Career Coaching Your Kids: Guiding Your Child Through the Process of Career Discovery

From the Inside FlapParents exert enormous influence over their childrens career choices, as both role models and advisors. But navigating the fine line between guiding and dictating those choices can be difficult, and parents can easily fall into the trap of too little or too much involvement.CAREER COACHING YOUR KIDS, completely revised and updated in this second edition, gives parents the help they need. Drawing on their collective experience in collegelevel counseling, career counseling in major corporations, and community service work with high school students and their parents, the authors describe in detail the lifelong process of career decision making. They identify the different roles parents can play at each stage and the most appropriate steps to take as children progress and grow into adulthood.Matching key events in the development of children, adolescents, and young adults with the parental tasks necessary to guide career choice, CAREER COACHING YOUR KIDS provides handson tools and tips, along with vivid examples and stories, aimed at helping children explore career options.This new edition, based on the authors continued research, offers a new preface, updated text, and an expanded Parent Tool Kit, and also includes exercises for children to completea feature requested by parents themselves.Product DescriptionThe authors identified the different roles parents can play at each stage and the most appropriate steps to take as children grown into adulthood.About the AuthorDavid H. Montross, Ed.D., is a partner with the Camden Consulting Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in leadership development and executive coaching. He is the author of REAL PEOPLE, REAL JOBS and two other career development books.Theresa E. Kane, Ph.D., is director of The Academy of Professional Skills Development.Robert J. Ginn, Jr., is a career counselor in private practice and a former faculty member and director of career counseling at Harvard University.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIONWhen we decided to write the first edition of CAREER COACHING YOUR KIDS, we believed there was a compelling need for it. Now, not only are we more certain that the need exists, but we are convinced it has grown. The number of jobs available has decreased markedly, making a wellthoughtout career plan more important than ever. Interesting and challenging jobs at the beginning of a career can open doors in the future, and those interesting and challenging jobs will go to those who know what they want and have done some preparation.Since the first edition was published, we have met with career development professionals and parents who attended workshops we developed based on the ideas contained in the book. We have met with parents of high school students and of students about to graduate from college. We have had important dialogues with high school guidance counselors and college career planning professionals, about both their coaching challenges and their frustration with how to help parents take a more active and helpful role. We have given presentations to professionals in a variety of fields. With all of these audiences, we found receptivity to and acceptance of our thesis that parents influence their childrens career discovery process, and that they need assistance to do so constructively, and we encountered interesting challenges to some of our core ideas that forced us to expand our thinking and perspectives.Soon after our first edition was published, new psychological literature confirmed our concerns about the impact parental overinvolvement can have on a persons career decisions. Children who follow paths they think their parents want them to follow, instead of discovering for themselves who they can become, can experience longterm frustration and job dissatisfaction. As Mary Jacobsen (1999) noted in her book HANDMEDOWN DREAMS, handmedowns may s