In a refreshing departure from this acquiescent parental strategy, Ginz-berg (1984) advised "against parents' adopting a withholding or neutral attitude toward the occupational choice determination of their children" (p. 183). Ginzberg argued that parents who refrained from expressing their feelings about their child's career would be unable to hide their anxieties and would be depriving a child of the opportunity to discuss their career concerns constructively. Children who had no such opportunities would find career decision making more, not less, difficult.
J. V. Miller (1985) offered a model of the relationship between career and family. She observed that career planning is too frequently considered to be an individual undertaking, with few people systematically considering family influences in the decision process. Difficulty in combining career and family roles appears to be a problem for men as well as women, although a higher proportion of men reported such conflicts (NCDA, 1988). Miller is not specific about how to work with families in career interventions, but did suggest that families could progress in developmental career stages much as individuals do. Evans and Bartolome (1984) interviewed twenty-two male managers and their wives, and found most reported a negative spillover of work emotions into family life. The authors concluded that work plays a very significant role early in a manager's career, whereas family plays an increasingly important role later in a career. Managers between the ages of thirty-five and forty-two experienced a new sensitivity to their private lives, and many started to spend more time with their families on weekends. This developmental interplay is the kind of stage theory Miller alluded to, and while it probably does not hold for women returning to the labor force in midlife, it seems reasonable for many traditional career patterns.
A group of researchers at the University of British Columbia, led by Richard A. Young and Larry Cochran, is making substantial strides in studies of career development (Young, 1983) and the family. Recent work by Palmer and Cochran (1988), for example, showed that parents can act as agents of career development for their children. In their study forty families with tenth- and eleventh-grade children completed the four-week Partners program, a self-administered parent-child career intervention. Pre- and post-comparisons between the treatment group (twenty families) and the control group (twenty families) on career maturity (Super et al., 1987), and quality of parent-child relationship revealed that the treated children showed significant gains in overall career orientation, moving from the thirtieth percentile to between the sixtieth and seventieth percentile. In post-treatment interviews, parents reported feeling closer to their children and having better understanding of their plight.
Overall, there was a marked strengthening in the parent-child bond around career issues. The authors concluded that parents can serve as an important source of continuous support, even when counselors or teachers change or are unavailable.
Munson and Manzi (1982) similarly proposed that young people learn about careers at home by watching, listening, assisting, participating, and performing, a model that resembles Krumboltz's (1976) social learning theory, which holds that individuals acquire their work orientations and attitudes through direct experience and observation. Friesen (1986) argued that psychological and sociological approaches to careers could be compatible if the interaction between the individual and the social structures they inhabit were the focus of inquiry. The developmental contextual approach of Vondracek and his colleagues (Vondracek & Schulenberg, 1986; Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1983) depicts these person-environment interactions as the central theoretical focus.
As Lopez and Andrews (1987) noted, little is known about the influence of family interactions on career decision making. Much of the void was probably created by studies of Roe's (1956) theory that could not confirm any long-term effects of parenting styles on eventual vocational choices. Oddly,
Lopez and Andrews appear to believe that a more distant parental role, although unlikely in most families, will lead to better adolescent career choices, presumably because less conflict and more individuation will arise. They characterized the indecisive youngsters and their parents as "involved in a series of tiresome, repetitive interactions over the subject of career decision-making" (p. 305). They suggested that during career decisions both parents and children must display novel behaviors, which cannot be mobilized if there is over-involvement by the parents.
Otto (1984) reviewed evidence that suggested a very different conclusion from that formed by Lopez and Andrews. Declaring that adolescence is "a period of continuing strong ties between parents and children" (p. 15), Otto summarized data from studies that showed that most young people have very strong and positive emotional ties to their parents. Otto argued that it is one of the "great tragedies of our time" (p. 15) that we so underestimate the beneficial influence of parents on their children's careers. Indeed, there was as much difference between the adolescents themselves as between adolescents and their parents. Surveys have continued to show that parents are the most significant influence on adolescents' career choice (NCDA, 1988).
