It’s almost inevitable. You were born into a loving family. As a baby you were the apple of your parents’ eye. They chortled over you and shamelessly showed you off to strangers. As you grew, their concerns grew with you. They wanted to keep you safe. They wanted you to eat your veggies. They wanted you to excel at school. They wanted you to have a better education than they had. They pictured you with a stethoscope around your neck. They dreamt of your success.
No wonder then, that you might find yourself at university, taking courses aimed at that ultimate parental path to success but which really feel more like hurdles to overcome than a journey to learning. And perhaps in some deep moment of introspection, you begin to have vague feelings of insecurity. “Who am I? What am I doing here? Yikes! Wake me up! I think I’m living in my parents’ dream.”
Relax. It’s not uncommon. Shouldering the weight of parental dreams and ambitions is the lot of most kids. And it is especially true for the firstborn child in a family. If you’re the third, fourth or seventh child count yourself lucky. Parental dreams may have been imposed on older siblings and the remnant of your folks’ ambition may simply be to get you out of the house.
But to get back to the topic, I’d like to ask the question in a different way: Should you be pursuing an education aimed at living your parents’ dream? Let’s look at it from both points of view.
Why you should
It’s easy. Because your parents love you and want the best for you. And since they are not complete social idiots, they know that education is your path to a bright future. The facts seem to back them up. For example a few years ago in the USA people with a high school diploma had twice the rate of unemployment of those with a college degree.
What’s more, your parents know that certain careers are more conducive to providing a secure financial future than others. Which is why your parents want you to get a degree in medicine, in law or in engineering.
Well, OK, maybe finance or management. And again, they’re right. In the above-mentioned survey, those with a professional degree were half as likely to be unemployed as those with a simple B.A. So you see, from the financial security point of view living your parents’ dream may be the right thing to do.
Do you want to be an oak?
But what if you have a strong calling of your own? The lure of a different destiny. Like, while in your parents’ dream you were a palm tree, you feel sure that you are destined to be an oak!
There is actually a very interesting theory about that. It’s called the acorn theory and it’s more a myth than a scientific theory – but myth in the classical sense of a mythological construct. Proposed by James Hillman, an internationally renowned psychologist, the theory holds that just as the mighty oak tree is implicit in the acorn, a human being is also predestined to the fulfillment of his or her soul’s code. And our job in life is to fully manifest that destiny – a process in which education naturally plays a vital role.
One of the possibilities proposed by Hillman is that your soul might begin the work of fulfilling its destiny even before the moment of your birth and that it actually chooses your parents as part of that process. Looked at this way it’s not that the child lives the parents’ dream but that the parents are actually chosen to support the child’s destiny.
Interesting speculation, right? Unfortunately, the acorn theory can just as easily be called on to prove the opposite point of view. So let’s now examine why you should not choose the educational path that follows your parents’ dream.
Why you shouldn’t
Sure, your parents may truly want what’s best for you. But in reality they’re probably stuck looking in the rearview mirror at the past road to success. Chances are, that road probably leads to what they would have wanted to achieve for themselves. And since they couldn’t, you’d better! They’d like you to study hard, get a good degree and be a big success. Like Bill Gates, for example.
Oh wait! Didn’t Bill Gates drop out of university? Yes he did. Young Bill had been in love with computer programming since the age of thirteen. And yet, when he got to Harvard, possibly under the spell of parental dreams, he contemplated entering law school. Fortunately, his love of programming won out. And he pursued it with all his might. So much so, that when a great business opportunity came along, much to his parents’ dismay, he dropped out of Harvard.
The point of this story, of course, is not that it’s OK to drop out of school. Rather, that the really important thing is to follow your calling and to work at it with all your dedication and energy. To get back to the acorn theory, this is your purpose in life.
How to tell what’s the right thing to do
It’s really a question of what feels right for you. If you suspect that in your education you are living your parents dream but really, you feel OK with it and what you’re studying interests you, keep doing it. Keep following that curriculum. Only, perhaps you should make sure that you know where that educational path will lead you. Get a taste of the Real World, because it’s often vastly different from the sheltered and idealistic world of a university. Take the time to look around. A brief internship in your field might be a wise move.
But what if what you’re studying does not feel right? What if you truly hate your core subjects? Or you are irresistibly drawn to something completely different. The best advice is: follow your instinct. Change course. Change now, even if it precipitates a crisis. That crisis is sure to pale in comparison to the one you might have 25 years from now, when you wake up in the middle of the night screaming “I hate my life!” – and there’s no going back.
So make sure that you get the education that takes you where you want to go. A university education is one of the most important ways of enriching your life and your mind. And just like a mind, it’s a terrible thing to waste.
The writer is the founder and managing director of InternsME www.internsme.com
