Don’t force careers on your children, parents advised

A University of Ghana student, Miss Florence Nightingale Akua Afriyie, has appealed to parents to desist from forcing careers on their children and rather identify their academic strength and weaknesses to determine suitable future careers for them.

She said the children only needed to be guarded to achieve their targets and goals to pursue their aspirations.

Miss Afriyie, a level 300 geography and history student, made the appeal in an interview with the media after a career guidance development and relationship counseling programme for final year students at Senior High Schools (SHSs) in the Sunyani and Sunyani West Municipalities held at the Sunyani SHS in Sunyani.

It was organized by the Afrimed Gold Company Limited, Accra in collaboration with the Ghana Education Service and sponsored by the Youth Arise Ghana, a non-governmental organization and aimed, among others, at sensitizing the students to identify and understand their career path to enable them to make the right decisions regarding suitable future careers.

Miss Afriyie noted students who were forced to enter professions not of their choice went through a lot of trauma and emotional stress, saying most of them abandoned the career to make fruitless effort to start new ones and consequently could not achieve job satisfaction and remained frustrated in life.

In that sense, she suggested the need for collaboration between parents and children as well as guardians and wards to engage in thorough discussions to make informed decisions about the right professions for enjoyable future lives.

Mrs. Patricia Awuah Amoah, the Bono Regional Guidance and Counseling Coordinator of the Ghana Education Service, advised SHSs final year students to always seek for advice to be able to choose the right programmes related to their interested fields of future profession.

Source: Ghana News Agency