Sounds like these kids are having a blast this summer so far! My kid started off with a school trip to Disney world where everything that could go wrong, went wrong. The finale was the school district having to rent a couple charter buses to drive 80 students and chaperones from Orlando to NJ due to the airline canceling the flight an hour before take off. Us parents were on a different airline organized by the same travel agent so about 40 people had to leave behind our kids and fly home. My D had a wonderful time and rolled with everything. Her only complaint was the bus had the A/C cranked up and she was freezing even with her travel blanket.
Now she’s relaxing with a friend at the beach for a week then a short break before heading to Oregon to visit family and camp. She flies home and immediately goes to band camp daily from 8-6 for about 10 days in a row. I’m exhausted just typing out her summer! I don’t even know if she has summer school work or not…
My daughter was supposed to do an online class required for graduation. But bad mom here forgot and missed the registration deadline. She has 2 more years to take the class so its not the end of the world.
Shes doing dance 4 days a week with 1 day being a double, 2.5 hrs in the morning then 4 hrs at night. Dance will go to 5 days a week in August.
She did a 4 day dance camp where they stay in college dorms and her team won 1st. Our dancers perform with our band and the week of band camp is coming up too.
(And add S23 schedule with 4 days a week football and 5 days a week rehearsal, this mom has 0 downtime!)
S25 is currently at Philmont Scout Ranch. Communication has been near zero but I’m assuming he’s having a fabulous experience. Before leaving, he finished up drivers ed, made headway on several merit badges to prep for Eagle and worked on his latest D&D campaign.
Permit test is scheduled a few days after he returns home. Then, probably lots of laundry, finishing his summer reading assignment and sleeping late in his own bed.
D25 has a job, but probably gets 15-20 hours a week, so she has had a pretty relaxing summer.
Our oldest just got married last weekend, so that occupied a lot of our time this summer. It’s a more complicated story that I really want to get into online even somewhere anonymous, but for very good reasons my new D-I-L has no contact with her family, so the whole wedding fell on us. Everything went great, but I’m also pretty happy it’s done. It was an all consuming thing for a while. I feel like our summer just started.
Our D25 isn’t really doing anything this summer, other than summer training on the varsity track team (she’s not going to the Olympics, but proud of her). Sleepovers, doing stuff with her big sisters, etc. She’s reading a great adult level sci-fi book a big sis recommended, after balking at reading the Grapes of Wrath (she said it was boring).
My issue (the wife defers the bulk of education/career matters to me) is trying to get her thinking in broad strokes about a career/profession (BROAD strokes). We have a S17 who just graduated and moved to the East Coast for a management consulting job. Our D19 is a junior and thinking about Peace Corp. and possibly law school (business attorney). Our D21 is gearing up for fall transfer application deadlines from her CA CC (doing very well, like her big sibs), and is def going to law school (prosecutor - def has the personality - but that could change).
Our D25 has a 4.0 in AP/Honors program and has been in a dual French immersion program since kindergarten. She sees my constant interaction with her big sibs about school and careers, but has no real idea what she wants to do. Nothing in STEM (“boring”). She said she’d like to do something in film (director, screen writing - we are in Cali after all), but when we suggest she do X or Y in that vein, she pushes back.
Yes, she’s only 14 (with the expected girl moodiness), but I feel she should have some burgeoning passion about something, anything! Absolutely nothing catches her eye. I see other kiddos here doing their thing, and I think “that would be great.” I told her this is the last summer of doing nothing.
Same with S25. He’s passionate about his extracurriculars but not about any specific career. He’s strong in math and science but pushes back when we mention careers in STEM. I’m hoping that this year they’ll do more career exploration at school and that he’ll start to find some direction. I try to remind myself that it took me until my mid-20s to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. 14/15 is really young to determine the course of your life, particularly when you have broad interests. I’m going to try to focus more on “What might you be interested in studying in college?” rather than the career topic. I think it overwhelms my son, who already struggles with anxiety.
I hear you—I had pretty much the same experience with my D23 until recently. Her older siblings (D17 and D19) have always been laser-focused on academics and know what they want to do with their lives, and even her younger sibling (the reason I’m in this group!) has had solid and fairly consistent educational and career goals since (not making this up!) third grade. But D23, absolutely none of it…
…until less than a year and a half ago!
That was the point that she shifted from taking music lessons to realizing that she absolutely loves music (the entire sonic landscape, really), and that she most emphatically doesn’t want to perform, but that she has a passion for the whole behind-the-scenes manipulation of sound and even the theory underlying the ways we perceive sound.
And that moment was sudden, and unexpected.
Which doesn’t give any clear direction for your situation, but it does, at least, provide some hope.
Though I’m not saying it’ll happen later this year (which would be my D23’s timing)—I mean, I didn’t figure out what I had a passion for til the beginning of my third year of college, and that happened very honestly entirely by accident.
And that’s okay, too! A vague sort of stigma centers around a kid starting out college majoring in “undecided” on boards like this, but considering that over a third of kids who start college with a stated major will end up changing majors anyway, it isn’t a bad place to begin.
Your comment is helpful - thank you. My fear/concern are the stakes are so high compared to our days (wife and I were in HS back in the mid to late 80s).
Unlike my wife (laser focused 24/7), it took me a few years to get serious after HS (even though I always knew my eventual career direction). But back then, college costs, especially publics, were low and there were so many career paths to the middle and upper middle class ladders. I was able to work my way through college and get it together. Today, everything is more costly, more pressure. A lot of kids seem to understand this and are responding accordingly.
We asked her earlier this year about summer film classes/camps, but she wasn’t overly enthused. Thanks for the link - I forwarded to my wife and we’ll definitely keep this in mind for when she turns 16!
She’s a great kid and certainly more academically disciplined than I was at that age. Admittedly, I started working a little younger than her (mowing lawns, etc.) to earn a little money. But, that was back in the day.
I had never even heard of my profession (respiratory therapy) until I was about 19 years old and at 14-15 I was absolutely against anything in healthcare because it’s what my dad wanted me to go into (nursing) and so many family members on his side are in various fields from speech therapy, nursing, dentist etc. I really wouldn’t worry about a possible direction yet. So long as she’s taking hs classes to prepare for most studies she’ll be fine. My D isn’t gifted at math, she’s adequate in it for most professions but not for something like engineering. Your D will lead you by doing what she’s genuinely interested in and has an aptitude for in these next couple years!
My kids were all over the place with respect to knowing what they wanted to do. S18 was going to be a teacher, then maybe senior year of HS changed his mind and wanted to go into business, definitely not teaching. A few major changes later, he is starting his first post college job in a few weeks. As a teacher. Good thing he started with some dual credit classes, because I think he ended up around 140 credits by the time he graduated.
S19 had no idea what he wanted to do last summer, and he was as annoyed as me but he felt like he had no direction and didn’t love his major but was pretty deep in to try to change. He had taken a viticulture class and really enjoyed it, I set up a couple meetings with people I know who own a small brewery and a winery. He got pretty excited about it, added a viticulture minor, and those have been his favorite classes. He is interning at a winery this summer. That isn’t something most 14 year olds would even consider.
D19 has been laser focused on being a physician since she broke her arm in preschool. Nothing so far has changed for her.
D23 has no clue what she wants to do. Which in fairness is where S19 was at this stage, so I am annoyed but keeping it to myself and trying (without much success) to help find something that sparks a potential lifelong interest.
And I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was 30. It was annoying I’m sure for my wife, but she knew I hated my job so was supportive when I switched professions and took an entry level position with a 60% paycut when we had 3 preschool kids in the house. Like a lot of things I have done personally I don’t really recommend that path, but it has worked out pretty well in the long run.
And just to add another datapoint, my spouse is a very successful transportation engineer—a field she didn’t even know existed until she was 30 or maybe 31 and had been out of college (with a physics degree) for years, which is why she then got her masters in civil engineering (since transportation is a subfield of that).
I hear what you’re saying @CalAlumandDad about the stakes being so high these days. But perhaps particularly because of that, there’s a need to make sure that flexibility is written into our kids’ life plans. In fact, I’d feel a bit of trepidation if my kids were getting degrees that were narrowly tailored for a specific job—what happens 5 or 10 years after graduation when they discover they’d rather do something else, or that that now-hot field has totally fizzled out?
If your D25 doesn’t know what she wants to do, then the important thing is to make sure that when she goes to college she’s learning how to learn. The major isn’t really all that important if the learning how to learn happens—after all, that means that no matter what, when she does find out what she wants to do, she’ll have the mental flexibility to pursue it.
I am a worrier, so it is hard to not to worry and I agree the stakes are high. But I have found the fears I had when they were little (I’m still shocked my 14 year-old finally potty trained, and not too much outside the norm; ditto that my 9 year-old has finally really mastered a cartwheel without looking like she’s trying to dive into the floor), gradually fade and new fears rear their head. It wasn’t until this thread that I even thought about potty training again. It was something that consumed me 24/7 for a few years. And now, nada. I don’t mean to be all “woo” and offer “this too shall pass,” but there is something to be said for our fears about parenting never really stop, just transition to different sites and here we are.
My 14 year old is a sloth and would not do any extra curriculars if I allowed it. Despite her strong sloth-like tendencies, I have no question she will be able to support herself as an adult. She performs the basics: she completes assignments on time, without any input from me, and does well in school. She will struggle with applying and pounding the pavement, but it will happen. Our kids are going to struggle in a million different ways to support themselves (global economy, geographic limitations, experience, skills, family demands, health issues, and on and on) and they’ll figure it out.
I agree with the previous poster who talked about the constant evolution of work and technology. My husband majored in Politics and is in tech. His job did not exist in 1998 when he graduated. I think this will be even more applicable to our kids. In some ways, it is literally impossible for them to know what they will do.
I was 12 and thought I would go to Disneyland every weekend when I was an adult. Our kids are just a bit older than that. They physically don’t have the cognitive power to understand long-term in the way that we do. I had no goals at 14 other than to hang out at the water park, go to concerts, and crush on all the boys. Somewhere along the way, it works out when we have more ability to think long-term.
Following up on the most recent points, I have gone into local high schools a few times and sat on career panels, and had other opportunities to offer career advice to mostly clueless and slightly frightened HS kids. I always tell the same story. My last semester of college, I had a class that entitled me to access the university’s internet system, which was closed to most students. Mostly I navigated it on a green screen, picking numbers off of menus to get to the information I needed for the class. I also had an email account, but the only other person I knew with email was my roommate who was in the same class, so not much point using it.
Tens of thousands, probably more, people my age make their living off of jobs directly related to the internet. None of them went to college for that. Who knows what the future will bring. You need to learn how to learn. Honestly, outside of a few specific specialties (medicine, engineering and accounting come to mind) most jobs are mostly on the job training. Even when I was an attorney I learned everything I needed to know the first year of law school. 90% of my job was a lot more specialized than anything I did in law school.
I need to emphasize that more to my kids, especially S19 and D23, who seem less focused on what they want to do long term. Learn how to learn. If you are somewhat personable and willing to work hard at least for a bit to learn the ropes at a new job, the rest will fall into place.
Hello everyone! Just checking on you. We’re still on summer break in the NE but band camp is in full swing and with a bunch of new kids joining this year and a significantly harder piece it’s been a challenge. My D25 is co section leader for clarinet and took 2nd chair since all the other 2nd chairs are new and not very proficient on the instrument. She’s been trying to help them while learning the routine as well. She loves every minute of it though. First football game is at the end of Aug so not a lot of time but the band D works miracles with these kids. I hope back to school and anything else going on with your kids is going great!