Helping Your Children Find a Path to Happiness

We all want our children to be happy. The trouble is there is no guarantee of what will make them happy. But we try, nonetheless.

When they are young, we make most of their choices. As they mature, however, they make their decisions. So what do we do when our children make a decision we know will make them unhappy down the road? Do we step in or step back? How do we help them find a path to happiness?

I am an ex-actress who is now a writer. My journey from writing to acting and back again is a long one spanning nearly twenty years. I won’t bore you with the all the details, just a few of them. My hope is my story will ease your mind about the choices your children make.

In high school, I developed a love for acting and writing. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer could have been actress or journalist, depending on the day.

I didn’t always want to do those things. At the age of eight, I told my parents I would never marry, become a scientist and live with them. Forever. They must have been thrilled with my plans.

Despite my issues with realistic career choices, at age 18 even I knew an acting career was risky. I had also abandoned my plans to be a scientist (too much math) and living with my parents (too much supervision). So when it came time to fill in the bubble on my college paperwork for “major,” I skipped acting and the sciences, and instead chose “Journalism.”

Journalism was a practical profession. Respectable. A career where one could expect to earn a living. And, as far as I could tell, there was little math involved.

I went to a state school in Kirksville, Missouri, touted as “the Harvard of the Midwest.” Knowing what I do about Ivy League schools now, I can assure you this was false advertising. I enjoyed none of the advantages a Harvard graduate does, in the Midwest or anywhere else.

My Journalism 101 professor was a slim fellow in need of a haircut. He wore a plaid button-down shirt, chinos, and worn topsider shoes. He carried a messenger bag slung across his body, its strap cutting a diagonal across his thin chest. He had pudgy white cheeks like a child’s and wore Lennon glasses before they were fashionable (again).

I expected to be inspired. I was disappointed.

His entire first lecture described journalism as a miserable profession. A job where you made less than $18,000 a year, which even then was a meager sum, and that was just when you were employed. Furthermore, when you were lucky enough to have a permanent gig, you were on call 24/7 and expected to thrust a microphone into the face of a grieving mother that just discovered her child died and ask her how she feels.

Um…what?

While I knew Journalism wasn’t a cakewalk, I didn’t picture anything quite so desolate as what he described. I left class feeling snake bit, the punctures of his lecture’s fangs allowing my journalistic enthusiasm to leak out with a slow, pathetic hiss.

I had an epiphany. If this bleak and challenging career path is what I’m in for, then I may as well suffer for the art I really love…acting!

I told my parents I was going to be a Theatre major but not to worry; I would get my minor in Music, to “fall back on.” They didn’t say a word. I took this to mean they were once again thrilled with my plans.

Acting didn’t work out. It turns out not everyone who decides to go for stardom makes it. Who knew?

I needed a job. I became a sales rep for an alternative radio station. It paid 100% commission. My desk was so close to the back door that when people went out to smoke behind the station, the snowflakes would spatter across my desk.

Not that the spattering mattered. No snow got on the phone that I used to get smacked with rejection all day.

I didn’t bother looking for another job, however. Where else would a Theatre major (with that helpful Music minor) get hired that didn’t involve the phrases “Would you like to see a dessert menu?” or “Do you need a different size of the curvy, boot-cut stonewash denim?”

Without any other choice, I survived my first job in sales. I bounced around for the next couple of years, always taking a better opportunity, and always learning more about how to be better at my job. At the top of my sales career, I was the Director of Client Relations for a marketing company in Southern California. So hey, it worked out fine in the end.

After I had left this job to raise my children, I missed it. Being a mom was not enough. One of my ex-team members reached out to me in my mommyhood five years ago and asked if I wanted to write some copy for my old company. And just like that, Lively Copywriting was born. I am one of the work-at-home-moms otherwise known as WAHMs.

When I decided to be a theater major, my parents were less than thrilled and probably terrified for my future. However, if they had tried to convince me to return to my Journalism major or even to my original dream of spinster scientist, I wouldn’t have listened. Wisely, they didn’t.

When your son or daughter comes to you full of exuberance about their decision to major in Elizabethan Poetry or Pottery, don’t despair. Our job as parents is not to control what our children do as adults, but to lay the foundation of confidence and determination that will help them find happiness, whatever twisty-turny path they choose.

When I went to college, I was a Journalism major. When I left it, I was a Theatre major with a Music minor. Now I am a writer and a WAHM. I made my choices. I lived with them. My journey led me here, and I can assure you it’s a happy place.

That is a good thing because if there is any truth to Karma, my kids are going to test my theory when their time comes.