“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It’s the season for high school enrollment and planning for DG, and it’s an interesting dilemma. Unlike Sticks, she has no ‘mainstream passion’ that she can channel into her high school years, which means we can plan her academics easily enough but not the electives.

In a sincere effort to help, she was descended upon by five “career women”, who explained that she really only needs to focus on one goal — getting to college and studying for a career in accounting, dentistry, teaching or medicine.

She was appalled. She told me she felt pressured, boxed in, angry a little bit that they would limit her future so severely. She said she might want to travel, to see the world, to feed the poor in Afghanistan, help build Iraq, and why were they so narrowly putting her into such a tight pathway?

I agree. Are we so focused on our girls being traditional successes that we would push them into the traditional “men’s careers”? And why just those four? What about rocket science, web design, social media, art?

Here’s what one of them said to a bright and talented girl drummer: “The band won’t get you anywhere; math will.”

Such narrow thinking! Imagine a world 20 years from now where we pushed our daughters into dull, boring, uncreative jobs, where we told them they needed to train for employment instead of entrepreneurship? Why aren’t we encouraging them to think past the traditional, into the ‘cloud’? Why not technology, why not the web?

This reminds me of the narrow thinking of my mother, the cautious “don’t give up your day job for the arts” ever-practical and incredibly stifling advice. Surely we can do better for our daughters.

I told her I want her to tune that stuff out and listen to me. At age 14, she shouldn’t have a clue as to what she wants to do, but should be encouraged to learn at her very highest potential, to explore, to dig deeper than the surface, and to dream of what she thinks she can do rather than what they tell her she should do.

The rest will follow.

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