I meant to get this blog out before Father’s Day but a day late isn’t so bad. My own father passed away 18 years ago. We were closer when I was little and not the oldest of six but an only child or the only girl for four years. As I grew up, I was merely the maid and nanny and truth be told, he was always trying to work overtime and frequently did at his factory job in our auto town in Michigan. Both parents had a tendency to shower what little time and attention they had on favorites and I wasn’t one. But we had good adult to adult relationships once I was married and on my own. I escaped my family pressures by going away to college and thought I was going into chemistry until I nearly failed the class. Then I found psychology and was hooked. Since I was on my own, I was lucky to get a job as a nurse’s aide now called medical assistants. Within a year of my selecting psychology as a major, my father had a heart to heart with me. That alone was so rare, I remember it vividly. We were sitting in the dining room and he asked why I didn’t go into nursing. I had viewed my job as just a job. I liked it but separated a job from a major in college. Two different universes. I said I didn’t think I could ever have the stomach to start an IV on a patient which RNs did. He was very encouraging and I was a little angry that he bothered to care after neglecting me all those years. I certainly didn’t need his advice now that I was on my own.
Yet when my psychology degree didn’t net me a psychology job and I finally got the connection between college and work, I began to seriously think about his advice. I did what I counsel students and parents of young adults not to do and that is to think of college as something not related to work or vaguely so. Had I looked into the jobs I could get with my college degree, I would have seen that it wasn’t the way to go. Hoping to return to college to become an RN, I encountered college administration resistence to allowing those back in who already had a degree. It is easy today but it wasn’t back then. I had to go on for an advanced degree and went to law school. Ironically, my mother  had told me when I was in middle school getting all A’s, that my grandfather would probably put me through college if I became an attorney. Unfortunately, he didn’t see me go to college let alone law school.

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I’m a bit late in posting this blog because I spent the last half of May attending my oldest son, Adam’s, college graduation and moving my youngest son, Richard, home from college. Whew! As Richard and I went to take our chairs at Adam’s graduation, a mother and her elemenatry school daughter walked in front of us. The mother turned to her daughter and said, “Sis is graduating. Now what are we going to do with her?” Richard and I looked at each other and laughed. Richard said,
“With the help of Kidsoutnow, she might get a job!” Sadly, I see adult children living at home from last year without jobs or any idea of how to get one. Adult children boomerang home at even worse rates in these economic times than before when it was half of all graduating seniors. Lastly, have the job in place before graduation. Recently, the young man I mentored was job hunting when his work hours were cut back. I will often fill out his job applications as I have great handwriting and his is a bit challenging to read. On that first page it asks for four employers, past and present. Can your adult child list four employers? Mine had three by their first year of college because I required them to work in high school. They also had letters of recommendation from their former employers. Does yours? By the second year in college, they had to be working in the field they wanted to get a job in. Adam had worked two years for his uncle. They liked him and he liked them. He has avoided the failure to launch because we made sure he would launch.

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