Works unless you have children who decide to do something that you never envisioned. Either because they truly want to, because an option is available in two decades that simply wasn't imaginable when you were raising them, or because they'd rather eat broken glass than follow YOUR plan for their lives, I mean.
Not that anyone in my family is highly oppositional about autonomy, subversive, or maybe non-conformist or anything. LOL.
It could be that this is a quirk in my DH's family and mine, but the parentally dictated "life plan mapping" technique seems to be most successful with the high achieving sort of child, and increasingly less workable the higher one goes in LOG within our extended families. In fact, most of the EG/PG people in both families have taken positively unholy delight in shattering their parents' expectations in one way or another. It's possible that this is a genetic quirk related to self-determination. (Cue Sid Vicious singing "My Way.")
Any career advice has to be couched as a two-way conversation and it has to be ultimately respectful and non-emotional in the extreme. Pretty much ANYTHING that I want my DD to do and she thinks is not something that SHE wants to do, I have to use logic and her own self-interest as very transparent objectives on my part. Always have.
Preserving options so that SHE can choose, and pointing out her strengths and matches with different occupations/activities is a way different game than thinking that I'm driving the bus. KWIM?
