Why do some parents impose a career path on their children?

Honestly, I never really understood this myself. The reason my Dad insisted on which career path I follow.

My Dad was a military personnel. The Nigerian Navy to be precise. He was what they termed a ‘Gunnery Inspector’, in charge of guns and armunntions. I remember growing up and watching all the other military men in our barracks come to our house to return the guns and magazines they had signed and collected. I believe that was the routine because everything was documented.

Dad was a low level personnel. He wasn’t an officer. But compared to his own Dad, my Grandfather; God rest his soul, he had done well for himself joining the Nigerian Navy in eighties much to the dismay of his mother; my grandmother who had assumed he was going to die at sea. I mean she was an illiterate who grew up in the village and had never been to the city so could share her sentiments. She was just scared. I bet she wanted him to be a farmer or trader avoiding all the risk in life.

After my secondary school education, I tried severally to gain admission into one of the renowned federal universities but it didn’t quite work out as expected so I spent fours years of my life applying for admission. My Dad wanted me to study law. He was obsessed with the idea of his first son becoming a lawyer. Personally, I wasn’t keen on studying law. But because I wanted to please my Dad especially since he was the one paying the tuition fees, I guess I had no choice. This also contributed to the reason I didn’t gain admission on time because most of the universities with law faculties were rather not easy to get into. We had to write multiple examinations before gaining admission. If you pass one and fail the second one, then you had to wait till the next academic year before applying again. As a matter of fact it had to do with ‘cut-off’ marks. If you didn’t score up to the ‘cut-off’ mark then you go back home. That was mostly my case.

After four years, I finally gained admissions into one of the federal universities but I wasn’t offered law which was my first choice. Instead they offered me linguistics and I had to take it because it had not been an easy road and I could not afford to spend another academic year at home.

The course was for four years and I graduated with a second class upper degree. But my Dad insisted he needed me to go in for a second degree and study law. At this point I was not having any of that so I told him it was high time I focus on my own dreams and goals in life.

Since my secondary school days, I had always wanted to be Rapper. I used to listen to all the rap songs back at school and even had a disc man in our hostel. It was contraband but I risked it. I would skip night prep to write rap lyrics in my dormitory and then show off my skills to my roommates when the came back from night prep. The late ‘Tupac Shakur’ was my number one inspiration. I would listen to his album, go to ‘www.azlyrics.com’ to download the lyrics of any song I desired to score.

After secondary school, I had become so good. I started visiting the recording studio to make my own music. Of course my Dad knew about it but he never thought I was serious about taking up a career as a rap artiste. We had numerous fight about it and even stopped communicating at some point because he wasn’t supportive.

Frankly speaking, I have become so good at my craft and can easily make music without a fuss. My Dad still isn’t supportive but that’s fine. I feel happy when I create and make music. My career isn’t exactly awesome because I have been doing it alone but I find peace when I know that I lived my life for me and doing stuffs that make me happy.

Perhaps I would have been more successful by now if I had studied law as my Dad wanted. I probably would have been financially free compared to being a struggling artiste with just one video on YouTube. But overall, I feel as though I had proved to myself without any iota of doubt that I am the best at my craft, something I had always worked so hard to prove to myself.

I haven’t spoken to my Dad in a while. I sent him the link to my video and he would not even respond to me. Sometimes I feel as though I would have done far better in my career path if I had his support. I know I will breakout soon, but it would have been earlier because then I wouldn’t be sneaking and hiding the progress I made.

When I think about it now, I feel like he was scared for all the controversies that surrounded musicians and artiste even though he never told me outrightly except this one time he said my career as a rapper would last only ten years at most. But then I would rather have ten years of living and doing what I want than thirty five years of living with all the money a Law degree would have gotten me and depressed that I didn’t even try to chase me dreams.

Sometimes, I feel like the role of parenting is to love and guide the child to be the best version of themselves. I still don’t understand why they need to impose a career pathway for their children.

Why do some parents do this?

Anyways, here is the link to my music video on YouTube

https://youtu.be/wZzJ40DxwfI

Tell me what you think, and please subscribe if you like it. In the meantime, I think parents should support their children and not impose because as Humans, I feel like we should be allowed to live.