My husband and I were chatting the other day about my book. He asked me what the title was. I have been trying for years to figure out the title, but how do you you summarize 120 pages to one short phrase? So he asked me again, ‘What’s your book about?”
“It’s about how college students don’t know what to major in because they don’t know themselves vey well. So parents need to take an active role in helping their children identify and nurture those interests and abilities that each kid has.”
He says, “That’s what I deal with everyday.” My husband is an academic advisor at our local public college. He says, “So many of my students don’t know what they want to be when they graduate.”
“If you don’t know where you are going,
then it doesn’t matter which road you take, does it?”
~ Cheshire Cat in Alice in the Wonderland
And I said, “That’s is one of the issues I address in the book. We need to stop talking about what they want to be when they grow up and start focusing on the things they actually like doing now.” That is what a career should based on; things one likes to do. Not what you THINK you’d like to be some day. Daniel Gilbert explains in his book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” that we cannot accurately imagine our own future, but that is how we instinctively choose our careers: imagine a situation and make a decision based on that vision. But we only imagine the best parts of the job. We fail to imagine the worse parts. So in essence, if you go about choosing your career this way, you are probably setting yourself up for misery. I explained further. “If you look at the activities that you do because you like to do them, then choose a career that uses those activities, then you know you are going to like doing that job…because you are already doing it.”
And he said, “They just aren’t taking responsibility for their education.”
And I said, “Well why do you think that is? Their parents never told them what is coming. That is why the current working title of my book is, ‘Have the Conversation.’ It’s because parents need to have a conversation with their kids and tell them that at some point the parent will no longer be responsible for their kid’s life. It’s so obvious a transition, parents don’t think it needs to be said. Every college student instinctively knows that college will end some day and the real world starts. But I don’t think the college student really understands what this means. If they did, the student would take college a whole lot more seriously.”
“Ok, ” I said, “so what’s a good title? How do I narrow all of that down to one phrase?” It’s confusing. Is it about parenting? Is it about education? Is it about teaching kids about education or life responsibilities?”
He suggested ‘PG 13.’ What do you think?
Working Title 1: “Have the Conversation: Prepping your Child for College and Beyond”
Working Title 2: “Prepping your Child for College and Beyond”
Working Title 3: “The $50,000 Mistake: Prepping your Child for College and Beyond”
Working Title 4: “PG13: Prepping for College in the 21st Century”
Grow Kids 