The #3 College Myth, Busted: Parents Should Not Step aside Just Because Their Child Is 18

The stories made my toes curl.

One set of parents left the entire college application process up to their son. He was 18 and would soon be on his own. It was time for him to take the reins, they reasoned. But he forgot to follow up with the task of selecting a residence and was therefore assigned to the absolute-worst, this-is-the-pits, no-one-wanted-it freshman dorm at the university. Unhappy from the outset, he quickly confirmed that he hated his hall and dropped out, never to return.

Another set of parents had been worried about their son's D in a high school math class. They tried to intervene, but he repeatedly reassured them that he could handle it, so they backed off. After all, they persuaded themselves, he was 18. All his other grades were on par for acceptance at the school of his dreams. But he failed math and was forced to attend a college he found humdrum, his enthusiasm for his future fading fast.

Both sets of parents still seemed to be in shock as they told me their stories. Possessed of twenty-twenty hindsight, they realized they had mistakenly believed a college myth: By virtue of being a senior in high school, their child was ready to act as an independent adult. On his own, he would march straight into an appropriate education and continue on to a good job.

Certainly 18-year-old students have responsibility for their own lives. Most of them have acquired skills for getting what they want.

The catch is that there is no magic to turning 18.

People mature at different speeds. There is great variability with regard to readiness. Some teens have already planned for the future; others may not even be aware that they need a plan, much less know how to make a good one and act on it. Some juniors wish they could move on already, whereas some seniors can't bear the thought of leaving high school. I've seen them in the hallways during their final semester, trembling like the Cowardly Lion about to face the Wizard. I myself stepped out nimbly from high school only to fall on my face later, tripped up by career immaturity in the transition from college to work.

Do not step aside yet, Mom and Dad. You are still needed—and for more than footing the bill.

Here are five suggestions for mentoring a student on the threshold of adult independence:

1. Be guided by your child's readiness. If she does not stride forward on her own, then do not rush her. Let her revert to a teenage version of taking baby steps while you metaphorically hold her hand. Sometimes a person may regress a bit before she's ready to move ahead.

2. Anyone signaling "I'm not ready" needs greater support. Consider hiring a professional. For example, a career counselor could work with your student to identify new experiences that might help her progress. (Some career counselors even offer tests that measure career readiness.)

3. Reassure your child that nobody knows exactly what she wants to do with her life when she's 18. As one of my psychologist friends says to her teenage clients, "Your first job is just exploration." And exploration can be fun!

4. Now is not the time to begin a downward spiral. There is simply too much at stake in the transition from high school. Don't bow out until you're persuaded—by good evidence—that your child is in fact ready to take over, with all that implies regarding skills with time management, organization, and decision making.

5. Like it or not, as a parent you are a primary influence. Your child needs to develop a plan for her future and will probably look to you for support and advice. Become career literate yourself. I've designed this blog for exactly that purpose and will do my best to make it worth your reading.

The #2 College Myth, Busted: A Trial-and-Error Search for a Major Is Never Your Child's Best Plan

Somehow the idea has gotten around that once your child starts college, the best she can hope for is a trial-and-error approach to choosing a major and thereby stumbling into a career.

Of all the prevailing college myths, this one is the most likely to make me froth at the mouth. I guess I take it personally because it ignores the work of vocational psychologists. To my mind, our misplaced faith in trial-and-error is like prescribing bed rest and blood-letting for someone with strep throat, ignoring the proven benefits of penicillin.

Of course, trying random classes once she's in college might help her decide on a major. Or perhaps she'll simply join the throng taking six or more years to finish what was originally set up as a four-year degree. Certainly a willy-nilly search after your student enrolls is in the interests of the educational institution, only too happy to collect tuition checks for the rest of your lifetime.

Colleges offer from fifty to 120 majors; universities, from 100 to 200. A few institutions list as many as 300 possible majors. This abundance is surely a blessing, as it provides college students with boundless latitude to explore their options and find their passion.

But all those options can just as easily lead to confusion and dead ends.

As psychologist Rollo May wrote in The Courage to Create, unlimited possibilities are often more terrifying than energizing. “It is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, ‘The sky’s the limit.’ The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapable real limit is also the bottom of the ocean.”

Your student faces a double peril: She must paddle through a tight pass between modern-day versions of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding the rocks of a prematurely-chosen major on one side and the whirlpool of indecision on the other, one that keeps her swirling through random classes on the off chance that one of them will push her out of the vortex.

A better approach begins with understanding your student's strengths, particularly her abilities and interests, before she even applies to college. You don't want to start too narrow, not when she's still a teenager. So start wide—but do what you can to make sure that even though your child will be at sea, she is headed toward her personal best part of the deep. From that smaller and more navigable body of water, she can then steer herself with growing assurance.

Here's a hypothetical example of this technique. Let's say that your student is interested in the broad realm of ideas and her strongest abilities are with numbers and creativity. College majors that would allow those talents to be put into play include economics, computer science, math, marketing, and statistics. She tries introductory courses in all five subjects. One by one, over her freshman and sophomore year, she rejects computer science, economics, and marketing. She discovers that she likes statistics best, with mathematics as a first alternate.

By the age of 20, when her interests have begun to stabilize, she has attained a positive sense of direction. At the end of her sophomore year, she's ready to declare a major in statistics. And she's put herself in a good position to specialize, having the requisite background to head toward careers as an actuary, astronomer, biostatistician, math teacher, or operations research analyst, all of which would require and reward her talents with numbers and creativity.

To recap: You can help your college-bound student develop a short list of possible majors. I'll show you how. Over the first two years, she can take courses from a carefully-selected but small number of subjects, intending to rule most of them out. That way, by the end of her sophomore year, she is more likely to have settled on a major that develops her talents and also leads to gainful employment.

With stronger up-front planning, you can save her time, your money, and everyone's stress, with an added advantage: Once she completes her coursework, she won't be camping on your couch!

The #1 College Myth, Busted: Not Everyone Should Go to College

Nearly half of all students who start college never finish.

Yikes! Could it be that going to college was never really their best option?

There is a well-oiled track from high school to college in the United States. To be sure, the college experience offers many riches, including the intellectual ones I treasured as a coed. But it's primarily the presumed long-term financial advantages that have channeled our cultural wisdom into the prevailing adage that "everyone should go to college".

Except maybe not everyone. Maybe not even half of those who give it a try. I for one believe that our high-school-to-college track is a tad too slick.

Photo by Marcus Winter from Potsdam, Germany

One of my university counseling clients comes to mind. A young woman who had immigrated to Pennsylvania from Southeast Asia, she had lived in the United States long enough to learn that college was absolutely mandatory. Unfortunately, in course after course she would try and fail, crash and burn. Reading and writing in English, her second language, could not have been easy. To top it off, academics were not really her thing.

My client had good mechanical ability and an interest in cars—but she refused to consider a career as an auto mechanic. Data on the nearly equivalent salaries for employees in her major and in auto repair did not sway her. I never heard her say that she couldn't be a mechanic because she was a woman. No, she was determined to get her college degree because that was the way to succeed in America.

In future posts I'll provide guidance about how to help a student judge beforehand whether college is likely to be her personal best choice. For now, let's focus on the word college. As it is commonly used, college refers to a four-year institution.

Ah. Here's a quick way to change a cultural commandment that could otherwise continue to lead countless students astray.

For many high school students, a two-year associates degree might be much more appropriate. In fact, community college training may pay better than a four-year liberal arts degree. Nursing as well as a variety of technician jobs come to mind, with median annual wages above $50,000 and some above $60,000. Anthony Carnevale, the research professor who directs Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce, says that nearly one-third of associate degree jobs actually pay more at entry level than those requiring a college education. Many of these middle skill jobs also offer better benefits and chances for advancement.

What can talent mentors do with this information? I'd like to hear your thoughts. Here are some of mine:

For starters, let's not automatically use the word college or restrict our thinking to a BA or BS. Instead, we can simply tell students they need to get further training after high school.

Secondly, we can help our children consider possibilities that may include but are not limited to a four-year undergraduate institution. For example, they might find training on the job, or begin an apprenticeship, or join the military, or earn an industry certification, or enroll in a vocational program at a community college.

The following action suggestions may help you unearth local alternatives:

· If your child is still in high school, make an appointment to talk with her high school counselor. Ask about Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes and experiential learning opportunities for students who may not be college bound.

· Visit your local community college, online or in person, and survey their program offerings.

· Talk to a member of your community's Workforce Investment Board. Using your zip code, you can find names and contact information online.

I admire an observation made to me by Kathy Hanson, a CTE school district coordinator: As mentors, we can provide an attractive array of educational and employment options from which our students can choose. We can help them gather information and think through the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Then we can support their decisions.

An Example of a Strength: Mentors in IT Help Rob Find His Place

In my previous post, I wrote about one of my weaknesses: I wanted to sing and play an instrument, but I was born with a tin ear. As long as I performed in the musical realm, a mentor couldn't do much except maybe hold my hand, express some sympathy, and push a pair of plugs into his ears.

Everyone has weaknesses, like mine in music; but by the same token, everyone also possesses strengths. With the proper mentoring, your child's strengths can become a path to finding her place in the world. Let me illustrate by telling the story of how mentors helped my son Rob develop his talent with computers.

As a seventh grader, Rob took Mr. Jewett's Introduction to Computing class. Computer skills came easily: Rob learned quickly, had fun adding cool extras to his assignments, and felt magic when he could make something happen on the computer. His friends all wanted to be the teacher's aide for second semester, but Mr. Jewett chose Rob. His technical prowess gave him a positive social identity and helped him overcome the tough luck of being a new kid in a junior high crowd.



In eighth grade, Rob took a Web Design course from Mr. Denise. The class was provided with PCs loaded with the latest Adobe software package and told, "Build a website with three pages. Go!" Rob was able to learn html by doing, always a better method for him than listening to a lecture. Mr. Denise also put Rob to work in the school's computer lab, another form of hands-on learning.

Sadly, by the end of eighth grade Rob had already taken almost every computer course offered through the school district. So his parents stepped in. I arranged for an independent study in simple coding to round out his ninth grade year. Then my husband and I gave him what proved to be the best Christmas present ever: an Apple laptop. Rob "played" with it for hours on end, learning all the while.

In high school, Rob built a gaming computer as a capstone project. Two new mentors—a high school computer teacher and a HP volunteer—generously extended themselves to support his project. The task was fulfilling in its own right and also offered something pleasant to focus on following the death of a friend.

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Rob worked part-time at the IT Help Desk for the School of Business, assisting his professors with their computer problems. In addition to making spending money and continuing to learn about IT, he found community on the job, a form of social support that eased the stresses of college with its endless round of breakups, conflicts, due dates, exams, and head colds.

Rob is now employed as an IT consultant for Big Compass, using computer skills that mentors have helped him hone for the last fourteen years. To the C++ he learned in college, he's added programming languages like Java and Ruby on Rails—and it still feels magical when he makes something happen on the computer.

I don't know my son's salary, but for me, that's not the point. He's been self-supporting since graduation and even manages to travel abroad and save some of his income. His boss has become a role model; he feels valued at work; and he's given freedom to solve real-world problems in his own way. As he looks to the future, IT remains a keystone.

Please note: Although the work world is competitive, Rob attained both revenue and resilience without getting straight As. He never had to win an award as The Most Magnificent McGillicuddy. It was not imperative that he attend an Ivy League institution (although he works with Ivy League teammates at client organizations, teasing them about how much they can accomplish when only one of them went to Yale).

Of course, in our tech-driven world, Rob has been fortunate to find great opportunity in his area of talent. But any strength has the potential to provide identity, community, and a positive life direction while also increasing employment opportunities, if your student has received some mentoring along the way.

Among my son's exemplary mentors, I feel the most gratitude to his junior high teachers. Mr. Jewett and Mr. Denise noticed Rob's early enthusiasm for information technology. They nurtured his budding interest and ability. Exceptional educators with high standards who continually modeled their own sophisticated use of computers, they set tasks at Rob's growing edge and gave him increasing responsibilities. Their early talent mentoring launched him in one of the most daunting challenges of modern life: finding one's place.

An Example of a Weakness: In Music, Carol Cannot Be Anything She Wants to Be

My mother stands at the sink, her back to me, and says, "You can't be in the band."

"What?" Somehow I've made it to her side. "But Susan Weber is going to play the clarinet."

My mother scrubs a pot, her eyes fixed on the gray dishwater, her forearms slick with spent suds. I can see the constriction in her throat and hear the resulting harshness in her voice. "You got a low score on a musical aptitude test."

I remember that test. Our class had listened to a short series of tones and then been asked to choose which one had changed the second time around: A, B, C, or D? Not even understanding what the word tone meant, I had guessed at every answer. "So?"

"Only one kid got a lower score than you did, Carol, out of both fifth grade classes. So they don't want you in band."

"You mean I can't get a clarinet?"

Mom shakes her head, pressing her lips together.

Trying to take it in, I leave the kitchen, picturing a line of forty-some fifth graders placed in order of musical ability. Because I'm standing next to last in that line, I won't be beside my best friend when she starts band next month?

I don't remember Susan proudly carrying her shiny new instrument into our classroom. I don't remember being left behind, one of the few souls remaining after the mass exodus to the band room. But I do remember this: Mr. Wagner, my first man teacher, contacted my mother and suggested that she provide me with an alternative activity, something that not all fifth graders could do. And thus it was that for the next couple of years my mother took me to Mt Solo Stables on Saturday morning for horseback riding lessons, where Cathy McRae became my buddy in the arena.

No, I never became an Olympic equestrian. And whenever I tell musical people that I was banned from learning an instrument in elementary school, they are appalled. To be sure, no one should be prohibited from making music. And yet, now that I'm familiar with aptitude assessments and not only approve of them but even advocate their use, I don't want to ignore the information they provide.

In my case, I believe my fifth grade test yielded an accurate prediction of my ability. I received an equally low score two decades later on a Tonal Memory aptitude test at Johnson O'Connor. I've also done poorly in any number of informal "tests." Nearly everyone who has ever heard me sing has asked me to stop. Even sweet little Rusty, a severely disabled boy I once babysat, didn't want me to sing "Rubber Ducky" when he took his bath. Shortly after I'd start to croon, his palms would hit the surface of the water, drenching me with spray as he yelled "Pops!" (his version of "Stop!")

Five decades after receiving a rude lesson about one of my weaknesses, here are my thoughts on the matter:

1) Although I myself had been unaware that my musical ability was in the low range, my weakness was obvious to others. If I had been allowed to play the clarinet, I'm confident that my performance would have earned scowls and scorn from my fellow students, which would have been even more excruciating to me than being excluded from band.

2) The school should never have asked my mother to do its dirty work. Instead, an educator should have talked with me privately and explained that even though there were plenty of things I could do well, remembering tones was not one of them. It certainly wasn't my fault, but my low tonal memory would make it painfully slow and laborious for me to learn to play music.

3) My lack of ability limited my options. Although I'd still love to be a singer, it would have been kamikaze crazy for me to pursue a career in music. Of course I could learn and improve, work hard and persevere, but it would take an unrealistic level of outside support for me to succeed. At an early age, I had discovered that no, I could not do whatever I wanted to do.

4) I later learned to play the recorder but lacked the motivation to continue making music with that or any other instrument. Eventually, I came to appreciate that not being musical was a blessing in disguise, in that it gave me more time for a preferred endeavor, one for which I possessed significantly greater talent and passion: reading.

Breaking Away from the Competition: A Footrace Illustrates Strengths and Weaknesses

I was unhappy with my life, so I went shopping. Surely I could justify buying a new pair of sensible shoes. Instead, the salesman held up something that looked like it belonged on a Barbie doll, with a high heel and stylish strap over the instep. He slipped the sandals on my feet and leaned back, admiration in his eyes. I couldn't afford the shoes but bought them anyway, because the salesman had made my shopping experience a pleasure. As it turned out, those sandals brought me joy every time I wore them.

A year I later bought running shoes from a different salesman. Knowledgeable but surly, he insulted my intelligence for choosing a pair that later proved to be comfortable and long-lasting. I still wish I'd pulled him aside to hiss in his ear: "You sold me these shoes despite your poor performance. You should do yourself and your customers a big favor by getting out of sales!"

In all my years of buying footwear, those two salesmen remain in my memory because one of them was just as awesome as the other was awful. They anchor opposite ends of a continuum. That same continuum exists for most human behavior, with strong performance at one end and weak at the other.

Let's switch now from a verbal explanation of strengths and weaknesses to a visual and numerical description, using the metaphor of a footrace. A footrace measures running skill. Like other skills, running can fall in the strong, average, or weak ranges. The image above shows the distance 100 runners have covered after ten seconds. (It also illustrates what statisticians call the normal curve.)

You'll notice that there is quite a bit of spread between the racers, with most of them bunched up in the middle of the pack. Those sixty-eight folks are running in the average range where it's hard to distinguish one from another. In contrast, the first sixteen racers—the strong runners—have broken away from the pack, while the last sixteen—the weak runners—have fallen behind.

In the high and low ranges, strengths and weaknesses are extreme enough to become "visible to the naked eye." In other words, observers are more likely to notice that you're fast, if you're one of the first sixteen runners, or slow, if you're among the last sixteen to cross the finish line. Arrows below the footrace image mark the point where the average range begins and ends (these two points are also known as one standard deviation below and above the mean).

Running is only one skill, but this general concept of performing in the high, average, or low range applies across the world of work. Every occupation has its own unique pattern of required skills, such as those necessary for selling shoes. When your student can use her greatest strengths on the job, she will become an effective and perhaps even phenomenal employee, like the guy who sold me the snazzy sandals.

Strengths are characteristics that help the worker adapt in a specific environment. In the sales environment, for example, strengths could include positive characteristics like being outgoing, developing rapport with strangers, and generating many alternatives. An employer seeks and compensates employee strengths that contribute to meeting his customer's needs. If you were the owner of the shoe store, of course you'd want to hire the most effective salesman you could, because he would help keep you in business.

Your child is best served by looking for work that is enhanced by her strengths and not affected by her weaknesses, so that she can break away from the competition throughout her career. If a particular job requires important skills that she can only perform in the low range, then she's better off looking elsewhere.

Do you suspect this point is too obscure to matter? Consider this little known fact: Many job seekers must submit to pre-employment testing. Employers seldom share the test results with their candidates; instead, they simply hire the applicants whose strengths provide the best match for their position.

And the unfortunate job applicant who has already spent her time and her parents' money to earn her bachelor's degree? She may not even be aware that she's running in the middle of the pack. She will not be hired. And most likely, she will never know why.

Mentoring Tips: Five First-Rate Ways to Support Others in Conversation

Your student wants to talk with you. You're flattered to be consulted and eager to help.

Now what do you do?

Here are five mentoring tips, gleaned from my experience as a counselor (as well as a supervisor of various kinds of psychotherapists):

Tip #1: Begin with what you hear and see and feel in your child's presence

There's something amiss in the phrase "just listening." To put yourself aside while you truly listen to others is to give them a precious gift.

Psychologist Leona Tyler wrote: "Counseling is basically a perceptual task. It is not possible to learn to say the right thing at the right time without learning to listen and watch and understand." It is the same for mentoring. Look. Listen. Let curiosity gently move you along.

Despite my desire to serve a helping of wisdom along with my counseling, I can't recall a single instance of praise for my profundity. On the other hand, clients thanked me over and over and over again for listening. 

Tip #2: Model patience with the process

Offer a contrast to our frenetic culture. Slow down. Conduct your conversation so that your student can hear herself think and begin to heed that small voice inside.

My clients would often tell me that they didn't know what they wanted when they actually did, deep down. Perhaps they were slightly scared to express it out loud, but eventually, because I waited and listened and probed instead of rushing in to offer advice, they would get around to declaring their heart's desire.

Of all the quotes about creativity, my favorite is from Epictetus: "No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen." Developing talent is an equally slow process.

Tip #3: Respect your student's desires

Personal values bring emotion (note the root word motion) into play, and that kind of energy can move entire mountain ranges. So let your daughter know that you respect her values.

One young woman admitted during a counseling session that she wanted to be a good nurse and mother and live in the country where she could raise a big vegetable garden. Then she trembled and hung her head in shame. Her goals didn't fit her parents' values, so she felt as though she had just confessed to something sinful. Hearing my respect for her goals helped her move forward.

Well-meaning friends and family, full of "shoulds," often plaster their own priorities on a young person who already feels vulnerable because her values are at odds with the mainstream (or perhaps simply at odds with her parents). When in dialogue, honor her desires—not your own.

Tip #4: Express confidence in his or her ability

If you believe that your son is capable of doing whatever it is he says he wants to do, then tell him so.

Lawrence Hatterer, a psychotherapist for fine artists in New York City, believed that his single most important contribution was a belief in his client's ability to create. Creative people of all sorts have told me that they were helped by such confirmation. Just one other person who believed in them was enough to strengthen their self-confidence.

I experienced this myself, when I told my sister that I wanted to write fiction for children. She read some of my early efforts and said, "I think you can do it." Sounds simple, but what a boost!

Tip #5: Contain your own anxiety

When your student wants to discuss something important, chances are that she will be uncertain and a bit worried. Anxiety is contagious—but don't let her scare you too.

One of my clients had been fired from a prominent position. Already embarrassed by his public demotion, he became panicked by his subsequent lack of success at the job hunt. Fear wafted off of him like bug repellent, which undoubtedly hurt his chances with potential employers. I helped by not becoming scared myself. Once he calmed down, he got the job he wanted and became one of my most grateful clients.

Try to focus on the person instead of her anxiety. In other words, let her feelings be her feelings and attend to her as a whole person. Attending does not mean rushing in to save her from feeling bad. Nor does it mean taking upon yourself the task of making her choices. It means going back to basics, to the starting point of what you hear and see and feel in her presence (see Tip #1).

Rest assured: You can provide information and opinions and emotional support, but you do not need to make decisions. That task belongs to your student. After all, she's the one who must live with the consequences.

How to Observe Talent in Children: Use Winner's Three Behavioral Markers

I began speculating about my son's strengths when he was still in utero. From the moment he was born, I kept an eagle eye on what he did well, and within a week of his sixteenth birthday, I whisked him off to Chicago for a formal aptitude assessment.

Fortunately, you don't have to be quite such a fanatic. You don't have to spend money, either. One free method for identifying strengths is to observe your child's behavior. In other words, pay attention to what she does better than most kids her age.

Ellen Winner, PhD, a psychology professor and researcher at Boston College, has developed three markers you can use to identify talent via observation. No testing required. Dr. Winner's research has been based on gifted children, but I believe her markers can also be used for the noticeable-if-you-look-for-it kind of talent that places a child or student in the high range of a specific ability. And high ability is plenty 'good enough' for learning quickly, getting a job, and advancing in a career.

Here are Winner's three behavioral markers:

1) Precocity (which means advanced in a specific area)

Let's begin with an extreme example. Carl Gauss, the eminent German mathematician, was a child prodigy. At age 3, he corrected, in his head, a mistake his father made in financial calculations. In grade school, his teacher asked him to add numbers from 1 to 100 in arithmetic progression—a feat he accomplished in mere seconds! At only 21, he wrote his magnum opus on number theory. Two centuries later, his brilliance continues to light the mathematical heavens.

In other words, the talented person often begins to learn about his special subject at a younger age than average. He learns faster and performs better than typical peers. As a result, his skills in his talent area are advanced, even when he's not a genius. For example, the one-year-old who speaks in full sentences, a feat not normally accomplished until the age of two (indicating talent in the area of language). Or the child who can successfully compete on sports teams with children a year or two older (indicating talent in athletics).

2) Rage to Master

Michelangelo, the great Italian artist, possessed an astounding visual-spatial talent that contributed to his success in painting, sculpture, and architecture. But on top of that he focused intensely and labored mightily with his visual gift, so dedicated to mastering his craft that he was willing to spend four years in awkward positions as paint from the Sistine Chapel dripped onto his face.

A rage to master refers to strong intrinsic motivation. The talented individual wants to learn, on his own, about how to win a chess game or play the harmonica. Without prodding, without an adult having to coax him with a carrot or strike him with a stick, the child strives to master the skills of his chosen domain. When adults spot such stellar achievement, they may assume there's a pushy parent behind the scenes, but the child with a rage to master actually pushes himself to study maps so he can learn geography.

3) March to their own Drummer

Living in isolation in northern England, in a world without MFA writing programs, the young Bronte sisters taught themselves to write poetry and fiction. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte created and acted out dramas as children, inventing and sharing personal worlds of fantasy. Later in their lives, when women were actively discouraged from writing books, each of the Bronte sisters adopted a male pen name and wrote one or more novels of unusual passion and lasting artistic merit (including the classics Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).

The talented person does not sit idly by with the mass of her fellows nor rush with them like lemmings into the sea. Rather than follow someone else's set curriculum, she instead takes initiative with her own pet projects, maybe building a Lego construction from her imagination or studying all the different kinds of spider webs she can find in nature. She pursues her own goals in her own idiosyncratic ways.

To mentor talent, keep an eye out for these three markers. Be sure to ask others what they notice in your child. For example, at parent-teacher conferences, ask her teacher:

· "What are my daughter's strengths?"

· "What is she good at?"

· "Have you noticed any areas where she is ahead of other kids her age?"

· "Have you noticed any areas where she shows unusual motivation?

· "In what kind of activities does she march to her own drummer?"

Afterward, tell your child where he or she excels. Remember to remind them of their talents from time to time. Students who know their strengths possess an inner security that's both portable and permanent.

Careers Tend to Snowball, Parents: That's Why Starting Off Right Is Crucial

In my office at the University Counseling Center, a lanky underclassman sprawls in the chair across from me, absorbing the results of his Strong Interest Inventory. He looks up and says, "Interior designer is one of my highest scores." He tells me how the design field fits well with other parts of his life and adds, excitement warming his voice, "You know, I'd like to manage my own showroom someday." Then he hops up and hurries out of my office to declare a major in interior design.

I never saw that client again, but I bet he did in fact become an interior designer. I wouldn't be surprised if he later managed his own showroom. Because he was a freshman or sophomore in college when he made his career choice—the perfect moment to pack his occupational snowball and set it rolling.

John Holland, an eminent vocational psychologist, wrote that "careers tend to snowball over the life course." He meant, in part, that people tend to stick with their first career choice. Sadly, that seems to be true even when it's a lousy fit.

For that reason, it was more gratifying for me to help college students choose their first careers than to work with adults who wanted to change their professions. Many of my older clients could identify a more desirable occupation fairly quickly—but then they slowed to a standstill. Change was simply too difficult, when they had children and spouses, car payments and mortgages. Not to mention that prevailing plague of our present day: never enough time.

Research in decision making confirms that people tend to stick with the status quo unless they are forced to change. Even if they are fired or laid off—a calamity with a silver lining—their options may appear limited. She lacks the time and money to retool, so she'll stay the course and find a job similar to the one she loathed before she lost it. At least that way she can cash in on her work experience to buy groceries for her kids.

I myself had a tough time changing my career, and I was a young 26 with no dependents. Sure, there was some delight in discovering my calling. But I also suffered, taking the silver spoon from my mouth to scoop up beans and rice and mix in chunks of food bank cheese. In the process of exploring new directions, I encountered an astonishing number of people who said that the only thing I could do was teach English—when I'd only taught freshman composition on a part-time, temporary basis for one measly year of my life!

Here's my point: It is appropriate to feel some urgency. Your child does not have all the time in the world to make a good career choice, particularly not if she's a specialist by nature. In posts to come, I'll show you how to help your student pack a firm snowball and start it rolling in the right general direction, so she doesn't later find herself hurtling down the wrong hill, gathering girth until she's smashed into a snow bank, her self-esteem, her happiness, and her earning potential all buried in the cold.

Why Mentoring Talent Is Win-Win-Win: Well, Wouldn't You Want Your Dentist to Be Good at Her Job?

Here's the most astonishing thing I learned in my twenty-two years as a career counselor: Most people don't know what they're good at. Part of the problem is that our abilities are so close to our essence, we tend to see right through them. To use an analogy, she can't really focus on her hand when it's plastered to her face; instead, she looks through blurry fingers. When she does gain a glimmering of her greatest strengths, she often discounts the feedback, assuming that if she's good at something, then it's no big deal, or assuming that if something comes easily to her, then it comes easily to everyone else, too.

That's the funny thing about talent: It's easy to miss, easy to squander. Especially from the inside. That's why talent needs someone on the outside, a mentor like you.

By talent, I mean an individual person's power for problem solving. Her talent—being able to learn something more easily than others—provides her with a competitive advantage. For example, someone with high aptitudes for finger dexterity and hand-eye coordination would more quickly learn the manual skills required in dentistry (and then also be less likely to gouge your mouth while filling a cavity). Furthermore, using natural abilities is satisfying and enhances self-esteem. Your child likes dentistry and knows she's doing a good job and her patients appreciate her work and make referrals, all of which feels fabulous. In talent mentoring, the first win is for the protégé, who has the potential to become simply superb at solving certain kinds of problems (and receiving the financial rewards).

We have plenty of unsolved problems, pressing in at every level. The workforce desperately needs skilled employees who have ability and interest in their chosen field and want to continue learning. No wonder, then, that competition for talent has gone global. As Rich Feller, past president of the National Career Development Association, told me over lunch, "The mediocre and the passionless are in a bad place." Sadly, a recent Gallup poll found that an alarming seventy percent of workers in the United States are disengaged. We can do better than that!

With more thoughtful talent development, a much higher percentage of the workforce would be well suited to their work, appropriately trained for their jobs, and fully engaged in solving problems for their client or employer. After all, wouldn't you hope your dentist was capable of remembering what she learned in dental school and reasoning with that knowledge to find the best solution to the problem in your mouth? Let's say your problem was tooth decay, and the solution was a root canal. You'd want her procedural skills to be simply stupendous, and you'd pray that she actually wanted to help people like you to the best of her ability. The second win is for the wider world.

Unfortunately, the basics of how to develop talent aren't well known. Parents, grandparents, and educators may have the best of intentions—but they don't know what they don't know. Because the research literature tends to be the tiniest bit obscure, I will select and interpret the most relevant findings and also provide a glossary of terms. I'll show you how to identify ability and offer appropriate educational options, whether for dentistry or something entirely different. The choice of what to pursue will always be the student's, but you can nevertheless make a phenomenal difference in the life of someone you care about. The third win is for you, the mentor.

I'm here to mentor the mentors, so the talent of someone special to you does not become lost in the everyday hubbub, like the "mute inglorious Milton" buried in that famed poetic churchyard. Here's my promise: I'll share my expertise online with any aspiring mentor who can read English, providing privileged information for free. So that your protégé will be better able use her natural abilities to achieve a competitive advantage in our bewildering world of work, this blog will help you recognize strengths when you see them, ferret out abilities that may currently be hidden, set learning challenges at the just-right level, and nurture the talents of your child, grandchild, or whomever—for her greater joy and our world's greater good.

Mentors in the Movies: Yoda, Leigh Ann, and Lionel Show Us What Mentoring Means

Master Yoda was a mentor: he trained Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi Knight. Leigh Anne Tuohy was a mentor: she coached the athletic talent of Michael Oher, who became a top draft pick for the NFL. Lionel Logue was a mentor: as a speech therapist, he helped the King of England speak without stuttering. You can watch them work their mentoring magic in Star Wars (1977), The Blind Side (2009), and The King's Speech (2010).

When you mentor someone, you use the highest possible level of skill with people to benefit another human being, guiding him or her with regard to a particular set of challenges, usually offering specialized knowledge, and always in the context of a relationship. Many different kinds of professionals are mentors: For example, physicians give their patients medical recommendations; ministers guide their parishioners on spiritual matters; and lawyers advise their clients regarding legal concerns.

In The King's Speech, the therapist Lionel played a mentoring role for Bertie, a member of the royal family who became the King of England during the course of the film. Bertie stuttered so badly it was excruciating to hear, but he had to speak live on the radio during World War Two—while his entire country listened in! Lionel used expertise from his field of speech pathology to help Bertie overcome his shame and stuttering. As a result, his speeches sustained England's resistance to Hitler's Third Reich.

Mentors pass on more than knowledge. They believe in their protégé and connect on an emotional level. Yoda knew how to access the power of the Force, and he persisted with Luke's training despite the aggravations of dealing with a brash young man. Leigh Anne understood how to use Michael's quick reflexes and protective instincts in the game of football, but she also responded to his need for a loving family. Curing speech defects was Lionel's job, but he gave more to Bertie than he was ever paid for, including the gifts of understanding and acceptance.

The task we will tackle in this blog is how to guide your child or student with regard to the challenge of choosing her life's work and preparing for future roles. What does she want to do with her life? How can she best hone her skills and connect her passions to meaningful work? What kind of training would make the most of her strengths, providing competitive advantage in the workplace? 

These are crucial questions. For me, they're even spine-tingling questions. However, the only person who can truly answer such questions is the student. When the time is right, a career development professional will be the ideal resource, but until then, your child is likely to look to you, a trusted adult, to get her started in a good direction.

Please note: Mentoring is not the same as telling a young person what to do. That's too much responsibility, and thankfully, it's not our job. To use a common mentoring metaphor, your protégé is like a seed, already containing what she needs to become a plant. You don't get to pick whether she turns into a poinsettia, a petunia, or a potentilla. But you do get to provide water and sunshine, so she can grow to be the glorious flowering plant she was meant to be.

While we're using metaphors for mentoring, let's add two more. We want to avoid the relational equivalent of grabbing our child by the scruff of the neck, bringing her too close and forcing her to comply. Mentoring is not a socially sanctioned opportunity to control or manipulate (which is why Leigh Ann made sure Michael understood that it was his choice whether or not he played football for Ole Miss). Instead, mentors hold out open hands, offering a gift the recipient feels free to take or leave. When we do our part well, our protégé will benefit. Maybe even as much as the King of England.

Michelangelo's Guide to Making Money: How to Turn Talent into Employment

Talent excites me, even when it's not a Big T talent like that of Michelangelo.

Why should you care?

Because of the speed of change.

Your children and students will encounter change on steroids. Technology continues to morph and advance, pushing businesses to innovate and compete for skilled employees. It's now predicted that in high tech fields, skill sets will become obsolete in as little as three years; in other fields, workers may have a little longer before they need to retrain. In order to be successful, your child will have to hit the ground learning and continue to add skills throughout his or her career.

Workers can meet those endless learning challenges best when their job duties match their abilities. Talent is, in essence, the innate ability to learn to do something more quickly and easily than others. Talents matched to tasks therefore allow a person to fly with the wind and outperform the competition. Let me illustrate by showing how the Italian artist Michelangelo turned his strengths into job skills and steady employment, becoming the towering talent of his time.

Michelangelo, like all of us, was born with a pattern of abilities as unique as his fingerprint. Among other abilities, he possessed high-level aptitudes for eye-hand coordination, creativity, and three-dimensional thinking. Eye-hand coordination allowed him to more quickly pick up manual skills, such as painting and sculpting. Creativity produced a rapid flow of ideas that contributed to the originality of his masterpieces. He also possessed spatial visualization, the ability to think in three dimensions, very handy for producing the David from a block of marble.

But early on, when he was a boy, his abilities were merely a potential. His talent needed a focus, which he found in art. Although his father tried to discourage him, art became Michelangelo's primary interest, the subject he liked best and wanted to know more about. In his visually rich Renaissance world, he learned by observing the work of fellow sculptors; in the Florence workshops of master artists, he learned techniques such as fresco painting and marble carving. Self-study and apprenticeship turned his innate abilities into knowledge and skills, the kind of talent that employers seek.

Michelangelo's job skills were further propelled by the passion of his personality. He held strong aesthetic and religious values, which motivated him to create beautiful images of the divine. When someone is motivated, he or she wants to keep learning in order to attain greater knowledge and skill. Such a person is willing to persist until the job is done, despite the inevitable obstacles and setbacks encountered. Michelangelo is quoted as saying, "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

Natural strengths, developed with the proper training and infused with the desire to solve a relevant problem, produce talent in the most complete and valuable sense of the word. Talent now means the whole person, who is not sitting around expecting admiration for being such a special snowflake but is instead directed toward solving problems.

When Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt the David, he had several problems to solve. For example, he was given a stunningly awkward block of marble, so narrow that previous sculptors had hacked away at it, further limiting its use, and then given up. Since no one taught anatomy in his day, he had to resort to clandestine activities before he could give his statue its gorgeously detailed muscles. In addition, Michelangelo needed to please his employer, the city of Florence, a problem he solved by giving his David a feisty Florentine spirit, a symbolically defiant warning to rival city-states, a visual version of "Don't even think about messing with me!"

It was true 500 years ago and it's true today: Problem solvers get hired. Michelangelo earned an income starting at the age of 14 and worked until he was 88, as a painter, a sculptor, and an architect, for employers as diverse as wealthy families, town councils, cardinals, and popes. Your student can reap similar results in a world that is faster and more competitive now than it was five years ago, let alone fifty.

Your child will be able to leave home and buy his or her own cappuccinos when capable of solving someone else's problem. Simple as that. In this blog, we'll explore how your student can develop her talent in a process much like Michelangelo's, from recognizing her abilities to choosing a field to acting on her values to finding her preferred problems in the work world and then persuading an employer that she has the skills to solve them. And keep on solving them, because the speed of change will never allow her to rest on her laurels.

Why I Began This Blog: The Creative Class Sparked a Blazing Bonfire

When I was in private practice as a career counselor, I frequently gave talks to the public about creativity. Although I spoke in a different place to a different audience each time, the exact same thing happened afterward. Can you guess?

An adult from the audience would approach me. After a quick thank you, she identified herself as a parent or grandparent and began to tell me, not about herself or her work, and certainly not about the pearls of wisdom I had just shared in my presentation, but about the talent in her child or grandchild.

I get it. A parent and a step-grandparent myself, I'm right there with you when you express your concern for your kids and their futures. I want the best for my child and grandchildren—and for yours too. That's one reason I began this blog.

In retrospect, during those impromptu conversations after my talks, I was gathering tinder—small, seemingly lightweight stuff for starting a fire. I didn't put a match to the tinder until years later, when I was revising my career book, The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People. In the process of doing library research for my third edition, I read Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he claimed that prosperity is created by the Three T's—Technology, Tolerance, and Talent—coming together in the nexus of place, as they did in the 1970's in what became the Silicon Valley.

Florida's ideas burned inside me with a small but steady flame, something like a pilot light. Inspired by his vision of creativity as an economic force for good, I wondered for some time what I could do as a creativity expert and writer to extend his message. Eventually, my answer came: While I knew next to nothing about exploiting technology or fostering tolerance, I could share volumes about mentoring talent.

For starters, my work as a counselor was about helping people flourish via a relationship. After all, a counselor is a mentor, someone who uses their interpersonal skills to benefit another. Moreover, I was trained as a counseling psychologist, that sort of psychologist most focused on client strengths. As the poster child for what not to do with my own career, I had quite naturally developed an avid interest in counseling psychology's vocational track and had therefore acquired a significant academic background regarding career choice, knowledge that remains stacked within me, like a woodpile.

I had also learned about developing talent from thirty-two years of experience across the entire spectrum of educational settings, from Kindergarten to post doc. In New Orleans, Seattle, and Pittsburgh, I counseled thousands of clients with both personal and career concerns and also taught single students in my private office as well as classrooms of twenty-five and lecture halls of 250. One of my community colleges was ninety-eight percent white; one of the universities, ninety-eight percent black. At the end of my career I became a school psychologist in Ft Collins, evaluating gifted as well as disabled learners and serving students both directly and indirectly, by consulting with their teachers and parents.

In short, I've been in the trenches, where it was easy to observe the diverse dismaying disconnects between students and learning, between one educational institution and another, and between education and employment in the United States. Many aspects of our educational system disturb me, and now that I'm retired, I'm in a position to communicate what I believe to be a simpler but superior strategy.

Since I think like a psychologist, my strategy is based on psychological concepts. Please understand: for me, psychology does not mean abnormality. Mental illness does not interest me much. On the other hand, nerdy psychological topics like the factor analytic structure of intelligence or vocational interests? Those are fascinating! In fact, I find them so interesting that I've collected a banker's box of ideas, enough fuel to keep a talent mentoring fire burning for a decade.

One of the books on my shelf is The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida's sequel. In it, he wrote: "Today, for perhaps the first time in human history, we have the opportunity to align economic and human development. Indeed, our future economic prosperity turns on making the most of each and every human being's talents and energies."

Now that's a goal I can get behind. I invite you to join me in building an online community of parents, grandparents, and teachers. I'll share what I know, and I hope to learn what you believe and what's worked for you in mentoring your son or granddaughter or student. Let's build a blazing bonfire, mentoring talent so that the generations that follow can derive career direction and job security, along with greater wealth and contentment, from developing their signature strengths.

Parents Beware: What You Don't Know about Career Planning Can Hurt You. Even Worse, It Can Hurt Your Child.

Too many of my son's high school friends—nice, athletic young men from good, supportive families—started college right after high school but quickly got into trouble, dropped out, and spent the next several years recovering their forward momentum. It was painful to watch and must have been terribly damaging to their self-esteem, not to mention needlessly expensive for their families.

My heart ached for those young men, but I knew they were far from alone. One-third of freshmen in the United States leave college before their sophomore year. Almost fifty percent of college students never graduate. Too many parents are left holding the bill for an aborted "must-have" education, having spent tens of thousands of dollars only to find their children back home, licking their wounds in the basement, less directed than when they graduated from high school.

How did a glittering cultural promise become such a devastating personal punishment?

Part of the problem is that everyone in high school is focused on getting into college. The assumption seems to be that it's the act of going to college itself that provides direction, as though career planning happens by virtue of admission to a four-year liberal arts college.

Except no, it doesn't.

As Career Vision points out, going to college is not the same as planning a career. Colleges, in my experience, are happy to take your money, offer another class as the solution to virtually every problem, and leave the career planning entirely up to your student.

And guess who your student asks for help?

You.

Of all influences, parents have the strongest on their child's career decisions. Expect your child to turn to you instead of to a qualified career development professional, especially early in life, when supposedly short-term career decisions can have far-reaching consequences.

But realistically, how are you supposed to know where he or she should go to school or what to major in? There are around 3,000 common occupations in the world of work, plus another 10,000 less common—and that doesn't count emerging fields. As former Secretary of Education Richard Riley said, "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, using technology that hasn't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems."

The workplace is changing so fast that educational policies can't keep up, creating a gaping mismatch between education and employment. "Employers across the globe are struggling to find enough people with the right set of skills for the posts they have available, even as millions of people remain unemployed." You don't want your student to become today's version of a buggy-whip maker in a spanking new automobile economy, especially not after you've paid $150,000 for the privilege.

What's a parent to do?

Read my blog.

My solution for finding direction and connecting education to employment rests on something possessed by every student: Strengths. By that term I mean many things, but especially their unique psychological assets, including Abilities, Interests, and Motivators (AIM). More about that soon. For now, please take my word for it: Your child's strengths and talents translate into her competitive advantage in the workforce.

Because of my background as a vocational psychologist, I was able to assist my son in his transition from high school to college. Making choices based on his strengths, he sailed through college in four years, despite having ADHD and a part-time job. He graduated with the major he'd chosen before entering the university and accepted the best of three job offers in his senior year. Now 25, he is preparing to specialize in an exciting new field that I did not even know existed when he was in high school.

I will share my knowledge in this blog, as a complimentary form of social capital. You'll learn how to identify your student's strengths and use them to guide his or her search for the best-fitting education and employment. Your mentoring can decrease your child's stress and enhance self-worth and salary, all while benefiting the larger world. Check back on the 3rd and 18th of each month for another post about how to identify talent and help connect it to education and workforce opportunities—even for opportunities that don't yet exist.