You have to be to your parents what Karl Rove is to Dub-ya. Feed them the lines, tell them what to say, explain why it’s good, show them how to sell it. [...] I, for one, don’t have an official title in my day job and I have several other projects that are important to me. But for now I just tell my parents to say Ian’s a writer. and mention one notable thing I’ve worked on. If you’re not employed in the traditional sense, then that needs to change to She’s working on ______.

So what is the line I should give. I think something like ‘Alan is researching and writing about learning and brain fitness’.

That isn’t my favorite way of explain what I’m doing, but it is probably the best way for other people to understand it. I’d like to change writing to teaching at some point, but that will wait until I’m at least practicing public speaking.

Not Wanting to See Your Child Hurt. Kill the dream early, so they won’t get hurt later on when they don’t get it.

Get your parents to realize that you will hurt a million times more if you don’t go after your dream than if you just don’t quite reach it.

I know this already, but the more I explain it to my parents the better.

I think my mum understands it. She told me recently that when my dad was made redundant there was the possibility of using the redundancy money to start a gardening business. It was risky but my mum was excited by the idea.

About a week later my dad landed himself a managing director’s job. The redundancy had turned into a nice promotion and my mum was frequently congratulated on becoming a managing director’s wife.

But Mum wasn’t all that excited. In fact she was a little disappointed. She was looking forward to taking that risk.

I think Dad ultimately enjoyed the work, but I do not think he was passionate about it on a day to day basis. It was stressful, took a lot of work and involved a lot of traveling — which is fine if you really care for the reason behind the stress, but I don’t think Dad was.

When I was doing work experience is the offices of a factory when I was back in college, I was talking to one of the workers about careers. I asked, a bit rudely probably, whether her job is what she dreamed of doing when she was growing up. She dodged the question, but explained how when you’re a kid you have big dreams and want to do all these amazing things, but you reach a point when money becomes important. I can understand where she is coming from, but as I listened to her tell her colleague about the fancy new mirror she had just bought, I vowed that I would never let my dreams die like that.

I broke that vow without even realising it. And it’s tempting to let them die again. It really would be easier it the short term. But I think letting a dream die is like letting your soul die. I’m not prepared for that depression.

Financial Concerns

This is the big one for me because my finances are not strong at the moment. I’m taking a very difficult career path, and money is even my prime concern. This is probably what is eating my parents the most, and to be fair it is my own concern as well. I have plans for improving this, but it’s going to be difficult to get it going.

When I do it’s going to be important to share everything with my parents so that they feel like they are part of the project.

The big message, however, is communication. I have to communicate more.

Ian Ybarra’s post can be read here.

The original prompts for Ybarra’s post come from Jason Sheen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 12:31 UTC and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.