Smells Like Teen Parent
This podcast is for adolescents and the adults who annoy them. You want to have a good relationship with your teen and you also have to get them ready for the real world. Jenny Debevec, a nationally certified counselor and consultant with 20 years working with teens, helps you maintain your sense of humor, offering motivation, advice, and support as we walk this sometimes smelly road. You will hear fun discussions and let’s get real interviews with parents, kids, and experts about topics like college applications, sex and gender identity, social media, relationships, learning disabilities, parent self-care, puberty, and more! If you need a laugh, a little advice or just want to know you’re not alone, listen in.
Smells Like Teen Parent
Ep 15: Guiding Teens to Careers from Dreams
Join me, Jenny Debevec, on this journey through the transformative world of career counseling. Let's explore how early conversations about ambitions can shape the lives of adolescents and teens. Imagine a child's playful dream of designing Lego masterpieces transitioning into a fulfilling career - this episode unpacks how nurturing youthful imagination and self-efficacy equips our youth with the tools to turn their vibrant visions into actionable realities. With personal anecdotes and keen insights from children of all ages, we dissect the myriad ways exposure to diverse environments and role models serves as a compass for teens navigating the sea of potential futures.
Welcome to Smells Like Teen Parent a podcast for adolescents and the adults who annoy them. I'm your Jenny Debevec, a nationally certified counselor and academic consultant with 20 years of experience working with youth. In our previous episode, we explored how to support our LGBTQ plus adolescents as they safely explore their identity. Today we're delving into a crucial topic why talking to your adolescent about careers is valuable in preparing them for adulthood. This is one of my favorite aspects within the counseling training framework, because it is such a positive and productive way to help people of diverse backgrounds, interests, strengths and values discover a career path that will be fulfilling and well-paid.
Jenny Debevec:What do you want to be when you grow up? Study sharks Okay. What do you want to be when you grow up? Teacher A teacher, I know. Go. A waffle A waffle man Okay, a waffle man All right, somebody's got to make the waffles, right. Go Police officer. Police officer Cool. What do you want to be when you grow up? Rotten egg A rotten egg. No, you're too lovely to be a rotten egg. But before we dive into these insightful conversations, take a minute to follow, rate and download this episode. Your support helps spread the word and it fuels my efforts to make parenting routines a little more informed and a lot more joyful.
Jenny Debevec:Career counseling with younger children, adolescents and teens is one of my personal favorite aspects of counseling, because it is so positive and it enables them to consider how the short-term habits they are building today will shape the long-term trajectory of their lives. It also elicits their imagination and it helps them expand their understanding of themselves. And speaking of great careers, this episode is brought to you in part by NextPhaseai. Transform your business with NextPhase Data Operations Services, improving the quality and reliability of your enterprise data. And now, with the ever-expanding landscape of high-tech careers, the possibilities for our teams are more vast and varied than ever. What do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a nursery doctor.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be a veterinarian, a graphic engineer.
Jenny Debevec:Are we ever too early to start talking about careers with our kids? The evidence suggests that asking kids about their interests, goals and vision for themselves is an important step. I recently asked various groups of elementary students about their vision for themselves. Have you ever thought about what you want to be when you grow up?
Speaker 3:Yes, Tell me I want to be one of those people who sits in an office and they have unlimited leggers and they make up new leggersets to sell.
Speaker 4:That's an amazing job.
Speaker 3:Is that a job out there? Yes, it's a job. How do you get that job? I have no idea. I want to be a sloth.
Speaker 2:I want to help the animals, the ones that you adopt, like we find the animals that you adopt Like a foster parent for animals.
Jenny Debevec:Yeah, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a president.
Speaker 2:Do you think you can both be?
Jenny Debevec:presidents share presidency. Yeah, oh, I think that would be the same.
Speaker 2:I know how much money they make. Do they make a lot of money?
Jenny Debevec:Yeah, In my school counseling role, I also gave a series of career lessons to older students, because it's the perfect time to help them think about why they're doing all this. You know school. I start by imagining with them what they might do and be when they're 26, 35, even 50. What is your dream job?
Speaker 4:I have no clue, but maybe something in sports. I mean, that's already my dream job. Yeah, I'm not really sure, but when I was younger I wanted to be an astronaut.
Speaker 2:I want to be one of the media people for sports and stuff who gets to take pictures of all the players and stuff.
Speaker 4:I was probably thinking something in social work or with clinical psychology. I want to be one of those people that sells houses, one of the realtors on selling sunset. My dream job is probably being a journalist or a spread designer for architectural digest. I think maybe my dream job is to be like a photographer, like a freelance photographer or someone.
Jenny Debevec:Probably like an author. It's interesting to note this role of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the ability of a person to take actionable steps in achieving their goals. When young people are encouraged and counseled in self-efficacy, they can develop behaviors and habits to achieve goals. What does this look like? It means helping kids see that along the way there are choices for them. We learn early on, as parents, that saying no to children over and over and over and over and over again, it not only creates friction and power struggles, but it can also leave behind a sense of learned helplessness. Conversely, the more an individual is encouraged to believe that they can, and the more the environment around them supports this belief, the better the outcome. So what did you want to be when you grew up? When I was a kid?
Jenny Debevec:I wanted to be an anthropologist.
Speaker 3:I was really into learning about Africa and the late Holy mudbed footprints and understanding how humans evolved? Do you?
Jenny Debevec:see that your current career has links to what you wanted to be when you were growing up.
Speaker 3:No, my life took me on a different path, but it's still a big interest of mine and I really love learning about all of that stuff still, and I think that's really great too. It wasn't something that I ended up with as a career, but it's a lifelong interest.
Jenny Debevec:What kind of career do?
Speaker 4:you imagine yourself in Definitely working in television film production industry. When I toured Sony, I was like this is awesome, that is where I want to be, that's what I want to do. Being in those environments are just so much fun and they look amazing and I know that it's a lot of work, but also I feel like it's really rewarding to do.
Jenny Debevec:And what's helped you move towards that career. Who's inspired you? How did you learn about these?
Speaker 4:careers. My mom and I would always watch 80s movies back to the future and like directors like Greta Gerwig.
Jenny Debevec:What advice would you have to parents who are guiding their children into careers.
Speaker 4:I would say, definitely be supportive and encourage them to like go out and try and reach for what they want to do, because it's definitely helpful to have people that are in your corner, rather, and people who don't think that you're gonna make too much money off of our career.
Jenny Debevec:In the adult world. The task of a career counselor includes helping a client identify and unpack the often heavy load of self-efficacy which begins to form at the earliest age, as a child receives feedback from his immediate environment about what is and is not acceptable. Question of the day is what do you want to be when you grow up?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I want to be a singer.
Jenny Debevec:A singer, okay. What do you want to be when you grow up? Mama? You want to be a mama. What do you want to be when you grow up? A vet, a vet. A fish painter A fish painter. No, a face painter A face painter. Okay, I want to be a pilot A pilot Great. What do you want to?
Speaker 2:be when you grow up? I want to be a rabbit A rabbit, Actually I.
Jenny Debevec:You want to be a rabbit? Okay, I want to be a monkey A monkey Okay. What do you want to be when you grow up? Astronaut. The bottom line we adults have tremendous power in shaping the self-efficacy of younger people. I recently was consulting with a student on her grad school applications. She had gone to these top schools, but she shared with me how she was still haunted by a ninth grade English teacher who announced in front of her English class that this student was brilliant but lazy. These three words, spoken inappropriately and probably off the cuff and without much thought, have haunted this student who, no matter what she has achieved in her young adult life and it was substantial she still believes that she's doomed to fail. Because an authority figure shared such judgment so freely and so publicly, the student internalized that belief that it must be so. Students with creative vision and curiosity often find themselves, because of adult judgments and negative feedback, looking over their shoulder throughout their whole lives. Forest Ranger.
Speaker 2:I came pretty early on, really Like in high school.
Speaker 3:Then I got away from it for like four or five years and then I went back to it Four or five years in college. I was kind of getting annoyed with people who were like I said it was a history major and they'd be like oh, so you want a teacher, not? Necessarily I could do anything, and then, of course, I ended up being a teacher.
Jenny Debevec:However, adults who help a young person challenge such denouncements and examine unhelpful perceptions can help dismantle its power. By modeling our own self-efficacy and normalizing the ups and downs of developing a strong work ethic, including normalizing procrastination, avoidance, imposter syndrome and fear of missing out, we can help young people imagine new interests and set goals as well as actually carrying them out. Encourage the teen in your life to challenge those destructive thoughts about self by helping them overcome an obstacle. Completing a college application, applying to an advanced math class, trying out for a play or the varsity team All these are excellent practices in reshaping harmful perceptions of self-efficacy. What do you want to do when you grow up?
Speaker 5:That's the question I forgot already Preservation of species, environments, Basically, just like the issues that the natural environment of the ocean is facing where, like we are world-of-faceted with plastic, world-of-faceted with oil traction, world-of-faceted with illegal fisheries of fish near endangered, A lot of species are endangered. That's a lot of what's going on right now.
Jenny Debevec:We need people like you.
Speaker 5:I'm still learning, but I'm not there yet.
Jenny Debevec:You're not, You're only what 18?
Speaker 5:Oh yeah, I'm gonna be equal to be 19 soon, oh, you're gonna be 19.
Jenny Debevec:You're just beginning. Another topic of conversation with adolescents is distinguishing with them the difference between a job and a career. Ask an adolescent what a job is that they might get and you'll hear a range of answers from snarky to serious. One recent example offered by a fifth grader working at Subway. But using this example as a job, we can then brainstorm how this job could actually help evolve into a meaningful career. Again, these are open conversations, opportunities to get kids to see how, why they might not enjoy all aspects of a job. There's always aspects of a job that can be building blocks to get where they need to go. Another great way to get adolescents talking about careers is to give them an assessment to help hone in on their personality, interest, strengths and values. There's a variety of self-assessments online, some of which can be taken for free. The most common are the Big Five personality tests, the John Hollands codes and the Myers-Briggs personality test. The Big Five personality traits are probably the best accepted and most commonly used model of personality in academic psychology, but one of my favorites is the John Holland codes.
Jenny Debevec:According to John Holland, the psychologist behind the theory of career choice, individuals who find careers and work environments matching their personality tend to experience more satisfaction and success. Holland's theory of vocational types identifies six dimensions that guide us in understanding our preferences and what type of careers can satisfy various interests. These are realistic, as in interacting with the world, investigative, our researcher types, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional. These dimensions offer a roadmap for understanding our passions and inclinations. Holland's model suggests that interest congruence is a predictor of both student and career success. To help your child on this journey, they can go online and take a free quiz to gain a clear understanding of their interests and how these relate to potentially satisfying careers. But remember it's their future and what matters to them holds more weight than what matters to you.
Jenny Debevec:Let's also explore the Japanese concept of ikigai, a model that seeks to balance passion, mission, vocation and profession. The idea behind the concept of ikigai is that what you love, what the world needs, what you're good at and what you can get paid for. All four elements are crucial in finding your purpose. To know what you love, you need to experience it, and that's the importance of real-world experience. It's normal that some teens might not have a clear insight into their strengths and interests. Real-world experience is key to expanding career awareness. Part-time jobs, internships, job shadowing All these provide practical work exposure. So tell me about what experiences you've had that have helped you move towards your field of interest.
Speaker 4:I took an acting for the camera class a college over the summer and I've recorded my own little movies portfolios and I've even acted in some student-made ones at school. And what?
Jenny Debevec:about. You've also been a camp counselor in what it's like a storytelling kind of camp.
Speaker 4:Yes, I essentially bring mythology stories to life and I have been able to create a whole world in universe around my camp persona where the other kids can also feel inspired and that they also can now have these stories to take back with them during the school year to inspire other kids to maybe either want to come to camp again or create their own stories outside of camp.
Jenny Debevec:Wow, so you've really laid the footwork of work experience, internships, classes in order to be in this very competitive industry. Yes, I have To know what you love. You need to experience it. Attend fairs, be part of internships, take classes and talk to experts in the field. Experiencing the work firsthand can be transformative. This helps your child discover elements of the work environment that they like or dislike, such as do they prefer teamwork or working independently, specific tasks or creative freedom. These work values contribute to career satisfaction, and discussing them with your team can provide clarity for their future choices. Finally, resources like the California Career Zone, the show Road Trip Nation and the National Career Development Association can be valuable in helping people of all ages learn what sort of careers match their interests, strengths and passions. Then again, there's always the fallback just to become an influencer.
Speaker 2:Okay, tip one have a personality. I'm telling you you're gonna post your videos and do not make the videos and are like okay get ready, get ready get ready, get ready get ready, get ready, get ready get ready get ready, get ready, I'm gonna go to school.
Speaker 2:I'm kinda tired. I'm kinda tired. Okay, honestly, it doesn't matter, okay? Next, this one is about brand collapse, because even if you have like a thousand followers or less, but you have good engagement or like your video does good, you can get brands to send you free stuff. And I know all of y'all that's part of what you want. You want the free stuff.
Jenny Debevec:Well, that's it for our episode today. Thank you for listening in as we navigate crucial conversations about preparing our teams for the world of careers. Following, rating and downloading this episode makes a significant impact on spreading this valuable information. Together, let's make parenting our teens a more informed and more joyful experience. Thank you to our contributors and thank you to the birdhouse where we mega-haven. May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, and don't forget to wear sunscreen every day, even in winter.
