By Lakshmi Balasubramani

Happy New Year Everyone! Hope you had a relaxing time with friends and family during the holiday season. Are you ready for the New Year and the opportunities it brings?

The topic I want to touch upon today is our children’s higher education. While schooling is fairly easy and much in preparation for what lies ahead, it is also the time when we need to help our children have a feel for the career choices they have ahead of them. As a parent, one of our tasks is to recognise our children’s strengths and weaknesses from an early age starting 7-8 years old. Once our kids approach year 10, it’s high time for them to have a feel for a fairly deep understanding of the various types of jobs and careers that the market offers and could emerge in the future.

The reason for my interest in this topic at this point is both social and personal. This is also the time when our children begin a new year in education and there is still a couple of weeks left for them to carefully consider their choices. They could go ahead with their chosen fields and have a deeper understanding of what the field is, in the first semester. Because, sometimes the difference between our perception of what it is and what it really is, can only be understood once we have actually begun the experience.

I’ve had stories from my friends where one of their children studied medicine for the whole 5 years and decided to switch to engineering after only a couple of weeks of real life experience via an internship at a hospital. On the other hand, one other friend’s daughter changed her field of study after one year of study in the prior chosen field. While the latter case seems like a chaos averted, expensive mistakes like this can be avoided if we as parents are proactive and help our children understand their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses and help them choose their field of study. It is not only a monetary expense, but more important is the time invested in the wrong choice.

As Indian parents, we are known to coerce our children into choosing ‘safe and rewarding’ education in the belief that they will develop the passion for it. But this mindset is not suitable or necessary for the internet generation. Because they have all the information, facilities and the maturity they need to make informed choices. As parents, all we need to do is to nudge them to explore, gather knowledge and make informed choices.

Anyway, I’m running out of word limit to write further. If you’d like to discuss further, please leave me a comment below and I’ll endeavour to get back to you personally. Or I’ll write a future article summarising my answers. Thank you 🙂