Parents want the best for their kids. They give their kids advice to help them grow into healthy, happy, and successful adults. However, the best-intentioned career advice might be decreasing the creativity in your kids and that might be causing a number of other problems. In this episode Amy Climer talks about how you can make a living doing anything and why saying Yes to your kids’ career ideas might be the best way to help them live healthy, happy, and successful lives.

What You’ll Learn

* How your best intentions as parents might be decreasing your kids creativity

* How the career advice you give your kids might impact their creativity

Resources

* Pet Rocks

The Weekly Challenge

When you hear a child talk about what they want to be when they grow up, say yes. Say yes even if you don’t know how they can do it. There are so many options today and by limiting the career options of kids we decrease their creativity and teach them that there are only certain professions that are worthwhile. Say Yes!

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free PDF Transcript or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #030: Career Advice to Increase Creativity

Amy Climer: Hi everyone. Welcome to The Deliberate Creative Podcast Episode 30. My name is Amy Climer and this episode is coming out on Christmas Eve so I want to say to all of you who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas! I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season. I hope you are enjoying this last week of 2015. Very exciting, as we are almost in 2016.

Today I want to talk about advice that we give our kids. I’ve been wanting to do this episode for quite a while, but I’ve been a bit hesitant because I’m not a parent. You know sometimes when non‐parents give advice about parenting, it doesn’t go so well, so I get that. But I think what I have to say is valuable even though I am coming from a non‐parent perspective. I might be a parent someday hopefully I will, so we’ll see. This episode is about career advice and as parents usually you want your kids to grow up and be happy and healthy and have a wonderful life as adults. We tend to be concerned about kids choosing careers that are going to help fulfill their dreams and help them be happy and healthy and stable and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, I think what happens, at least in the US. I’d be curious to hear from listeners in other countries. Is this the same in your culture? But at least in the US, it seems that we try to steer our kids in certain directions and usually it’s one of only a few professions. That top two have got to be doctors and lawyers. We often steer kids towards those professions because we think of them as very productive, very successful, very well respected, well paying positions. This has been true for the last fifty to a hundred years. I don’t know long. But definitely for our lifetime this has been true. So for those of you who are Gen X’ers like me, I’m 40, for those of you around my age maybe a little bit younger who are parents, for our entire life it has been true that doctors and lawyers have been respectable, well paying positions. But who knows if that’s going to be true in the future. I am not suggesting that it is not. I just don’t know. But I think that it is just interesting that we tend to push kids into 1 www.climerconsulting.com certain fields regardless of what aptitude they maybe showing. I think this can be really detrimental to their health.

[3:27]

I’ve seen these in so many different ways. The first I’ll talk about is just watching parents either give kids advice or listen to them talk about ...