Choice of Profession

One time, my 8 yo daughter said she wanted to be a lemonade vendor. Another time, as someone who loves dogs, she said she wanted to be a vet. My wife suggested that she should be the vet at a zoo so she could treat the widest (and wildest) variety of animals. The next time the topic came up, my daughter shamelessly claimed that the zoo idea was her’s all along: “You think I can’t come up with ideas? I have brains”, she declared, tapping her head.

When it comes to studies, like most kids, she dislikes maths. I tried reasoning with her in terms of what she cares about. You want money, right? All the best paying jobs are based on doing well at maths. I made as much progress with that argument as Calvin’s dad had made.

In recent times, my daughter has learnt the word, “hacking”. Hacking is a very positive term in her peer group, apparently. She announced that one of her friends has hacked her classmate’s account and thus gets to copy their (online) homework! Isn’t that cool, my daughter’s face said. Since we were on the topic of hacking, I told her that her mom’s job is to prevent people from hacking into the system. “Really?”, she exclaimed, “To prevent hacking?” How uncool, said her expression, you’re killing all the fun things in life.

You can be anything you want to be when you grow up. That’s what we tell our kids. But really, we parents only mean that in the Henry Ford kind of way: “You can have any color you want… as long as it is black”.