2368. Vocational Adulting
8. Vocational Adulting
Shaping Our World through Service and Career
Rebecca is a 29-year-old I (Kara) have known and walked alongside for 17 years. Recently, she and I met for coffee so she could bring me up to speed on her plans for graduate school. To my delight, she was planning to pursue a master’s degree in occupational therapy and was moving out of state to attend a graduate school that specialized in helping refugees.
Rebecca’s choice brought me chills.
But Rebecca was on the verge of tears.
Eyes moist, she explained, “I can’t believe I’m 29 and I’m just now figuring out the career God has for me. I feel so late and left behind.”
I listened for a few more minutes, and then I recapped for her the statistics about this generation of young people that we shared in chapter 1. “Rebecca, your generation is taking five years or longer to figure out life. Trust me. I’ve studied this. For young adults today, 28 is the new 18.”
Now the tears started to come. Right there in the middle of our neighborhood coffeehouse. Rebecca offered between sobs, “No one ever told me this. No one ever told me I wasn’t lame or abnormal.”
And my heart broke.
Upon graduating from a prestigious four-year university, Rebecca had worked and volunteered at multiple local nonprofits, searching for her vocational home and calling. What Rebecca—and Rebecca’s parents—thought would take a year or two had taken seven years. But that extended search had made a difference. Rebecca was now confident about her career calling and committed to using her skills and voice to serve and advocate for refugees as they entered the US workforce. Rebecca hadn’t been wandering or stalling; she was adulting.
Service and Career: Two Vocational Adulting Opportunities to Shape the World
In the last chapter, we highlighted the importance of adulting, meaning a child’s growth in agency as they embrace opportunities to shape the world around them, specifically in their relationships. In this chapter, we transition from relational adulting to vocational adulting. Committed in our mission to “form global leaders for Kingdom vocations,” we at Fuller Seminary define vocation as “identity in Christ, embodied in a specific context, expressed in service to God’s mission.” As described by theologian Frederick Buechner, vocation is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Two of the primary vocational channels that help learners, explorers, and focusers make our world a better place are service and career. Both service and career reflect God’s universal call on each person to use our resources (our skills, time, energy, and finances) to further God’s work in our world. Both aim to restore the peace (or shalom) that God intends for all people and relationships. Put more simply, both share the same end goal of righting wrongs.
In the midst of these similarities, your learner, explorer, or focuser likely thinks of the two differently. They consider their present or future job as their career—whether that be as a stay-at-home parent, a white-collar professional, a blue-collar laborer, or a uniformed soldier or sailor. In contrast, they view service as the difference they make outside their career—often by volunteering in church, nonprofits, faith-based ministries, or local philanthropies.
In a world that puts more and more pressure on young people to know what they want to do before they even really know themselves, we think service is often an important step in helping our kids identify their career calling. That’s what happened to Rebecca. It was her volunteer work at nonprofits in Los Angeles that revealed her deep burden for refugees. Her career calling emerged as she experimented with service.
In Rebecca’s initial pursuit of service and her eventual pursuit of a career, she needed patient, wise adults—her two parents and a handful of other mentors—to help her identify God’s vocational call on her life and to support her during her longer-than-expected adulting journey.
Adulting Insights: Research Related to Your Child’s Service
Every day, often through social media, our young people are exposed to the best and worst of our world. This section showcases research insights that capture how, when, and where young people typically serve—and how Growing With parents not only fuel our kids’ service but also roll up our sleeves and get involved.
The Good News: Young People Are Already Changing the World around Them
We at the Fuller Youth Institute embarked on four years of research on Growing Young churches with the primary goal of understanding how churches are changing teenagers and young adults.
We accomplished that goal, but along the way we identified an important corollary. Churches are definitely shaping young people, but the reverse is just as true: young people are also shaping churches.
When we asked pastors, congregational leaders, and parents to describe what teenagers and young adults add to churches, the term we heard more than any other was vitality.
Adulting young people add more passion.
More innovation.
More creativity.
And sometimes even more money. While teenagers and young adults are often not themselves huge financial givers or tithers (to put it mildly), their energy can attract older adults with more resources, who in turn faithfully support the ministries of the church.
Serving Together: A Starting Point and a Launching Pad
Perhaps your learner, explorer, or focuser is already bringing vitality to a church or nonprofit through their involvement and ideas. That’s terrific, but if your family is like most, you aren’t around while they serve. Maybe the members of your family are serving individually through church and other philanthropies, but your family is not serving together.
While more challenging for your family schedule, recent research reveals that serving together—doing the same activity at the same time in the same place—can become a springboard for families, especially families of learners, to have rich Growing With conversations about serving and adulting that wouldn’t happen otherwise. This was confirmed in our interviews with parents growing with their learner teenagers. Despite juggling busy schedules and a host of priorities, over half of the families we studied are serving together.
“For the last 18 months, our family has had a seven-year-old child of an addict we know living with us. That’s been stressful for our kids. But it’s also been growing for them. At first, we were frustrated because we didn’t get more help from other friends, but we’ve realized why people give up on addicts and their families. It’s not convenient. Helping other people is inconvenient.” —Myesha, an Illinois mom of one learner and three explorers
Saundra, a mother of explorers and focusers, told about shopping with her two children years ago. During their errands, they encountered a cashier at a grocery store lamenting that it was her son’s birthday and she didn’t have the money to buy him the gaming device he really wanted. Saundra recalled, “As we left the store, I asked our kids, ‘Should we take the money we were going to use on something fun for our own family and buy a gaming device for this mom to give to her son?’”
Saundra’s three sons immediately responded, “Yes.” So the family made a quick run to Walmart, bought the gaming device, and headed back to the grocery store. Saundra gave the bag to her kids and stayed in the car. She wanted them to experience how it felt to give such a special gift to a stranger.
From that point on, her kids were quick to look for ways to serve strangers—whether it was helping a senior adult load groceries or buying a sandwich for a teenager sitting on the curb of the 7–Eleven. Saundra summarized one of their family’s mottos: “If God is meeting our needs, we ask ourselves, ‘How can we meet somebody else’s?’”
Serving “Together” Even When You’re Not in the Same Room
For some families, serving together is infeasible. Your child may live 3,000 miles away. Or they may live three yards away but roll their eyes when you ask if they want to serve with you at the nearest hospital or public school.
Our interviews with Growing With families yielded two suggestions for parents who can’t serve at the same place at the same time as their kids:
One Massachusetts dad who is growing with his high school and college students has seen the power of these two steps in his family’s financial stewardship. The dad described, “We have always been very transparent with our kids about how we contribute to the church, and why we think it is important. Our kids care deeply about our church’s local and global impact, so at our church’s last stewardship campaign, they made their own pledges. And it wasn’t, ‘Hey Dad, I haven’t yet made my pledge, can you loan me ten bucks?’ It was, ‘Dad, I’m going to pledge $200,’ and they figured out how to honor that pledge with their own money.”
Learners: Lots of Service but Not Lasting Service
According to one national survey of 12- to 18-year-olds, 55 percent of teenagers are serving, contributing more than 1.3 billion hours of service annually. That is almost twice the adult volunteer rate of 29 percent. (Read that sentence again, adults!)
That’s the good news. But here’s the bad news. While learners are serving a lot, it’s not clear their service leaves a lasting impression on them. Of the more than two million US teenagers who participate in mission trips every year, five out of six report that those trips don’t leave a long-term mark on their lives. More specifically:
Wait. So should you not put down a deposit on your daughter’s mission trip?
Should you just tell your stepson to get a real summer job this year?
Not necessarily! In the “Adulting Ideas” section later in this chapter, we give some practical suggestions to help your learner’s service experience yield the spiritual and overall ROI (return on investment) we all hope for.
Explorers: Struggling Somewhere between Busy and Complicated
While explorers are old enough to periodically be in the driver’s seat of your family’s service, they often end up in the back seat, or never quite make their way into the vehicle at all. One study of age cohorts conducted by the US Bureau of Labor found that volunteer rates were lowest among 20- to 24-year-olds, with about 18.4 percent reporting they serve.
Some of the barriers that keep our college-aged young adults from serving are internal, such as their perception that they aren’t capable of nor have adequate resources for helping others right now. They believe those capacities will come when they are older, so it makes sense to wait until later to serve.
In addition, compared with teenagers who follow household rules and thirtysomethings who often have households of their own, twentysomethings tend to have more latitude to decide about their own schedules, living situations, and relationships. Consequently, according to Jeffrey Arnett, “There is no time in life that is more self-focused than emerging adulthood.”
Yet before we point a finger at explorers in general, or more specifically at the explorer in our own family, let’s remember that some of the barriers preventing philanthropic service stem from what they have seen modeled in adults. Including us.
Perhaps their consumerism mirrors our own drive to achieve the “middle-class dream” of a family, nice car, and comfortable house.
Maybe their embrace of individualism and the consequent belief that it’s up to each individual to answer how (if at all) they want to serve others—on their own time and their own terms—reflect our attitudes and actions at home.
Our intent in sharing how our kids mirror the good, bad, and ugly in us isn’t to make any of us feel judged. Instead, it’s to help us each stop and look at our own perspectives and practices before we judge those of the nearest explorer.
Focusers: Benefiting from Rolling Up Their Sleeves and Serving Others
When service data is not confined just to 18- to 23-year-olds but expanded to all adulting twentysomethings (and even thirtysomethings), a more encouraging picture of their service emerges. According to the Nielsen Company, 57 percent of Millennials (those born from 1980 to 2000) engage in volunteerism, more than any other age group. The top three causes young adults care about are education, poverty, and the environment. Given these passions, it’s not surprising that more young adults than ever are looking for first jobs in community service programs like Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, Engineers without Borders, International Justice Mission, and AmeriCorps.
Adulting Insights: Research Related to Your Child’s Career
For our young people, vocational adulting involves not just service but also expanding (and at times narrowing) career choices. Our kids’ career roller coasters give us a new ride to grow with our kids—if we are willing to climb on board.
Parents’ Struggle and Support during the Career Highs and Lows
When we asked parents which areas of their adolescents’ and young adults’ lives require the most support, the top two answers were “major life decisions” and “career, vocation, or work-related decisions.” Four times as many Growing With parents found the career process to be “hard” compared with those who labeled it as “easy.”
For their part, our adulting young people often feel like they are stuck in a pit of career stress. They know they are supposed to be exploring new career options, but often the daily pressure to pay the bills leads them to jobs that are dissatisfying in the present and unlikely to lead to a dream job in the future. Sometimes our explorers and focusers who had particular career intentions in the preceding life stage realize that those past inclinations no longer fit them, so they feel like they are starting over vocationally. It takes longer to figure out a vocational call than today’s twentysomethings expect, which leads young people (and their parents) to fret that they will never land a “real job” that is meaningful, stable, and financially sensible.
In the midst of the career stress and pressure felt by kids and parents alike, the Growing With parents we interviewed try to support their learners, explorers, and focusers by taking two primary steps:
One Georgia mom of learners and explorers discovered the importance of these two steps by doing the opposite. Since first grade, Tasha has said she wants to be a teacher. Her mom has been worried about this goal because she sees teachers struggle financially from paycheck to paycheck. Tasha is now in college and is going to graduate with some debt, so her mom started verbalizing her concerns more frequently. Finally, Tasha stopped her mom, looked her in the eye, and said, “Mom, God told me I’m going to be a teacher when I was seven years old. Will you please stop trying to tell me to do something different?” According to Tasha’s mom, “That pretty much made me be quiet.”
Learners’ Initial Vocational Experiments
As with many paths crisscrossing your teenager’s life, their career steps take the form of experiments that typically lurch—and at times stumble—forward haphazardly. Often as your child enters high school, they branch out into new academic disciplines or extracurricular activities. Your former math whiz kid might lose interest in geometry and instead immerse themselves in ceramics. Your basketball player gearing up for a fall tournament might also choose to audition for their school’s winter musical. While these adolescent experiments may not last more than a year and may not lead directly to a long-term calling, they often contribute to your adulting child’s unfolding grasp of career possibilities in unexpected and powerful ways.
I (Steve) recall that when our middle daughter entered high school, she was introduced to so many new activities. Elise was excited, but Jen and I could tell that she was having trouble figuring out how to choose and prioritize the best activities for her. I thought I was helping when I asked her, “What activities and clubs do you want to join?” Elise answered, “All of them.”
While her answer was impractical, it was honest. Her instinct made sense to her: “If I can’t choose, I’ll just do them all.” I learned that growing with Elise involved the added step of helping her find a healthy balance between investing in a few things and doing everything. In fact, many families find that empowering their adulting learners to pursue one interest outside the classroom may be enough in certain seasons.
Some need limits.
Others need encouragement to step out.
None of our learners can do it all.
Explorers and Focusers: Experimenting or Floundering?
Depending on who you talk with and what you read, twentysomethings are either deadbeats dragging down our entire economic system or innovative geniuses representing the hope for Western civilization. We may gravitate toward one side or the other of this debate, but research paints a compelling picture that most young people are simply trying to survive in an increasingly competitive world.
ECONOMIC EMPLOYMENT REALITIES
While our culture often points a finger of shame at our underemployed adulting young people, the underlying causes for their vocational and career upheaval are diverse and often beyond their control.
This economic environment has upended traditional pathways for explorers and focusers seeking employment. Facing empty kitchen cupboards in their apartments and rent due at the end of the month, the average 22-year-old has held more than four different jobs in the last four years. One Gallup study of twentysomethings found that more than one-third were unemployed, underemployed, or living “gig to gig,” meaning they were making do with part-time work, juggling several interim jobs, freelancing, or starting their own business. If you’re like the two of us, you know explorers and focusers who work full time while also supplementing that income with one or more “side hustles.”
VOCATIONAL (HOLY) DISCONTENT
At times, our explorers’ and focusers’ job transitions are due to their own limitations and flaws, such as their poor understanding about their own strengths, or their lack of information about the job market, available career options, and training requirements. Perhaps our kids suffer from a lack of “grit,” meaning a lack of commitment and perseverance, without which it’s tough to pursue a vocational goal, especially after failing the day before. Or maybe our kids have swallowed the “30 is the new 20” mythology; instead of investing in their careers, they avoid vocational decisions, squander career opportunities, and coast.
But at other times, even when explorers’ and focusers’ job-hopping stems largely from their own choosing, the motivations that drive their transitions are admirable, such as:
While others accuse explorers and focusers of floundering or drifting, we prefer to view them as experimenters. We agree with a fleet of career counselors who view indecisiveness as a normative phase in career development that is most often temporary and eventually resolved. Indeed, most adulting explorers and focusers report finding careers that are both satisfying and long-term by their late twenties. And those ultimate vocations often are a better fit for our children since they have spent several years considering options and analyzing their own strengths and weaknesses.
That’s easy to say, but when it’s your 26-year-old cobbling together various part-time jobs while living in your guest room, it’s tougher to take comfort in such so-called “normalcy.” While there is no guarantee for our kids (or us) that their experiments will eventually lead to the career promised land, some of the encouraging signs of young adults’ vocational adulting are when they maintain:
Parents Are Also Invited to Grow during This Vocational Adulting Season
Right as our kids are navigating their own quarterlife career transitions and choices, we parents are often hip deep in our own midlife job shifts. While many of us are hitting the peak of our job satisfaction and expertise, others are losing our jobs or retiring early. Now that our kids’ college tuition bills have been largely paid, some of us are even reinventing ourselves in an “encore career,” pursuing a long-deferred dream we have postponed for the good of our family’s financial stability. Others find that just as their own kids leave the nest, their aging parents require care and perhaps also financial support. Even though we have more vocational mileage than our kids, we are still adulting and navigating the new twists and turns that come our way.
In the midst of this winding vocational road, our kids’ choices reveal our hidden anxieties and unresolved disappointments. Some of us wish we could redo our twenties so we’d be in a different spot today. Deep down, we hoped our kids would follow in our career footsteps. Or maybe we secretly envy our child for having the courage and faith to pursue the riskier career that we wish we had pursued. Parents thrilled that their kids are the first in their family to go to college are ecstatic about their kids’ accomplishments, but may also be anxious about their own inability to fully empathize with and support them.
Our own career challenges and changes give us a prime laboratory to grow with our adulting learner, explorer, or focuser. We can model how to face vocational regret and anxiety with determination and honesty. We can be an example of how to persevere even when our own initial online applications and job interviews don’t pan out as we hoped. We can empathize with the good, bad, and ugly of the career journeys that we experience alongside our adulting kids.
I (Steve) once hiked a mountain ridge with a friend, and we came over a crest and saw a wandering river below. We mused that if we created that river, it would be straight, efficient, clean. Yet in the twists and turns of this river, life sprang up at every bend. In our own vocational journeys, perhaps the “wrong turns” aren’t detours but opportunities for life and growth—opportunities that will be even more meaningful as we share them with our adulting kids.
Adulting Ideas: Enabling Your Child’s Adulting through Their Service
Helping Your Family Serve Others
The earlier your family jumps into the adventure of service, the better. Many of you have been serving together with your families since your children were toddlers. When your kid has a free Saturday morning or is home for Christmas break, it feels normal to volunteer together at the local recycling center or at your church campus.
If serving together isn’t yet part of your family’s identity, try these baby steps to help your learner, explorer, or focuser understand how service can shape the world around them.
“When our two kids were teenagers, we would go to restaurants and pick out one family and pay for their bill. One time, we decided to cover the bill of a sweet old couple, which blew away our waitress. When it was time to pay our bill, the waitress said, ‘Oh, it’s been paid. The family next to you heard what you did, and they were so touched by it that they offered to cover your tab.’” —Anya, a California mother of one learner and one explorer
IF YOUR CHILD LIVES AT HOME
IF YOUR CHILD DOESN’T LIVE AT HOME
“Helping our kids recognize they are called to serve and make a difference in our world is not always about seeing a big finish. Often it is the smaller things. The things that might seem inconsequential can actually have the biggest impact. We might not be able to see that impact, but we have to trust how Christ works in that.” —Andrea, a mother of a learner and an explorer
View Service as a Process, Not an Event
Whether we are serving together as a family or our kids are serving on their own, we are more likely to be transformed when we no longer consider a Tuesday evening visit to a senior center as a mere three-hour activity but rather as a 24-hour journey. Instead of thinking of a weekend house-building trip as a two-day event, we view it as a two-week adventure.
That mindset is possible when you think of service as a three-step process: before, during, and after.
Before: A lasting service experience starts when we help our learner, explorer, or focuser properly prepare for the sometimes menial and often mind-blowing service experiences awaiting them.
During: Enhance the adulting that can emerge from service by helping your young person reflect on their experience.
After: Deepen the impression of service by helping your child connect the dots between the public school building they painted in a nearby city and the homeless woman they pass every day on their way to class.
Recently, Dave and I (Kara) had the chance to take our three kids, two of whom were teenage learners at the time, to Brazil with Compassion International. To maximize the adulting this trip offered our kids, we treated this six-day trip as a six-week process.
Beforehand, Dave and I downloaded key insights about Brazilian culture and history. With a bag of York Peppermint Patties to motivate our kids to stay focused, we spent an hour sitting on a picnic blanket at a nearby park and learning the highlights of Brazil’s past and people.
“When our kids were teenagers, we took them on our first family short-term mission trip. Our kids got to hear me discuss how I arrived at my faith. Plus they got to express their faith to people their age who had no idea who Jesus was. I think we would have been okay without that trip, but that trip really solidified our family unity and our sense of family faith.” —Marcos, a Texas dad of one learner and one explorer
We also received the names, ages, and interests of the families and children we were going to visit. That information, along with pictures of the young children we would be meeting, helped nudge us to pray for our soon-to-be friends.
A month before the trip, each of our kids asked an adult to meet with them for coffee to help them process how they were feeling, what they were looking forward to, and what they were anxious about.
When we returned home from Brazil, Nathan, Krista, and Jessica each got together with that same mentor. They shared what they learned about themselves and how God used their unique interests (Nathan’s love of sports, Krista’s love of organizing people to play games, Jessica’s love of photography) to build relationships with Brazilians of all ages.
Since we were able to sponsor a child we met through Compassion, we now keep in touch with and regularly pray for 11-year-old Ticiane. Every Christmas and at Ticiane’s birthday, our kids pool their money for a special gift to let Ticiane know they are thinking of her.
In part as a result of the trip, Nathan began tutoring lower-income elementary school kids for an hour each week. Krista commits a week each summer and multiple afternoons during the school year to volunteer at a neighborhood educational center and at our church. Too young to serve as a volunteer in local nonprofits, Jessica serves every summer in our church’s vacation Bible school. Because we treated our trip to Brazil as a process and not an event, we were able to grow with our kids, and the seeds planted there continue to bear fruit in our family.
This before/during/after approach applies not just to global philanthropy but also to service you do in your own neighborhood. Last Tuesday night, Krista and I volunteered for 90 minutes at a shelter for homeless families located 10 minutes from our home.
During our short drive there, I asked Krista a few key questions: Why are the families we are going to meet living in this shelter? What do you hope happens while we’re there?
On the way home, I gave Krista a few minutes on her phone so she could catch up with friends she hadn’t texted in 90 minutes (which can feel like an eternity to her and her friends). Then I asked her to put the phone away and I shared about the pregnant resident I met who peppered me with questions about nearby hospitals and doctors. We talked about our favorite parts of the evening, highlights of the conversations we had with the children and parents, how it was different than she expected, and how we hope to do it again next month.
Adulting Ideas: Empowering Your Child’s Adulting through Their Career
Become a Key Chain Parent
In our research on Growing Young churches, we found that the leaders who best mobilize young people in their gifts and callings are those who show what we came to call “key chain leadership.” Key chain leaders are regularly looking for ways to hand keys to the church over to young people. Not necessarily literal keys, but rather keys that represent new authority, power, and access that expand young people’s experiences and opportunities in their congregations and communities.
We believe that a parallel process of “key chain parenting” is just as vital in our families. The good news is that our adulting kids are ready for those keys; they are divinely gifted with unique skills and a unique vocational calling to offer the world. The bad news is that only 55 percent of young people who can identify their passions and skills receive adult support to develop and showcase them.
That’s unfortunate because in all three stages of learner, explorer, and focuser, our kids benefit from an adult who identifies and hands over keys. As our kids unlock vocational possibilities, they need a parent or a trusted adult to affirm what works, thereby empowering them to open new doors toward their future career and calling.
Handing the Right Keys to Your Child
In the learner stage, key chain parents reflect on their child’s preferred academic disciplines or talents emerging in extracurricular activities. A quick glimpse at 17-year-old Nathan’s report card makes it pretty obvious to him (and anyone else) that he excels in math and science (like his engineering dad). What has been less obvious to Nathan is that he is also a gifted teacher. Whether he’s helping his grandmother with her cell phone or his sisters with their math, Dave and I (Kara) have shared with him that he has the patience of Job and the teaching instinct of Socrates. We have told him that we don’t know if teaching will play in to his career calling, but it’s a key that we hope he continues to use to unlock the potential of others.
Based on what we see as Krista’s interests and strengths, we have helped her pinpoint some of her keys: speech and debate, playing with little kids, designing images on her laptop, and editing videos. Oh, and coming up with great ideas and enlisting people in executing them. Dave and I aren’t sure what career recipe will emerge from those ingredients, but we are glad we have paid attention to her hobbies and joys so we can imagine her future with her. We look forward to doing the same with Jessica when she hits high school.
When kids reach the explorer stage, key chain parents remind their kids of dreams they may have forgotten. Your 21-year-old might not remember their intention three years ago to take as many literature classes in college as possible, or to spend a year abroad to understand microeconomic forces in the developing world. As parents, we remember the lyrics to our kids’ past dreams and sing them back to them when the timing is right.
Sometimes the songs we sing back to our kids are new songs for us as parents. My (Steve’s) oldest two kids have very different career goals. Elise is pursuing business. I was a finance and marketing major and worked in the business world, so as she talks with us about potential post-college careers, I have numerous opinions and examples.
My eldest daughter, Kara, is an accomplished artist. Since graduating with her bachelor’s in fine arts, she has tried to navigate non-art work for life’s daily expenses while also developing her art career. I’m embarrassed to say I used to swoop in with lots of advice on how Kara should market her art and get ahead in her field. Typically this was met with resistance from her and frustration from me. But then after a serious conversation between us, I realized that I was trying to give business career advice to an artist! I have not stopped trying to help her navigate her art career, but I am learning how to understand her field and career goals before superimposing my experiences on her. It is a new tune for me and a more encouraging one for her.
In all three stages of learner, explorer, and focuser, identifying keys does not mean prescribing a career for them. Their career is theirs, not ours. Often when we see passions or proclivities in our children, our best step is to pray. As one Midwest couple with children who are now young adults and beyond recalled, “When our oldest son was really little, we had a feeling that he was going to become a pastor, but we always thought it was not our place to tell him that. If God wanted him to be a pastor, God would need to speak that to his heart. So we never told him, but we prayed about it. Sure enough, God did call him to ministry. It’s hard to hold your tongue at times and sit back and watch your kids struggle a bit, but God is faithful.”
Reframe All Work as “Holy”
“I’m so sick of speakers at chapel inviting us to be pastors.” This frustrated junior at a large Christian college continued, “Most of us are going to be engineers, nurses, teachers, or accountants. I’m tired of speakers making us feel like those jobs don’t matter as much as being a pastor or missionary.”
Contrary to the message this adulting explorer was hearing at his college chapel, we believe that every career provides opportunities for ministry. Sure, there are some (like both of us) who are called into full-time ministry as a career. But every vocation has the potential to be ministry. Any and every job gives our kids the opportunity to worship God, love and serve others, use their gifts to create new solutions, and point our world to the God who loves them more than they can imagine. As one Florida dad we interviewed regularly reminds his three sons, “I do not care what you do for a living. What I care about is that you live your life for God’s purposes. Frankly, that is where fulfillment, significance, purpose, and joy lie.”
Teaching your learners. Give your learners a taste of your own attempts to live for God’s purposes. Make sure your kids know not just what you do (which may require a visit to your job site for them to truly grasp how you spend your time) but why you do it and how you try to minister to others through high quality work and relationships.
Guiding your explorers and resourcing your focusers. As your twentysomething children move into the explorer and focuser stages, it’s time to invite them to peer behind the curtain of your job experiences to understand how God continues to grow you through the highs and lows of your vocational trajectory. The boss who seemed to favor others. The layoff you didn’t expect. The promotion or raise you deserved but didn’t receive. As you discuss these common job situations and experiences with your emerging adults—sharing your mistakes as well as how God both protected and guided you—they gain a bigger vision of what it means to love and serve God in all jobs and all seasons. Sharing these stories also gives your kids a front-row seat into how you are still adulting too.
“We try to help our kids avoid judging possible jobs based on what’s the best career opportunity or what makes the most money. The question is, ‘What do you see God calling you to?’” —Wendy, a mom of a learner and a focuser
One very blunt dad we interviewed confessed, “Along the way, I have sometimes whined about my job. I’ve told my kids that sometimes supporting a family and working kind of stinks. But in the midst of those challenges, here’s what I’m learning or what I am growing into. I think that’s helping my kids understand that a job isn’t just a place to make money. It’s also a place to grow and give back.”
Growing With Your Learner as They Prepare for Life after High School
You grab your keys and head to your car for a 15-minute drive to the nearest shopping mall with your high school junior or senior. As you back down your driveway, you think, “Oh good, this will give us a chance to talk about life after high school.”
Your child sitting next to you thinks, “Oh no, now he’s going to want to talk to me about life after high school.”
Both Steve and I have realized (often through our mistakes) that planning with our learners about their future can be a season of great family success or great family strife. If you want to grow with your child in these early vocational and college choices about life after high school, try the following.
Create a system that works for your learner to keep track of deadlines. If your learner has the option of attending college, junior and senior years bring a quantum leap to the application, scholarship, and test deadlines that your family needs to track. Before shifting the burden of responsibility for all those deadlines to your learner (which we recommend), help them develop an organizational calendar and a system that works for them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a spreadsheet or a stack of sticky notes; what’s most important is that it works for your teenager.
Visit where you can. As much as budget and schedule allow, visit potential schools with your child. Take tours, talk to current students, and visit a class or two. Countless families of learners have found it was the campus visit that was the clincher. Plus all those visits give you time over meals, in the car, and maybe even on planes to talk with your learner about the major and college experience that will best prepare them for their possible future vocation.
Remember there is no single perfect job or school for your child. Admittedly, all the unknowns after high school can be stressful. But don’t add an unnecessary cloud of anxiety to your family’s ecosystem by believing the lie that there’s only one great job or one great school for your learner. That puts too much pressure on the decision of one (often unpredictable) college admissions committee or one (potentially arbitrary) employer. Most high school graduates have lots of good options, any one of which sets them up to succeed in their twenties and beyond.
Be interpreters of their interests. Learners will often answer “I don’t know” to questions about their future work aspirations or possible undergraduate majors. As parents, pay attention to what they’re interested in and help them see where their interests and gifts connect with real jobs. For example: Does he love babysitting? Perhaps he would be a great elementary teacher. Is she always looking for excuses to get outside? There are some exciting jobs in forestry, marine biology, or mountain guiding. Does she find herself taking appliances apart to discover how they work? Engineers or mechanics do that every day. Does he continually ask “why”? Maybe he would be a great reporter or writer.
Enjoy the ride. My (Kara’s) personality is rather type A (or at times, more like type A+). Before diving into the college experience with our oldest, I feared that I would put too much pressure on him—and myself—to work every possible angle to enhance his college application and thus expand his college options. But early in Nathan’s junior year, I felt like God reminded me of this reality: I only get to go through this college experience with Nathan once. After that nudge, when I felt my inner anxiety—and my subsequent tendency to place undue pressure on my child—rise, I reminded myself that we’ll never get to go through this again, so let’s enjoy the ride!
Rest in God’s plan. As a mom of three learners, one explorer, and one focuser summarized, “The most helpful prayer that God has led me to pray with sincerity is, ‘I trust you.’ I can almost mark the season when that went from being something I knew in my head to something that was a genuine anchor for me. God has our son covered. We are given responsibility but we are not ultimately responsible.”
Bobblehead Parenting with Your Explorers and Focusers
Serving as a guide to our explorers and a resourcer to our focusers often means avoiding overreacting to our children’s shifting career decisions. One mother of a young adult who delayed going to college referred to her philosophy of parenting as “bobblehead parenting.” As she summarized, “Our 20-year-old son is thinking about going to a four-year college to get his bachelor’s degree. But that changes almost weekly. I never know what plan is going to stick. So I now just sort of shake my head ‘yes’ and ‘okay’ to whatever his plan is this week. I call it ‘bobblehead parenting.’” Responding more calmly and somewhere in the range between neutral and positive is making this Growing With mom more approachable and a better sounding board.
Nodding along with your kids—at least for a few moments or a short season—buys you and them time to process while keeping the channels of dialogue open in those moments when you most need them to remain open. Like when your daughter tells you she is leaving a secure job. Or when your son announces that he is changing majors, which means it will take him another 12 months—and another year of tuition—to finish his degree. In those moments, nodding along helps you to do the following:
Take a breath.
Be curious and open to their ideas.
Listen and hear them out without cutting them short.
Catch the deeper longing that lies beneath their crazy idea.
Stay connected relationally and avoid overreacting.
Walk through their plan with them to see the possibilities and hurdles.
Remember that your adulting kids are growing to appreciate your feedback, not depend on your permission.
Knowing How Best to Help Your Explorers and Focusers in Their Job Search . . . and When to Step Aside
Based on their interviews with career counselors who specialize in working with young people, Jeffrey Arnett and Elizabeth Fishel provide the following practical vocational suggestions for parents of twentysomethings.
Remember: It’s their job search, not yours. The same tendency that may have led you during your high school senior’s application process to tell others, “We’re applying to college” can lead you to think “We’re searching for a job.” The reality is that you are not going to be hired; your child is.
Offer a menu of possible choices of help, and let young people pick what works best. Instead of trying to guess what your child wants from you, offer a host of options—ranging from reviewing a résumé and brainstorming potential contacts to role-playing an interview and helping set six- and twelve-month goals—and let them choose from the menu.
Assist in creating a jobs advisory network. Since up to 60–70 percent of job possibilities come through networking rather than listed openings, one of the primary channels of support for explorers and focusers is helping them build a network of contacts and advisors. You can help them brainstorm relatives, teachers, coaches, former supervisors, neighbors, and church members they can contact (note that it’s your kids initiating the contact, not you) for advice and potential connections.
As one mother of a learner and an explorer we interviewed reminisced, “Our daughter met with a female CEO of a psychological hospital who started with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. My daughter was utterly blown away that she started with this degree and went on to such a major accomplishment. My daughter was also surprised at the turns and twists in this successful professional’s career journey. She realized that life and our vocations are not always linear.”
Encourage your child to seek internships and volunteer roles to gain experience and connections. Unpaid or barely paid internships are a primary way for your adulting explorer or focuser to gain real-world work experience during (or instead of) college, over the summers, and after graduation. What they lack in salary they often make up for in your child’s ability to get a foot in the door, make contacts, and try on jobs for size. Or you might want to encourage your child to volunteer a few hours or evenings a week for your church or another organization that needs help. Just make sure that while you’re supporting unpaid internships, you’re not also hinting that your child “make money”—which places your child in an untenable and unwinnable dilemma.
At Fuller, we love helping our students (many of whom are twentysomethings) think about service and career. And we love acronyms. So we’ve developed a CIQ (central integration question): At this point in your Christian journey, how do you envision your call to God’s mission in the world? Steve and I applaud this question because the phrase At this point in your Christian journey implies evolution and growth.
This question, as well as this phrase, is a regular part of our curriculum.
It captures the tears and relief of Rebecca, whom we described at the beginning of this chapter.
And it names what we sense in our families as we watch our kids navigate their vocational adulting and, if we’re honest, discern our own unfolding call to both service and career.