Executive Portfolio

This article was written by Johnell Smalls

No matter how old you are, parents still consider you their baby. They want to make sure you are properly fed, have a roof over your head and that everything they ever wanted for you, is achieved. From the time you are born until you turn 18, parents have the right to tell you what to do. But should it continue once your an adult? Many times it does and as an adult the battle of expectations may be even harder to handle.

“I want my daughter to stay in Atlanta at least two years before going off to college,” mom, Cynthia Taylor of Atlanta said. Taylor said her daughter wants to move away but she is not going for it. This is one of the top disagreement among parents and their children. Children would like to venture off to experience life away from home but parents would rather them to stay close. Just as parents would like to choose where their children live, they also make demands about college.

“My grandmother wanted me to major in Surgical Technology at a school I wasn’t interested in,” Jasmine Thompson a student at Fort Valley University said. Thompson mom also did not want her to leave her hometown. “I basically told them it was a good idea but that’s not what I wanted to do. I’ll be the one waking up hating the work everyday not them,” Thompson said. That’s how most kids break it down to their parents. Even if you pick the school, major, classes and everything, chances that you’re child will not do the best as he or she possibly can will increase.

This can be hard to hear that your child wants to live there own life without any advice from you so some parents use threat tactics to influence their kids. “My father said he wasn’t going to pay my tuition unless I majored in Business needless to say that’s the degree I graduated with,” William Bellinger, a student at Georgia State University said. Bellinger says he grew to love the major but other students are not as happy as him when parents pick their major or school. Other tactics parents use to either keep their children close by or in a same state while in college is to buy them a new car or agree to pay their auto insurance or phone bill.

Parents just want to see their child exceed in life and sometimes adding their two sense can draw a big disagreement. It’s okay for someone to make mistakes and if that means letting your child go to explore life and make their own mistakes let them do so. You can only protect them for too long. Before parents were trying to choose college and majors for their children, it was husbands and that came to an end. Parents will one day learn that their children are no longer children but adults ready to take on the world by themselves.