Impact Of Parental and peer Influence On Career Decisions

You can force a horse to the stream, but you cannot force it to drink water. So goes the popular saying. This is apparently akin to one of the major challenges that teachers face on a daily bases, namely, teaching unwilling students or students who are obviously in the wrong class or career. One of the major causes of these is a student offering a subject or in a career forced upon them by their parents or the effect of peer 

influence.  

Children are loaded with talents.
Help them discover and explore their talent.

Parental and peer influence is a serious problem that has serious and far-reaching consequences. A student who prefers one subject or career and the parents or friends prefer another, is simply reduced to a programmed robot that simply does what is expected of him with disregard for the preferences and feelings of the boy or girl.

Such a student will definitely have problems with concentration, assimilation, dedication and focus in school. It will be a miracle to find such students do well in school. Assignments and classwork will be big burdens for such a student. Such students will always have mood swings and may appear completely withdrawn from school activities. He or she is just like a feather being tossed around by the wind. The student does not have a mind of his or her own. School results and reports will definitely reflect these facts.

At work, competence will definitely play out the history of their education.  Such an individual cannot live up to expectation. This should not come as a surprise. In jobs where the competence of the person is very easy to see like teaching, medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering, computer science and the like, the person’ s career may be in a disaster.  

This is the powerful and far reaching effect of parental and peer pressure in career decisions.

Many lives have been destroyed in the course of parents trying to make their children be what they (the parents and friends) want them to be, not caring about the preferences of the child. My take on this is very simple. Children should be allowed to make their career choices.  They should be allowed to identify their talents, preferences and areas of interests and explore them. Parents in particular, should only guide and advise their children. They should be interested in the reasons behind a particular choice being made. This is to ensure that the choices made are based on enough facts, not based on peer pressure and misguided assistance from outsiders. The highest parents can do is to try to persuade and not to force.

It is necessary to remind parents that it is the child’s life we are talking about here. So the child should have the final say on subject and career decisions.

Thanks for your time.

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