Preparing Young Children To Launch

Having spent the last 20 plus years immersed in helping Connecticut high school students, I have lived a work mission of getting children prepared for leaving high school and heading to college.  The mission is carried out through SAT-ACT prep, tutoring, college, and educational counseling, but those areas are the strategies and tactics to carry out the vision, not the vision itself.  Over the last ten years, but with increasing intensity over the last five years, the mission has extended to getting children and young adults not only ready for college but also for their careers.

Here’s why: even before The Great Recession, some of my former college counseling and SAT prep students were coming back to me for career counseling.  It seems that regardless if they went to great schools like The Williams School or Hopkins or any of the top public high schools in Shoreline Connecticut (Branford, Guilford, Madison, Old Saybrook, Old Lyme, East Lyme, Waterford, Valley Regional etc.) and then went to good colleges, they still had no training in figuring out what to do for a career.  In addition, the world of work was changing before 2008 economic meltdown, which accelerated but did not start the radical work revolution of the last 30 years, with the Internet being the greatest marker of our movement from the industrial-corporate age to the Information Age.

Having now seen the challenges that twentysomethings face post-college graduation, my work mission has made me realize the connection between high school to college to career success in a deeper way. Now I feel the pain of my twentysomething clients (and parents) when their children are unemployed or underemployed or in a mismatched career.  Many – but not all – could trace their challenges back to high school.  They did not work to their potential.  This limited their college choices.  They were not inspired by the college they attended and/or did not excel at college. And so forth.

The good news is that many of my old students keep in touch with me.  They – the ones who put in the work in high school and had successful college transitions – are not only doing well but likely are doing better than we were at their age, since many companies now give lots of responsibility to the young and talented.

Let’s make sure your children are in that batch.