www.thebrainymoms.com

The podcast for smart moms

Podcast 
Amy Moore, PhD

Raising Career-Ready Kids | Dr. Tega Edwin

About this Episode

What if helping your kid find “the right career” starts with removing the pressure to choose one? On this episode of The Brainy Moms Podcast, Dr. Amy and Sandy sit down with counselor and career coach Dr. Tega Edwin to rethink how families approach work, college, and the messy middle in between. From fifth-grade classrooms to college advising offices, she’s seen how early biases about gender and prestige quietly close doors—and how simple exposure to real people in diverse roles opens them again.

We unpack a practical roadmap: start with exploration in childhood, not decisions; move into skill-building and option-finding in the teen years; and treat careers as fluid expressions of who we are, not final destinations. Dr. Tega shares classroom-tested ideas that make pathways tangible. For parents guiding older teens, we dig into smarter college strategy—sampling classes, staying undeclared when helpful, using career services early, and avoiding the debt spiral of constant major changes. You’ll also hear how to translate any degree into marketable skills, and why “What Can I Do With This Major?” belongs in every family’s toolbox.

Money worries fuel career fear, so we go straight at financial literacy: budgeting, saving, and investing as the bedrock of freedom to explore. We talk about leveraging your network for shadowing, coaching social skills for the workplace, and turning part-time jobs into lessons in EQ, advocacy, and professionalism. And when a dream is blocked—by health, academics, or reality—we talk about redirecting it without crushing it, honoring the spirit behind the goal. Along the way, we challenge parents to audit their own beliefs about work, because kids learn from what we model, not just what we say.

If you’re ready to replace anxiety with clarity and give your kids tools to pivot with purpose, hit play. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend who’s stressing about career and majors, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway so more families can find it.

About Dr. Tega Edwin

Dr. Tega is a counselor educator, licensed counselor, and career coach who worked as a school counselor helping children, teens, and families navigate career exploration and big life decisions before transitioning to career coaching. Known as Her Career Doctor, she equips women to find fulfilling work for themselves and land higher-paying jobs that improve their life satisfaction. Her work combines research-based career development strategies with real-life counseling experience to make conversations about the future less overwhelming and more empowering for families.

Connect with Dr. Tega

Website: http://www.hercareerdoctor.com/

Instagram: @hercareerdoctor

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tegaedwin

YouTube: Her Career Doctor

And now, some free gifts from our sponsor!

Learn more about cognitive skills and brain training. Download the free ebook, Unlock the Einstein Inside: Wake Up the Smart in Your Child
Try some brain training exercises! Download the free Brain Training Game Pack

To find out how LearningRx might be able to help you or your child. Visit LearningRx.com


Listen or Subscribe to our Podcast

Watch this episode on YouTube

Read the transcript for this episode:

Dr. Amy Moore: 0:30
Hi, Smart Moms and Dads. I’m Dr. Amy Moore here with my co-host Sandy Zamalis. And Sandy and I are super excited to have a conversation today with Dr. Tega Edwin. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Tega and why she is here. She’s a counselor educator, a licensed counselor and career coach who worked as a school counselor helping children, teens, and families navigate career exploration and big life decisions before transitioning to a career in coaching. Known as Her Career Doctor, she equips women to find fulfilling work for themselves and land higher-paying jobs that improve their life satisfaction. Her work combines research-based career development strategies with real-life counseling experience to make conversations about the future less overwhelming and more empowering for families. Dr. Tega is here to talk with us today about the best ways for us to encourage our kids in their own exploration of careers. Welcome, Dr. Tega.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 1:31
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Sandy Zamalis: 1:34
Yeah, we’re excited that you’re here. I know so many of our parents really need help in this regard because that this is a huge overwhelming topic to try to figure out the future for their kids or help guide their kids in figuring out their future. So let’s jump in and figure out have you tell our listeners what is it about this that um kind of spurred you on? How did you get into this field?

Dr. Tega Edwin: 1:59
So my journey started in school. Well, no, really, my journey started when I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor because so I’m Nigerian and so I grew up in a culture where real jobs very fitting for this conversation, real jobs were things like being a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a nurse, things like that. So I thought medicine was the path for me. And that was more societal pressure, not family pressure. But I failed the MCAT. I had started a psychology minor in my junior year of college, and then I fell in love with psych minor. And then I took the MCAT, I think at the end and failed. And I was like, okay, this is clearly not the path for me. But that was how I then pivoted, just started thinking about what do I really want to do? What do I enjoy? What kind of work do I want to do? And back then I loved being around kids and working with kids. So that’s how I discovered counseling. And so I went back, got my master’s in counseling, became a school counselor. I worked in a pay-by-performance district in Colorado Springs. And it was interesting because for school counselors, two of the metrics, well, there were three total, but two of the metrics they used to determine counselors’ pay was attendance. And fifth graders would take this career test, and how they performed on this career test would determine our pay moving forward. That was it for counselors. And so obviously, I was like, wait, what? I had not been taught about this in my master’s program, did not know what I was doing. But I really loved school counseling. I love being around kids. So even if it was gonna be a test type thing, I still wanted it to be fun for the kids. So that’s when I started doing exploration for okay, these are fifth graders, 10, 11-year-olds. How am I gonna talk to them about career? Which is it’s not even in the realm of what they are thinking of right now. And so my research led me to develop this program that helped them really just explore themselves and who they are and work. And I just saw the kids light up. Like this was one of the few places where school felt like it was about them, like they were talking about themselves. Some of them would talk about wanting to be basketball players or um, you know, one of the archaeologists. It was a really cool project. But that was how my love for career development started. So when I went to get my PhD, my research was actually in school-based career development. Um, and it was in that path that I became a career counselor and so pivoted to start working with adults. And then when I became a faculty member, I missed doing the career work and I still wanted to help people because I’ve just seen how much career confusion can really stress people out. It doesn’t matter the age, it doesn’t matter the generation. When you don’t know what you think in your head, like I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, so to speak, it can feel very stressful. And so I really love this work. So that was why I started my career coaching business, in addition to what I do as a faculty.

Dr. Amy Moore: 4:37
I love that. And I love that you talk about that term career confusion. You know, before we started the episode, you mentioned how we’ve got kids going to college and their prefrontal cortex isn’t even fully developed yet, which makes reasoning really difficult, right? It makes weighing all the alternatives really difficult. So of course you’re in the space of being confused. And then confusion causes stress, which is then right, an emotional roller coaster.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 5:08
You said something when you when you started asking as you know, parents are struggling to help their kids figure this out. And I’m like, some parents are even struggling to figure it out for themselves. Like we’re just not taught how to make career decisions, period. As a society, people expect you to figure it out. And so I think that’s also part of where that stress comes from.

Sandy Zamalis: 5:25
Yeah, I was gonna add that, you know, I think some of it’s a paradigm shift too, right? Dr. Take, like careers aren’t for many people like a longevity game. Like it’s it’s you know, except for things like doctors, lawyers, engineers, you know, definitely there’s some longevity there. For the majority of uh society, a lot of times those jobs are going to switch and change. So it’s really about figuring out what your skill set is, what you’re good at. Are you good on your own? Are you a creative? Like there’s a lot of, I think, uh, discussion that probably needs to happen around that aspect. So share with our listeners what did you do in that classroom that really helped your students see themselves in this process of thinking about who they wanted to be when they grew up.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 6:14
For sure, yes. So it was a, I want to say eight-week unit, but I remember we started with things like the the biggest one I remember this was two weeks that really sort of blew their mind was I just started with this concept of multiple intelligences. And I know that the research is mixed on multiple intelligences and if people believe in them, but these are 10-year-olds, right? Like I was not trying to change their world, so to speak. It was more just okay, you might not be good at math, but the fact that you’re good at sports matters and is still a way of being intelligent. Or for the ones who are good at music or the ones who are good at drawing, right? So I was I taught them this concept of the different eight, um, the eight types of intelligences. And that I believe really sort of blew their mind because I think a lot of the kids grow up hearing things like, you know, you have to pass math, reading, science, that’s it. And so they think if I’m not great at those things, then I’m not smart or I’m not good enough or I don’t know what I’m doing. And so that really, like I said, shifted for them what they thought about what it means to be an intelligent, capable person. And then we started exploring things like I would talk to them about their interests. So, just what kind of things do you like doing in your free time, right? Like, do you like playing games? Do you like reading books? Like, what does that process look like? And I think they really found that helpful. So we did, so in Colorado, we had this career exploration website. A lot of states have them. Here I’m in Missouri now, we have it too. And so I just had them do some of these assessments. There was a Holland, it’s called the Holland Interest Survey, but tailored for kids, where they just took an assessment and it tells them, Oh, are you more of a hands-on person? Are you more of a talking to people person? Are you more of a research and data or numbers person? So we did that. And then we talked about different types of degrees post-school. So I was teaching them about things like associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, on-the-job training. And I remember this one, they really enjoyed this because I used Legos to show like the Legos were numbers of years. And so we were using it’s okay, how long does an associate degree take? Two blue Legos, but a bachelor’s degree can take, you know, four blue Legos. It was just again ways to make it hands-on for them to just conceptualize that. And then we talked about career clusters. And this was something that I already had a poster in my office, but just again, helping them see the different places that um you can work in terms of when we think about clustering it, whether it’s the medical uh field, retail, just helping them see the nine different career clusters that exist, again, to expand their horizon. And that’s because the research shows us that by fifth grade, most children have already started eliminating career options based on two factors, gender and prestige. Gender meaning if they see physical, just how people present. So if in their brains they see all their doctors are men, their brain tells them only men can be doctors. If they see physically all nurses are women, their brain tells them only women can be nurses. So then a little boy who wants to be a nurse might look at, so again, at that age, that they’re still very binary in their thinking. So might look at a nurse and think, oh, I can’t be a nurse because I haven’t seen one who looks like me. That’s the gender piece. And then prestige, what the research shows is based on how adults around them talk about jobs, how they treat people around them, they start to decide which jobs are worth pursuing or not. So, for example, if you’re in a family where you hear them talking crap about your jender as a child, your brain says, Oh, that’s not a good enough job for me. You eliminate it. So there’s a theory, it’s called Gottfurton’s theory, which is a bit controversial because her research kind of went off the rails when it comes to race later on in her life. But there’s been enough empirical evidence for the first part of that study to show that by fifth grade, children are eliminating options based on gender and prestige. Then we see that by high school, they are now eliminating based on what they think is their effort level. I’m not smart enough for a medical degree, so doctor’s not good enough. I can’t be a doctor. I don’t have the tolerance to um go for a master’s degree, so I’m not gonna be an engineer. So really we see that throughout is we call this the process of circumscription and compromise. Children are throughout their lives, they are compromising based on what they see around them. The reason why I share that is so for me, at that elementary school level, what research shows is it’s all about exposure. It’s not about decision making at all. It’s just see as many different jobs, see as many different kinds of people doing as many different kinds of jobs as possible so that your brain doesn’t tell you you can’t do something. So that’s why for me, then I was doing like that career clusters, because it was like, especially because I was working in a um high, free, and reduced meal school district. So a lot of my kids were not really exposed. So if you’ve never seen that a truck driver can make good money, you might think that’s not a good enough job. So showing you what these different clusters of work look like is what I was aiming for. And so we spent a couple of weeks talking about the career clusters. Um, I forgot to say that at the beginning of the unit, I also just explained to them the difference between a job and a career so they could wrap their minds around it. And then we ended with a career fair. So, you know how back they used to do the science fairs with the trifold board. So throughout the research, there were research and options. They would pick a job and then research, and they built each built like a trifold board for one career and put all this information on it. And we had it in the library, parents came to look at it. We matched it with like the musical night, and it was really just a fun process of them learning about themselves and learning about just different options that are available out there. So that was what I did with them.

Dr. Amy Moore: 11:57
So I love that you made that distinction that at the elementary school level, it’s about exposure, right? That we’re not actually putting pressure on them. Like you, in fact, say, don’t ask kids what do you want to be when you grow up, right? Um but I love the idea of immersing kids in um, you know, experiences where they can see all of those different career options. And I would think, and is your recommendation that they should see non-traditional gender roles in the jobs? Like, for example, my husband is a nurse. He’s a male nurse, right? So, like I would think he should go speak at a career fair so that boys know that there are lots of male nurses out there.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 12:43
Absolutely. So when we think about physical cultural identities, race, gender, disability status, we really want kids to see different types of people doing different types of job so that their brain doesn’t link a specific identity to a specific job.

Dr. Amy Moore: 12:59
Yeah, I like that. So you say that careers are fluid, not final. And I think we started talking about that. Normalize that.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 13:12
Tell us why that’s okay. Yeah, because even Sandy, when you said, you know, some jobs have longevity, like maybe doctor, lawyer, engineer. I was like, I have three lawyer clients right now who are making a career pivot. Nothing is long anymore. It’s gonna say longevity. I always say I can make up words, I have a PhD, but nothing has longevity anymore.

Dr. Amy Moore: 13:32
We’re experts when we have a PhD. We’re allowed to make up those words.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 13:36
I can make up a word, it’s not longevity. But so the thing, the thing is a lot of us who are parents now grew up under a generation who was taught that work was something that you did for 20 years. Like you work until you retire or you die. Literally, those were your only options. You work to put food on the table, you work to pay the bills. That was like work had a function, keep you alive, feed you, contribute to society, and do one thing. Go to college, get a degree, do one thing related to that degree until you can’t do it anymore. That I think served them for the generation that they were in, so to speak, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. Now people desire fulfillment, people desire impact, people desire satisfaction, people are recognizing, and I this is something I say when I teach a career counseling class, and I always talk about how we spend most of our awakening hours at work. The at best, you’re doing 40 hours. Most people work more than 40 hours. Over your adult lifetime, that’s 90,000 hours that you spend at work. People are realizing they don’t want to be miserable for 90,000 hours of their lives. And so work is no longer just this functional thing, it’s a form of expression. People now want to work to express themselves. The thing though is we as people are not stagnant. So the thing that you can express yourself with when you’re in your 20s might be different when you’re in your 30s, might be different as you remember in 40s, 50s, because your values change, your interests change, you learn new skills, you develop new interests, interests, all that changes. And so, as you as an individual grow and change, the kind of work that satisfies you is also going to grow and change. But most of us haven’t been socialized to think about work that way. We socialize that change is bad, change is given up, change means you’re a quitter. And so we might try to stick out a bad job, try to prove that we can do it, even when we’re feeling miserable. And unfortunately, our children see that. They see that you come home tired from work, they see that you’re complaining about work with your loved ones every day, they see that you are complaining about your boss, they see that you don’t have time to spend with them because work is so busy. And so they internalize that work is just we do this one thing, we pick it and we go. And so if you want to break that cycle, we have to have that conversation with kids of, you know, you pick something that you will enjoy for this for one season of your life. But if in another season you find something else is inter is interesting, you can make a change. It’s all about having the skill set to make that change, all about knowing how to pivot. And so work very much is fluid because we as people are fluid. And most of the times, one of the when I look at my work with women, the thing that keeps a lot of women dissatisfied is they’ve stayed too long in what I call a job that’s expired because it doesn’t fit you anymore. It doesn’t match who you are in this season of your life. You started this job when you were a single 20-something year old and you could grind and do all that. Now you’re a mother who has different values, different priorities, and the workplace hasn’t shifted to match that. So that’s why that tension now exists because you’re not expressing yourself as who you really authentically are right now in this season of your life.

Sandy Zamalis: 16:42
How do we prepare our teenagers and like young college kids for that kind of fluidity? Because our systems aren’t set up for that. They’re not, they’re not not at all. I mean, very much about putting the time, grind, grind, grind. Um, so what would be your suggestion for parents there? How do we help prep them for this kind of fluid mindset?

Dr. Tega Edwin: 17:05
I think conversations from a young age. This is why I said that. They’re not asking that what do you want to be when you grow up? One of the reasons why I said at the beginning I want to be a medical doctor was because when I was, I think, 10, I said I was gonna be a pediatrician and I could not let that go. I literally, like, that’s why I all the way to college, I said I’m gonna be a doctor. So I’m going to be a doctor. I don’t want to disappoint my parents. I’ve been talking about this, I’ve told everybody what I’m gonna do. If I quit now, it’s bad, right? The thing about conversation is like instead of what do you want to be when you grow up, what do you enjoy doing? What thing makes you feel like you could do it for if you could do one thing for the whole weekend, what would that one thing be? And you, as the parents, studying your kids. So, for example, if I think of my nephews right now, I have one nephew who literally he’ll just he’ll make comic books. He said, Ante Take, do you want to read my comic book? And I’m like, this is an arts kid. He loves to dance, he loves to draw. If we make this child go into science, I will fight the world because that is not his path, right? But just observing those types of things about what is the thing that when you leave your child alone, they do it on their own. And then are there ways for you to invest in that, whether it’s a class, you sitting down with them, but just exploring it without any pressure. If they get tired of it, it’s fine. Don’t say, Oh, you stopped drawing. No, it’s okay, what’s the new thing that you’re interested in? So when we teach them early on that their interest can change, they internalize that so that when they’re adults, they’ll realize that their interest can change, right? So if my nephew stops drawing right now, and I go and I say, Oh, but your comic books were so great. Why did you stop? You could have gotten better. That is a subliminal message of you’re not good because you stopped, right? You could have gotten better, so now you’re getting worse because you stopped the thing, as opposed to, oh, what are you interested in now? Why do you like it? What do you enjoy about it? And then you start to learn, okay, what are the things that your child is gravitating towards? And you’re you’re planting seeds that change doesn’t make you a quitter. Change does mean change just means that you understand yourself and you know how to move with the tides internally, so to speak. So that’s like I think early level. I think another big conversation that we need to switch is the college pipeline is terrible, right? But we can’t change that system. So, how do we work in it? Think about sitting with your kid before college and having a conversation, like if they choose college, right? So, first of all, I should say pre-that, ask them if they want to go to college, right? A lot of us who already went to college assume that it’s the only way our children can be successful. It’s the only way that they can be financially stable. But I always remember when I was a school counselor, I used to say, I have a master’s degree and truck drivers make more than I do. Right. So it’s it’s not just about the degree, it’s about if you know what their interests are, then you might know that, oh, the best way for you to be successful in what you have said you kind of are interested in is going to be a degree. For some other child, it might be on-the-job training. It just depends on those interests that you’ve observed. So, okay, do they want to do a figure out two-year degree, on-the-job training, four-year degree? What is it? But then after that, even when they’re going to college, giving them that opportunity to say, okay, uh, what kind of subjects were you enjoying in high in when you were in high school? And how can they take that first year, just that first year, to explore a few different classes to see what did you like learning about? What did you enjoy before you pick a major? A lot of institutions will let um kids go at least a year undeclared before they declare a major. And so let them explore and you uh sort of give them that message of if you stop like being interested in this topic, that’s fine. You can still finish the degree, but we can find like you can find jobs that are not directly related to your degree. I think what we see happening is uh let’s say a child starts chemistry and they realize they hate me. I majored in biology and I failed OCAM and I was like, I hate this. But I thought I couldn’t change, right? I have to do this. So I minored in psychology. Okay, but I didn’t do anything. I’m, you know, I went to a different degree path. But some other child would have thought, oh, I have to now change my major to do something that I want to do. But the problem with that is the more you change your major, the longer you stay in school. The longer you stay in school, the more debt you’re racking up, right? So if we let them know, okay, no, as long as you get that degree, if you’re doing a four-year degree as soon as possible, we can figure out how to market your skills for something else, right? Don’t rack up this debt that’s gonna be weight on your back. But more often than not, if they’ve explored classes, at least in that first year, they’ll have a sense of, I didn’t like the science ones, but I like the art ones, I like the writing ones. Maybe I want to major in English. Okay, now let’s sit down. What can what are the options? That’s the other thing that’s missing. What are the options that are available with this degree that you have? Um, I can’t think of it now, but I will think of it and share it with you all post the post our recording. But there was a website. Oh, it’s called What Can I Do with This Major? When I worked as a career counselor on um a college campus, that we used to use that website because it’ll take a major and show you all the different types of jobs you can do with it. It’ll show you the professional associations tied to that job so that kids have this mindset of, okay, even if I’m getting this degree, the world can still open up to me. It’s all about options. I still have options. I don’t have to, because I did science, be a doctor. Because I did engineering, be an engineer. No, there are options. And because we as adults aren’t socialized to think that way, we often can’t help our kids do that. So send them to the career services center, look up resources on your own. Um, I just thought of another one. It’s called CUDER, K-U-D-E-R. It’s career exploration but gamified. So kids can play games, but they’re learning about careers, learning about themselves. So I think this really comes down to conversations about options and that fluidity while you are also observing your child. You’re observing what they’re interested in, what excites them without you getting stuck in one thing. I’ve seen that happen with parents where, but they said they wanted to be a doctor. They have to be a doctor. No, they changed their mind and that’s okay. You have to model for them that changing their mind is okay.

Dr. Amy Moore: 23:00
Okay. I like I almost cried a minute ago. Um, as you were normalizing this idea of um, this is who you are in this season, and that’s okay. Or just because you have this degree doesn’t mean you have to work in that career field because that could be applicable to others, right? And so um, you know, I was a career changer, and so um my mom always blamed that on my ADHD that I didn’t stick with the same thing. And then I kept switching. In fact, I overheard a conversation uh that she was having with my aunt once. Well, why is she doing that? Well, because she has ADHD and she can’t stay with one thing. And in my mind, I was moving forward. I was doing something new and exciting and in a way that I could help a bigger number of people, right? Like, and so to be able to hear that like we should celebrate that rather than shaking our heads and you know, blaming that on um a lack of stick toativeness. So I appreciate that you absolutely bring that up. And I also love this idea of college is so expensive. College is so expensive. And so you’ve got a kid who’s like changes their major three or four times and you’re just seeing dollar signs, right? Every time your kid comes home and says, Oh, I didn’t like that, I’m gonna change my major. And so to be able to redirect them to, okay, look how many credits you’ve already, you know, finished. How can we compromise? Like, how can you use what you’ve already done to in this career path um so that we don’t spend an inordinate, an ordinary? See, I’m now I’m making up words. Hey, an enormous amount of money uh while you figure all of this out. I can remember when I was in college as a psychology major, I was um uh waiting tables and I had this table of eight businessmen, um, and they were asking about me. And I said, I’m a psych major. And six of those eight businessmen, they were bankers, all had psych degrees. And they laughed at me and they said, Maybe you can be a banker like us. And like they graduated and realized, okay, I don’t want to be a psychologist with this degree, but where can this be applicable? And oh my goodness, the skills that you learn understanding human behavior are absolutely applicable in banking, right? These are people who are dealing with their money and their finances and what are they gonna invest in, right? And so those skills were applicable to them. I always laughed. I’m like, no, I’m not gonna be a banker like the other psych majors, but anyway, yeah.

unknown: 25:49
Yeah.

Dr. Amy Moore: 25:50
And let me go ahead, Sandy.

Sandy Zamalis: 25:52
Oh no, I was gonna say the only thing I wanted to add to that too, because I mean, I think we’ve all been there, right? I mean, I definitely, you know, I was I shared that story about how we had to have an intervention with my son in engineering school because he was failing and he wouldn’t, for whatever reason, he was locked in um and would not bail. And so we were like, I think it’s time to bail. I don’t think this is your calling, not because you’re failing, because it’s just it isn’t who you are. Like this doesn’t push you, like there’s something else you’ve locked in here, and it’s not that because this is your passion, right? Like, so we were trying to uh get him uh resorted and and it worked out well. But we, you know, he was in school longer. I remember those, you know, long conversations with my husband. He was panicking about the money, and and you know, my theory at the time was you know, the way our system is set up, which is kind of why I called that out a minute ago, is that our kids just don’t have those opportunities to do internships and to get those experiences anymore. So I would rather him fail in college and have it be a little costly for him to figure out who he is and figure out, you know, what path he needs to go and build some resilience. Because up until that point, he’d never failed anything. So I think he kind of needed that to like struggle a little bit so he could figure out how to get more in alignment with who he was. Um, but then I also remember, and maybe you can speak to this, Dr. Tega, you know, there’s also a battle, like it’s a you know, generational thing, a battle of, oh, well, you can’t pay rent with a job like that, or you know, like, you know, how do we overcome that? Um, that any stigma or you know, incorrect beliefs we have about careers, because you’re right, the career landscape has changed. There are more creatives that are, you know, able to be in the workspace than ever before. So any of those artistic pieces in music or art, there’s more space in the business and career work career world for them now than there ever has been. Um, so how do you help parents or help kids kind of wrap their brains around that piece to just push that away? That yes, you actually may be able to pay rent with this career that you love or thinking that you’re gonna love down the line.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 28:11
Yeah. So there’s three things I and I wrote them now that I want to talk about first, um, with the exposure, because you talked about internships can be harder to get, which is true. However, as adults, we still have networks where we can help get our students opportunities to shadow people. So that’s another way in college, if you can start from in fact high school, where it’s just follow a doctor around, follow a banker around, follow an engineer around. Just see again a different level of exposure where we’re not just talking about it, but you’re seeing their day-to-day as another way to help them in that decision-making process of that looked like a terrible day. I don’t want to do that job, but that looked like a fun day. I might be interested in that. And then also thinking about language in a few different ways. So, for example, if I think of your son, I know you said it worked out. So back then, one thing I would say is so for if I think of the word, for example, passion, kids have a hard time, but kids don’t know what that means because they’re not old enough to have a passion, candidly. Like they have interest, but not passions. And so, even thinking about if if a parent listening is thinking, oh, my son or my child is in that situation right now, asking questions like, okay, you’re locked into engineering. But let me ask you this: what do you like doing in your free time? What makes you feel happy? What makes you feel good? What do you enjoy doing? Let’s just have a conversation, just tell us about you and what you enjoy. And then you, as the parent, just listening, and then you’re and then you’re listening for patterns. And saying something like, okay, Bob, Bobby, as I’m hearing you talk, none of that sounded like an engineer, babe. Like I’m hearing like an artist or somebody who wants to dance. What do you like? And you being light about the conversation. That way they know it’s more we’re just talking about you. And like, maybe I didn’t hear an engineer there. I heard an artist. So what’s up with this engineering thing? Tell me about it. Because maybe there’s people in college telling him that if he quits his a failure. Maybe a teacher had said, if you’re not an engineer, you’re not good enough, right? Because sometimes we don’t know how the other adults are influencing them. That makes them locked into that path. And so we need to be a different voice in their lives and opening it up to okay, tell me about you, tell me about who you are. And I’m listening for patterns so that I can then feed back what I’ve heard you say. So I wanted to share those two things. Um, and then to answer your question. But I had thought about this when we were talking earlier. A lot of times, even as adults, uh, one of the biggest things that keep us uh stuck in situations we don’t like is lacking. Of financial stability. And so candidly, and I was gonna say this earlier a good way to get that thought of I can’t pay rent with this out of your child’s head is to improve their financial literacy early on. So it’s it’s it’s not directly career related, but I think that’s just the foundation of. I remember like I was telling my husband just recently, I was like, one thing that I’m mad at my dad for, because he was an accountant, right? He was a banker. And I started working in college. And I’m like, why did he never tell me about it? Did he have a psych degree? No, he did not. He did not have a finance degree. But I remember saying he was investing, he was getting dividends. Why didn’t he just tell me as a kid, even just make me, I would have been mad, but just say $20 from your paycheck has to go into the stock market. Like, I don’t care what you do with the rest, but you have to invest this $20. I would have been mad as a child. I know that. But now as an adult, I would be so grateful because that money would have grown exponentially. And so, how do we from young start teaching our kids about investing, about budgeting, about saving? Because if they at least have a financial safety net, they’re more likely to explore. Most times we lose our wonder, we lose our exploration because of the reality of I have bills to pay and I do have a rent to pay. So that’s like an addition of how can you help your child just learn about finances and finances and build a financial safety net. And then for the one, okay, I want to be a creative, I got to pay rent. Can you find creatives who are paying rent that they can talk to? Right? Remember, it’s all about that possibility model. They have to see it. So not a superstar, but a real life person who’s leaving living day to day, how are they making it work? Right. And having them have that conversation with someone who can say, Oh, here’s what I did, here’s how it worked, here’s what didn’t work. And then they can think, okay, do I want to go down this path? Or, okay, maybe I’m gonna give them options. I’m always about the options. You can work on your art while you work at Starbucks or work at you know a grocery store, whatever it is. Like you can get the money in somewhere, but just because it’s not paying now doesn’t mean you have to give up on that dream. It’s gonna be hard work for a few years. I’m gonna, I’m gonna be honest, it’s gonna be hard work for a few years. But if this is what you want to do, it’s gonna pay off. Oftentimes, parents don’t give children that possibility. We are scared of our kids living out on the street. So we want them to get what we think is a stable job. So we don’t want them to work two jobs, right? Because to us, it’s not gonna work. So we don’t let them make those mistakes or do that exploration. And so I think even encouraging that process um can help kids move through that mindset. As is if we don’t feed it to them, they will not internalize it.

Dr. Amy Moore: 33:02
Okay, so what do you say to the teen or young adult who is actually having the opposite thought? That they don’t want to monetize their hobby. They don’t want to take what they love, that they’re so good at, that they do for fun. They’re afraid to turn it into a career because then they’re afraid they’ll end up hating it, that they’ll get sick of it if they have to do it. Speak to that.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 33:30
Yeah, then we I say, what else are you interested in? So we are none of us as human beings are single. We’re all multifaceted. We’re not one-dimensional. So, yes, you might have one hobby that you love and you don’t want to monetize. That’s good. Keep it as a hobby. You probably have other things you’re interested in too that you could work in, even as adults. So, what are other things that you like learning about that you like doing? And can we find a job? Let’s keep your hobby a hobby. Let’s find something else that you enjoy and explore that as career options. We can give them that option of, okay, that’s fine. You know, you have multiple hobbies, let’s pick a different one that we can see how you can monetize.

Sandy Zamalis: 34:07
I love how you alluded to the shadowing and how parents really need to engage their own networks because um, I think I love the financial literacy piece, but talk a little more about building those networks because building networks is really important. And it’s also a piece that we do not teach our kids. Um you have to meet people, learn how to meet people, learn how to um engage with people so that you get to have more experiences and you can do these shadowing kinds of pieces. More hiring is done from connection than from you know paper job descriptions.

unknown: 34:45
Yeah.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 34:46
I think first it would be us as the adults have to be curious about other people and what they do. Like wherever I go, and this is just the career coaching me, I’m always asking people about their jobs, not what they do, but just what do you do daily? Because I’m just curious, I like to know what jobs are out there. Sometimes people will look at me like, why are you asking this? I’m like, I’m a career coach, I just like to know these things. But then I learn about jobs I didn’t know existed. And so I don’t think every adult is that way. Because most of us hate our jobs, we don’t like to talk about it. It’s it’s it’s not a dinner table conversation unless we’re complaining. And so, how can you, as an adult, be willing to engage other adults to learn, whether you are at the coffee shop or at the grocery store or whatever, just oh, I mean, sort of, how do you spend your days? And that’s how you can ask the question instead of what do you do, right? How do you spend your days? And you can say, you know, I have a teenager that I’m trying, you can give them the context, right? I have a teenager that I’m trying to expose to different jobs. So I’ve just been trying to learn more about what’s out there, and then you asking friends, right? You know, it’s oh, I know you do blank, Bobby’s going to college in two years. I want him to learn as many options as possible. Would it be okay if he came to work with you for one day or for half a day or a couple of hours just to see what you do? Give him a taste of you know what work looks like. And so it’s you leveraging those relationships. And then before your child is going into the spaces, you teaching them about professionalism, about how to have conversations, about thanking people, about building relationships, about being emotionally intelligent, right? Like teaching them those skills for how do you ask questions? Let’s write down three questions. What okay, you’re going in here. What do you want to know about these jobs? Write them down. Okay, make sure you find time to ask. Here’s how you can tell when, like, if if they’re talking to somebody else, wait for them to finish talking before you ask. Wait for when you’re alone, like teaching them social interactions so that as and and maybe saying, When you come home this evening, I want you to tell me three things you noticed about how people talk to each other at that office, so that then you’re giving them homework of not just learning, but watching interactions so that they also know how to build those professional relationships in the future. Also, if they do go the traditional education route, a lot of institutions will do networking events. They’ll have career service, like a career services office that does networking events that brings recruiters in, that teaches them professionalism. I can’t tell you how when I worked as a career counselor on a college campus, how many times it was hilarious. Kids would be like on graduation, on their way out, they’ll park their car in front of our office, run in and say, I need help finding a job. So you’ve been here for four years and you never once came in. And on the last day, you’re saying you need help. And that’s not to shade them. They didn’t know the service existed. They didn’t know that offer was possible, right? Like that we offered that service. But ideally, the adults in their life should have known and said, Hey, go talk to the career counselor and see what they say about picking a major, right? Or when you’re doing the, you know, college, college campus visit, asking, do you have a career services center? How do you support children in making decisions? You, as the adult, asking these questions and then pushing your kid to use those services because it’s included in that really expensive tuition anyway. So they should leverage it.

Dr. Amy Moore: 37:51
I love that. Okay, let’s talk about being a dream killer. And at what point in our child’s life do we become the dream killer? For example, uh, you’ve got a kid who has aspirations for being a fighter pilot, but they have an autoimmune disease. So they won’t be able to be in the military, right? So, I mean, that happened in my house, right? I mean, my husband is a former fighter pilot. So one of my kids really wanted to do that as well, but he has celiac disease, which is an automatic disqualifier. So at what point would it have been appropriate for me to say, not gonna happen? I’m gonna have to smash that dream? Or what if you’ve got a kid who wants to be an astronaut, but they’re barely a C student? Like there’s no way that they’re gonna get into a military academy, become an officer, and get to be the 0.001% who actually gets to be the astronaut. How do we handle situations like that?

unknown: 38:52
Yeah.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 38:53
You know, I’m glad you brought that up because Sandy, you were saying something earlier when you talked about how your son was failing engineering classes and you just said barely a C student. I just had the thought of, I had the thought earlier and it’s come back. If a child is failing something academically, they’re not interested. It’s not because they’re not capable, it’s because they’re not interested. They’re either not interested because it’s not interesting, or the adult teaching them is not making it interesting. We are all capable of learning and passing in some way, shape, or form. But remember that our education system is analyzing or is assessing fish on their ability to climb trees. That’s really what we do, right? So I just wanted to throw that out there. And I think I would say at the point where you know that it’s absolutely like this is a fact. So, for example, uh, is your child not gonna ever like the celiac disease is they’re gonna be managing it for the rest of their lives? It is a disqualifier, and then sit down, okay. Here, baby, this is why, right? It’s because they do these tests to join the military and they say you, you know, you can’t have conditions like this. And so that’s not gonna happen. Now, how can we be a dream deviator as opposed to a dream killer, so to speak, right? So you can’t do that, but when you when you become 18 or whatever it is, I promise you we’re gonna have you take flying lessons. You might not be a fighter pilot, but you can still learn how to fly as a hobby. We can find a different job, right? I’m saying that because I think of myself growing up, I wanted to be a model so bad. My mother was like, No, like what that is not a job. And she wouldn’t even let me, I wanted to be a model, I want to be a dancer, I want to be just like I like the artsy things, and I I was a biology major. And she said, no, it didn’t happen. And I think of now when people just randomly be like, oh my gosh, are you a model? I’m like, no, but I wanted to. If she just let me do it for fun, I could still have gone the science route, but at least that itch would have been scratched and it wouldn’t have been a regret. So, how can we deviate like that dream to a hobby and say, so you can’t do this as your job because A, B, and C, but I’m willing to support your interest in it as a hobby. We can take classes, we can do simulations, you can learn, and that way they don’t feel like the dream was totally killed, just redirected. I love that. Great advice.

Sandy Zamalis: 41:01
So, Dr. Chega, how would you um help parents in the aspect of encouraging uh helping them encourage their children to have jobs? Like a not thinking about the career side of things. Um, I think as a parent, I’ll um, and definitely in in hindsight, I’m really thankful that my kids have had a lot of jobs. Um, they’ve tried a lot of things. It was um, I feel like COVID in in my uh for my kids was definitely a little bit of a blessing because it kind of weirdly smashed the job market right when they were coming out of college. And so they had to just try lots of different things. Um, and I think between the two of them, they’ve had like 10 different jobs in like four years. Like it’s been kind of crazy, but they’ve moved a lot, they’ve had these great experiences. Um, how early would you recommend, you know, encouraging your kids to have a job, even if it’s just for that financial literacy piece or building networks, um, but not necessarily, you know, something I know as parents, sometimes we protect our kids from that because they’re gonna work their whole life, but it might be good to incentivize that maybe earlier to help them shadow.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 42:15
Yep, absolutely. I was gonna say you just make it a family culture in this home. You can pick any, I don’t think there’s a specific age I would recommend. I think 15 is definitely a good minimum, depending on the type of job. But just saying in this home, we work once we turn 16. Like it just becomes a mantra mantra. That’s what we do. In this house, we work once we turn. And it could be like my first job was in college. I started college when I was 15, so I was very young. But it was, I was just, I was in my residence, like res life. I just sat at the desk. I was like the front office person, but I got to meet people that way. And so it’s like that was not a job that was too big for me cognitively, right? It was just filing, organizing the office, you know, giving people a tour of the of the um dorm. That was it. And so thinking about, I think I would say appropriate jobs like that, where it’s not cognizant, it’s not too much of a cognitive load for the child to do the job or physical, even, right? I’m not gonna tell you, say you put a 16-year-old to be lifting big suitcases in an airport. And so I would say it becomes just a culture of okay, here’s you’re gonna work and and and telling them the why of it. Why? So you can understand what it means to you know how adults live life, so you can get out there and meet new people, so you can start making your own money so that I can teach you how to invest it, teach you how we do budget. You you want that game, we’re gonna create a budget for it so you can buy it with your own money. And again, they might rail push back against it. I think of these things I’m saying to you. If my parents had told me, actually, I wanted to work, my parents didn’t want me to work because they wanted me to just get A’s in school. But there’s some other things that I would have been like, I don’t want to do that. But in hindsight, as an adult, I would have looked back and said, that actually helped me. And so that’s just part of being a parent is we know that we make our kids do things that they don’t want to brush their teeth, but their teeth will fall out if they don’t. So we make them do it. And so it’s just as long as you’re explaining the why to them. This is gonna help you build skills, it’s gonna help you meet people, help you learn what you like doing. And so, is it this summer you work at Chuck E. Cheese, and the next summer you work at an office, and then the next summer you work at the gym, and then you just see what did you like, what did you not like? It’s a way for you to get to know yourself. So I think it just becomes a family culture thing of you and your partner, you sit down, you pick what age do we think makes sense for our kids. I think 15 to 16 is good. And we just say, okay, we we prep them and you start dropping those hints from when they’re 11, right? Just as jokes, oh, when you’re 16, you’re gonna start making your money. I think when they can drive, they can work, right? And so you just you just start you you drop the hints five years out. Oh, I can’t wait for you to start driving so that you can pick me up after you come back from work. Just jokes like that so that it becomes in their head, I’m going to get a job once I hit this age. And so that just becomes a norm in the family.

Dr. Amy Moore: 44:55
Yeah, I had we did that in our family. Um, one of them was 18 before he actually got a first job. But um, it was fun to watch the kids really grow and learn and see what the dynamics of being an employee actually feels like too. Uh, because that can be shocking to some kids, right? So, especially if they don’t grow up in an authoritarian household, um, it can be shocking to have an authoritarian boss. And that’s the reality that happens um out there. So it’s great experience because then you can coach them through, okay, well, how do you handle those interactions?

Dr. Tega Edwin: 45:37
Yeah. And I think you bring up a great point, Dr. Amy, of, and I hadn’t thought about it, so you said it, as they’re working, creating time as a family to talk about the work experience, right? Using it, okay, what happened today, what was confusing, what was hard, and creating a space for you to then be able to teach them, okay, they shouldn’t have done that. Here’s how you can advocate for yourself, right? Or, oh, here’s what you could have said differently. So using their work experience as a way to think of your question earlier, Sandy, of how do they build relationships? If they’re at work and you’re debriefing with them maybe two or three times a week, you can talk about and hear, okay, where was their EQ not quite where it needed to be? Let me coach them on what they can do next. And you’re using their work as teaching moments. Yeah.

unknown: 46:18
Okay.

Sandy Zamalis: 46:18
We offered so much great stuff, Dr. Tega. And we’re getting close to the top of the hour. So I wanted to give you a chance to kind of just share with our listeners anything that maybe we didn’t hit on that you want to make sure we drive home for parents in this um aspect of helping our kids build that career job mindset for the future, thinking through that fluidity.

Dr. Tega Edwin: 46:40
Yeah. I think I would say that every parent should assess their own relationship with and beliefs about work. What role do you think work plays in our lives? What do you believe is possible in the world of work? What do you think careers are meant to be? Because we are the ones who pass down those messages to our children. And so, you know, I think a parent could be listening to this and think, oh, great, I want to give my child options. I want to make them think change is good. But if inherently you believe that change is bad and change makes you a quitter, that’s what your child is going to hear and see, no matter how you try to spin it. So you have to fully embody and believe whatever message you want them to live out, which means you have to do self-reflection and assessment of what do I actually believe? Because that’s what you’re going to pass on to your child, and that’s gonna that’s gonna be their reality.

Dr. Amy Moore: 47:30
Absolutely. Um, Dr. Taega, how can our listeners find you, uh, find more about you and your work?

Dr. Tega Edwin: 47:37
I’m her career doctor almost everywhere. My website is her career doctor.com. I spend a lot of time on Instagram. I’m HerCareer Doctor There. Um, I have a weekly newsletter where I send out strategies mostly geared towards adults. But if you go to um catchupweekly.com, you can join. But I love having conversations about career. And so if you DM me on Instagram ever, I will absolutely respond because I love this is my favorite topic to talk about.

Dr. Amy Moore: 48:00
You can tell. Absolutely. Um, we appreciate all of your amazing insights and wisdom on a topic that we just haven’t spent any time on on the show. And so I hope that um I know that our listeners will have just some amazing takeaways and aha moments. I know I did from this conversation. And we’ll put all those links to your social media and your website in our show notes. Dr. Tega Edwin, thank you so much for being with us today. We really enjoyed having you. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed having this conversation. All right, listeners, I hope that you feel a little bit smarter after spending this hour with us. You can find us at the Brainy Moms on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and YouTube. Uh so we would love it if you would find us there and follow us. And until next time.