Well, yes, having a spouse/significant with a high paying job can open up more opportunities for following one’s dream without necessarily facing the consequences.
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My younger S plays video games in any free time available. I’d be very satisfied if he was talented and motivated enough to make money doing it (competing in championships, making YouTube videos etc). Unfortunately he isn’t.
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I think it’s more that they don’t have expectations of living the high life. My daughter doesn’t have an SO and my son’s fiancee isn’t making much at this point.
Hah! That is often the advice given to many an artist.
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Since the topic has come up frequently on this thread, I just want to thank all the parents who are supportive of their artist kids pursuing their interests for a living.
I expect I’d do it even if I loved my job, but especially because my work life is merely satisfactory, and often stressful, one of my primary diversions is patronizing the performing arts. I am extremely grateful for the musicians, actors, and artists who bring such joy to my life.
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Well, my daughter who is in the performing arts is married to someone also in the performing arts. Both are following their dreams.
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And they managed to purchase a condo in Manhattan, where average price for a studio is close to $1 million.? How lucky. Also, how extremely rare.
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My kids were excellent students, and participated in sports and music (in the K-12 yrs), but I can’t say they had “passion” for anything in particular.
So as parents we kept encouraging them to not limit themselves through their choices. I can think of one instance in particular. DD never loved math, perhaps even dislikes it. Yet when she completed the required math sequence for high school graduation, we talked about the benefits of taking calculus her senior year. We didn’t tell her she had to take calc. However we do believe knowledge is power, so we showed her that calculus was often a college degree requirement. She chose to take calc and was extremely glad her university accepted AP credit for it.
This same DD has chosen “build a career in your 20s”. I have no idea if she plans on eventually being a mother, but financially and resume-wise she will have some flexibility.
Lastly, upthread I wrote:
The “shared experiences” part was probably a factor in my kids’ life choices to date. Our family has a history of longevity. Grandparents and great-grandparents have lived into their 80s. They’ve seen/heard how people can enjoy those stages of life.
So true.
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Um, no. They do own a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan and it did not cost anywhere near that amount.
I don’t think their success so far is due to any luck. Rather they work very hard and are go-getters.
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There are tens of thousands of hard working performing artists in NYC who can barely manage to survive. Luck has a great deal to do with anyone’s success.
You do understand that for every tale of successful artsy yuppies, there are dozens more that are not, right? Even those with plenty of talent and initiative. Pointing out the unicorns is not always wise. Bill Gates never encorages anyone to follow his path of dropping out of college, despite his success in doing so. Unicorns are rare for a reason.
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@roycroftmom There are “starving artists” who also do survival jobs, like waitressing, etc. Sure.
But there are also young adults who majored in what I assume you’d consider more practical fields who are living at home with their parents.
My kids have been self-sufficient from day one, and I don’t consider any of it to be due to luck. In terms of my performing arts kid, she never waited for work to come to her…she creates work and is good enough that people pay her for it. Son-in-law also creates work for himself.
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I don’t consider either of my kids to be unicorns. For my performing arts kid, she has lots of friends who have made it at the highest levels of her profession. She is not alone. Do all make it? No. But one need not be a unicorn.
One more thing, when I look at her peers and friends from her graduating class in her BFA program in college, there are quite a lot of them who have gone onto great success at the top of their field. Just not all of them.
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But how do you know? Facts on the ground today may not and probably will not be the same as 20, 30, 40 years from now. The world is rapidly changing.
I grew up in a neighborhood and a wider geographic area that was dominated by engineers. Grumman (now Northrop Grumman), Sperry (now Unysis), and Fairchild Republic were in our backyard. It was a middle-class, secure life for the engineers. Then the massive layoffs came, and all the men were unemployed.
IBM provided a great life for people pf New York’s Hudson Valley. A GREAT life. Guaranteed. I don’t have to tell you the end of that story.
On the other side of the coin, who could have predicted the rise of tech companies, AI, management consulting, venture capital.
Can’t predict the future.
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In tech many people have been laid off or their job was outsourced. Once you get to middle management and you are too expensive, you have to constantly worry about being ousted.
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This. I think an important point we need to make to our kids is that keeping their skills (for lack of a better word…read “employability”) relevant is going to be necessary no matter what type of career they choose. And its not uncommon, perhaps even the norm, for people to have multiple different careers in their lifetimes. This was noted to me even when I was starting out, back in the stone age.
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My husband and I both got laid off 3 times in our career, we both worked at startups most of our life, none of them made us big money, we did end up retire early for me and him before age 65. You constantly have to retool yourself in any field, particularly a career in technology.
And what makes you think people with liberal arts degree are spared in a lay off.
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That’s exactly how my kid got to where he is today. Gaming was how he honed his systems and development skills.
Constantly playing games for years (no sports until high school, just chair-sitting/screen-watching/programming) turned into developing games which led to staring at the sky one day and pondering how some AI software Google published for game development could be adapted to improve robot navigation for the Army that led to an independent project in college that eventually led to a second place paper award at the IEEE MIT Undergraduate Technology Conference his junior year for a solution he developed based on that gaming software that actually DID improve robot navigation. His major was not computer science, but all those hours “wasted” on gaming and programming enriched his engineering skillset and produced something useful to the Army and made him the unicorn he is today. This is not an usual story. Many inventions and technological advances have come from “useless” sideline tinkering and daydreaming.
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Absolutely. But thousands of male college students drop or fail out due to their addiction to video games as well.
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Of course, but @ucbalumnus did not mention addiction. That’s another ball of wax.
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I was discussing this thread with a friend of mine. Neither of us directed our kids to specific majors. Our older sons are following pretty traditional, non-lucrative paths in academia.
Our younger sons are not following traditional paths at all. Hers is working part time in a job that aligns with his degree but doesn’t seem to pay enough or give him enough hours to move out of the house. She is really frustrated with him. My son is doing contract work right now but is paying his own bills in another city while chasing his dreams and has done so since he graduated college. We learned yesterday that after his current gig is over, his boss wants to keep him on part time to do some production work. These jobs pay enough to allow him to keep chasing the dream.
The thing that frustrates me is that my friend thinks my son is “lucky.” I find that insulting. She refuses to see the work he’s put in on building a network, busting his ass on jobs so that people want to hire him for the next one. He is more professional than most people I know, including those 20 years older. He’s smart, personable, has a great work ethic as well as personal ethics. People see that. I know he’d be wildly successful in the tangential area where he gets most of his work if that’s what he decides to do, but he’s not at a point where he feels like he “needs” to do that and forgo what he really wants. He’s in his 20s … if he’s not going to pursue a dream now, then when? But ds didn’t get his current gig or the offer of staying on after it’s over because he’s “lucky.” He’s GOOD.
So, again, I’m not saying every kid can pull it off, but there are definitely ones out there who can and do. I imagine soozie’s dd is one of them. I’m thrilled she can afford to own an apt in NY; ds wants to buy a house where he is but can’t afford it right now.
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