An Artistic Kid who Doesn't Want to Major in Art

Parents Forum
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We have an S19 that is talented when it comes to art. He has been taking private lessons since fourth grade and takes all of the honors art and AP art classes available at his high school. He absolutely loves it. He is still on the fence about whether he’s an “artist”, meaning does he have anything to say through his art. I think it might be his path but he’s a bright student and strong in math and writing as well. I find that, whenever I push the art thing, he pushes back. For him, art is a release. He loves it because it’s not competitive like everything else in his world right now. It’s downtime and stress relief. If his teachers mention entering his work in contests, he says no thank you.

My mother in law paints as a hobby. I see him watching her and knowing that it’s always an option for him to keep art fun and not work. Maybe your daughter feels the same way. A few of our friends have paid him to paint portraits of their dogs. He said those were the only times that he didn’t really enjoy painting. Just because you’re talented at something does not mean it has to be your profession.

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I like mackinaw’s advise. I would also say that the world of work has changed My H’s father (now in 90s) was an engineer who spent his whole career at two companies whereas my close friend who is an engineer (now 50s) has switched companies many times and is now in a different part of business entirely.
Your D may major in any Liberal Arts undergraduate and may not discover her true career path until after college.

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LOL, yeah, I was kind of hoping to quash this thread last night - I felt like I was getting judged and misunderstood.

To be clear - I haven’t been pushy with my daughter. I’m very aware that she is in her first semester of college and that she has plenty of time to explore and find herself. Of course we have discussed majors - what parent hasn’t done that with their child? I have given her my opinions and advice when she has asked, and I’ve accepted her right to make her own decisions when she has rejected my some of my suggestions or found them unhelpful. I’m the parent of two teenage girls! This happens on a daily basis!

In this particular case - she asked my for my advice! Also she expressed her frustration at not being able to fit an art class into her schedule (it wasn’t one of the classes that got rejected by her advisor - it just wouldn’t fit as it was three hours long). And I haven’t offered her anything yet, except to point out that the school had a Visual Arts minor. She said “Oh, that looks interesting.” And that was the end of the text convo.

I appreciate the helpful posts - most of them have been thoughtful and and have provided me with good info and ideas that she probably would have never considered. I seriously don’t know whether to present them to her though after all the flack I’ve received about butting out and letting her find her own path. I feel many of the suggestions provided info that even her career center staff would not have considered - the people in this forum have such a wealth of knowledge and experience! But I keep hearing that I shouldn’t share the ideas with her because it’s not appropriate for me to provide input to my teen-aged daughter - I’m just supposed to send her off to college with a “Go forth young women and make good decisions - because I’m not supporting you after you graduate!” "And don’t ask me for advice either - you need to figure it all out yourself ". “Sorry we didn’t warn you that you’d be completely on your own once you left for college!” “Good Luck!”

Just venting. I have to go to a Dr’s. appt. I’ll check back later. If anyone has any other sincere helpful advice, I wouldn’t mind hearing it. If you have commentary about parenting methods - I’d prefer that you not waste your time.

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As a general comment, my D2 was thinking about having a secondary concentration (that is how her school does things) in visual arts. But she couldn’t get an art class for her first 3 semesters – either they conflicted with her core classes (required) or were filled by the time she registered. She finally gave up and did the concentration in literature. She was able to get into a couple classes as a senior, and now is trying out the glass blowing club at her graduate university. But just wanted to point out that at some schools it is hard to even get into art classes if you aren’t an art major.

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Offering advice for a person who is the age of your daughter, and newly at college, is more than appropriate, it is probably necessary. I think you can help counter the cultural message that college is about career and that art is not “practical,” for instance.

People on this forum certainly have different parenting philosophies. Yours sounds very warm and supportive and you should be proud that your daughter asks you. You have a good relationship based on trust and affection :slight_smile:

46

OP- sometimes just dropping a “Hey, I read a great article in the New Yorker about urban planning/transportation issues in Asia” can do the trick. Kid reads the article, realizes that there are about 50 incredible jobs that she never knew existed, and she’s off to the races.

One of my kids works in a field where if you’d asked us when he was in HS the likelihood that he’d end up there, we’d have said “Zero”. And loves it, and is completely fulfilled intellectually, personally, etc. Another kid works in a field which did not exist back in HS (the company is a late stage start-up, the technology is still pretty new, if you’d described what they did back in the mid-2000’s you’d have thought it was a fairy tale). So the probability of us predicting this career would also have been zero. Close friend has a kid who talked about med school since she was in the 3rd grade- is still in her 20’s and is co-founder of a medical start up (with just a BS) which is on its third round of funding. My friend is still bummed the D never applied to med school! (but the kid will be CEO, AND a tech millionaire, so it’s not too shabby).

But getting your D to think about careers she knows nothing about is a good thing, regardless of the source of the information.

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One of my college girls entered school with no idea of what direction she wanted to pursue. Although, she knew she didn’t want STEM. My husband kept telling her to “look down the road and what would work for a career.” She got overwhelmed and frustrated. She loved English and was really enjoying her Sociology classes, but didn’t know how to translate that into a long term career. Last spring she went abroad with a group including two professors from her school. They had time to talk about life and arranged get togethers with local alums. Their advice was to stop trying to map out her own life and pursue what interests her now to find that passion. So this fall, as a junior, she’s declared duo majors in English and Sociology. She’s still not quiet sure exactly where that will take her, but she is researching that.
So my advice is to ask your DD what the next five years look like to her. What would incite passion for her? Giving back and doing something meaningful can take so many forms and she may need to narrow that down once she finds her passion. For example, my husband is an engineer and yet for 35+ years he has donated twelve hours a week to our community as an EMT for our local first aid squad. Remind her to be gentle on herself. It’s okay to be confused at this time of her life. Good luck.

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I divide art into two broad categories: art that serves others and art that serves self. One is not better than the other and there are overlaps. The former describes the vast majority of creative people who use their art as a hobby, to give pleasure to others as well as to themselves as they create; the latter describes artists who make a living (this is the “serves self” component) at their work. And of course, their work brings pleasure to others, too.

Your daughter probably wants to continue to enjoy her art and recognizes that the minute art comes with requirements, it just won’t bring her the same level of joy. This is okay. She can do it as a hobby her entire life, while working at a career that pays her bills.

She’s a first semester freshman. She still has 3 semesters of distribution requirements to go before she has to choose a major. (My son didn’t declare his until the beginning of junior year.) She will find something that she can major in, even if it’s not something that prepares her for a specific career or even something she’s passionate about.

She will find plenty of majors to choose from at a small LAC!

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Hi, OP. I’m one of the offenders. My comment “it’s probably a good idea to let her find her way and for you to not make suggestions” was in direct response to your comment, “But of course anything I suggest, she’s not going to like.” I responded as I did because I have children who often are like that, and so I don’t offer them suggestions when I think their reaction will be to discard the suggestion because it came from me.

My older daughter did a lot of fine art in college; she was able to incorporate art into her concentration (like a major, but self-designed). Since graduating, she has focused on writing, which she loves. I don’t know if she’ll get back to painting ever. I hope she does if she wants to. She supports herself by working part-time as a server. She makes some money from the writing but not enough yet for that to be her only job.

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I don’t think it is unusual for freshmen to want to take everything and be disappointed that they can’t. I used to get that big catalog and dream of taking all the fun classes and then realizing that I could only take 5, and they couldn’t all be at the same time or all over campus. And I also realized that there would be more semesters. My daughter has had to build an entire semester of classes around French 2 that only had one section that met from 11-12;30 and that cut out all other classes in that 11 to 1 time frame (which was a lot of classes). This semester she had to build around a museum class that is only offered in the Fall, only one section all afternoon on Thurs. Again, cut out a lot of other classes.

It’s a disappointment she’ll have to come to terms with and probably realize it will be fine. Younger college kids don’t realize there is drop/add too, that what they sign up for in Nov isn’t what they have to take in Jan.

I enjoy helping my daughter pick a schedule and she likes me helping. She isn’t very good at mapping the time slots or the distance across campus from one class to another, so sometimes I’ll find a class or a discussion session that would be very convenient for her to take. A lot of the classes at her school can be taken in several departments, and by taking the class as a religion class rather than a history class, it can fulfill an A&S requirement, or a major requirement. She likes my pointing those things out.

My other kid is an engineer and takes exactly what is required in the order it is required. She’s no fun to help at all.

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Thanks everyone for your additional comments and support :). When I mentioned the Visual Arts minor at her school, I worded it wrong - it is a Visual Studies minor - not an Art minor. Here’s the description:

Learning Goals
To teach students visual literacy
Students of Visual Studies will investigate their place in the global system of images. Through a Visual Studies framework students have the ability to describe, analyze, and negotiate an increasingly complex world of information technologies; the impact of these technologies on art, culture, science, commerce, policy, society, and the environment; and the interrelationship of these technologies with historical and material forms.

To engage students in critical making
Visual Studies creates curricular opportunities for students to make images, objects, and digital artifacts with critical awareness of their powers and limitations. Critical making, or thinking with process, encourages students to develop production skills which, when coupled with theoretical training and analytical rigor, will broaden their ability to improvise and problem-solve in a variety of disciplinary contexts.

To train students in interdisciplinary rigor
Visual Studies encourages conversation between scholars working on the relationship between text and the visual, the nature of perception, cognition and attention, and the historic construction of looking. Visual Studies can help students perceive when disciplines are essential to understanding a subject, and when they can be combined for a more expansive or more precise critical engagement.

To guide students in an “ethics of the visual”
Visual Studies invites a return to the liberal arts as a process of creativity, critique, and reflection. It links creative expression to cultural analysis and social engagement, training a generation of theoretically informed makers, artists, innovators, teachers, and civic leaders. We invite students to examine the relationship between the visual and structures of power, to analyze the role of images in making consumers and to attend to the role that images play in constructing “others” through race, gender, or disability.

I’m not so sure that these Learning Goals can be accomplished in a six course minor - seems a bit ambitious to me, but it might be a good program for her. I’ll talk to her more about it this weekend, along with the other ideas and advice that was offered. She’s already taking one of the courses allowed under this minor as one of her Gen Ed requirements - an Anthro course that she just selected kind of randomly (not knowing anything about this program at the time), but she’s really enjoying it.

Thanks again for the assistance.

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A few things come to mind:

  1. Does she have gen ed requirements to fill? She may develop interests as she fulfills them. Two birds, one stone. My D started college thinking of 3-4 majors and in the course of fulfilling certain requirements, settled on one that wasn't in the top 4 initially. And she loves it. But if I'd told her that freshman year she'd have laughed at me and told me no way, never THAT.
  2. IMO it's OK to guide and be a sounding board. I supported D no matter what major she looked into and tried to help her visualize the path through each and envision career possibilities for each. I saw it as my job to help her work them through, and listen to her as she took the classes and made decisions based on her reactions to them. Where I stepped back was in choosing the actual major - that had to be her call and hers alone, she had to own that. But she STILL asks me for advice and I am thrilled to be asked, and I give as much as I can.
  3. Art majors have careers that aren't "art". My brother was a fine arts major at a LAC who wound up an executive in several large fashion design companies. Not as a fashion designer, by the way. He never studied business but he has managed to have an amazing career in business while also being creative more days of the week than not.

The person who leads the trips, the social worker you mentioned made me think of a young friend. He went to college, not sure what his major was, but he’s super outdoorsy and adventurous. He’s currently earning a LOT of money as a wilderness guide at a ridiculously expensive boutique resort near his college town. He takes groups of VIPs out on multi day adventures. No social work required :smiley:

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Just for fun folks can look at hireculture.org, which lists MA cultural jobs. The job market is diverse and often random zigs and zags lead to the job a person likes best. I don’t really understand thinking about career in specific ways during college, because of that. That site, to me, really illustrates the kinds of opportunities available to lots of grads in liberal arts and the arts/music.

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@compmom That’s a great website! I’ll send it to her to show her the possibilities!

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Apologies for not reading through the whole thread, but if it wasn’t mentioned before my friend’s artistic kid (I think he majored in fine arts and took computer courses as well) ended up in web design and is doing very nicely.

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My older daughter was the artistic type in HS, anything from photography to photoshop, drawing, painting… She studied architecture as an undergraduate, was wildly successful, and is completing her M.Arch in a very well respected and challenging university on a great scholarship. That’s the ‘what’ part.

The ‘meaningful’ part is even better. She is not interested in being the next Zaha Hadid. She is more interested in how architecture can help small communities develop and grow, stay sustainable, etc. A far different issue, and a more important one than designing Taj Mahal hospitals and homes for the 0.1%.

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My older D was a vocal performance major and earned a BM degree. She decided to work in casting and in a talent agency. They are both low paid career paths for many years, so she decided to focus more on marketing in the entertainment field. Five years post graduation, she decided to pursue a full time MBA. She was offered two full tuition scholarships in prestigious programs and is currently studying at NYU Stern. She did not have stellar GMAT scores, but programs liked that she had a unique background.

My younger D earned a BFA in art with a sculpture concentration. She immediately pursued her MA in art education and finished her degree in one year. She is currently a first year sculpture teacher in a public school in Brooklyn. She feels that she will devote summers to her art - making and the rest of the year she is earning a decent salary and is doing something important for children. She finds both paths fulfilling and meaningful.

Btw, my older daughter is also good at art and volunteered in a mentoring program, teaching the arts on Saturday mornings as a volunteer.

My artist daughter has singing talent and studied voice in college as well. It was not an official minor. She had an art major, and took all her elective credits in voice lessons and special effects makeup classes.

I would advise your daughter to try different classes. Eventually she will need to choose a major, but as others said, an undergraduate major does not necessarily determine your career path. There is a lot of flexibility in terms of admittance to grad programs, too. Many art ed majors did not major in art. They needed to have a certain number of credits in art and art history. No ed classes were required prior to admittance.Some students took art classes post graduation and then earned enough credits to enter the program.

Good luck to your D. It is possible that her unwillingness to take talent based classes may be due to a fear of being judged. Crits ARE rough on the ego, but help artists mature and grow.

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@ Thank you @uskoolfish Some helpful info, especially about the art ed path! I think you might be correct with her fear of being not good enough - as of last year when we were discussing majors while she was in the college app process. Now, after she’s been in school for a semester, she’s having second thoughts as she’s trying to fit a drawing course into her schedule :).

BTW, she’s also a gifted singer - who doesn’t want to join any vocal groups at her school either (even though a member heard her in her room singing and stopped and knocked on her door to tell her she should join). Maybe next year she’ll be confident enough to take part in those activities also.

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@turbo93 This is a great time to be an architect if those are your interests. Back when I was in school I took some urban planning courses, but people were barely absorbing Jane Jacobs at that time.

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@LeastComplicated

I’m a speech pathologist. The course of study is not at all flexible, and the initial degree to be licensed is a masters.

Your daughter can consider this, but let her make that choice. It’s a great but challenging field.

She is only a first semester freshman. SHE will figure this out.

One message that might be helpful…many college graduates end up in careers that have little to do with their actual degree major.

Perhaps she can spend some time during winter and spring breaks shadowing a variety of jobs?

As an aside… my daughter is an outstanding musician, and played in ensemble all four years of undergrad…because she enjoys it!