For Parents Who Think They Know Best for their Children: We Don't, says Griselda Heppel
Photo by Trinity Kubassek: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sheep-288621/ Here's a tip. If you’re an anxious/ambitious parent, determined your child will pursue a safe and respectable profession, despite said child’s reluctance, lay off. Otherwise he may run off to Australia to work on a sheep station and you never see him again. Like fellow AE blogger Mari Howard, I’ve been delving into some family history lately and can confirm that this really happened. A doctor in County Carlow, Ireland, my great-great-grandfather, William Fryer, had his 25 year-old son, Charlie, all set to take up medicine as well. For reasons lost in the mists of time, poor Charlie felt the only way to escape this hideous fate was to fly to the ends of the earth, which he did in 1879. Just as telling, from a family dynamics’ point of view, was Charlie’s refusal to follow up any of the introductions his frantic parents gave him – once they’d tracked him down – to contacts in Australia who cou...