SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : THE DRIVING FORCES : Following in Their Footsteps or Choosing a Different Path

Parents start feeding their children at a very young age, and it’s not just formula and strained carrots that go into those wobbly, little heads. There’s also a lifelong diet of career advice--nutrition of a very different sort.

“It starts the day the poor kid’s delivered,” said John Holland, professor emeritus of social relations at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Making Vocational Choices: A Theory of Careers. “If you’re the son of a lawyer or the son of a doctor, you have a very good chance of being a doctor or a lawyer.”

Very few studies assess parental influence on children’s careers, in part, Holland contends, because career choice and guidance has developed more as a business than as a serious field of academic study.

But the influence of parents can be profound. It is obvious in the longstanding family business, where the stage is set for a child to take over when a parent retires or dies. It affects doctors who would rather have been actors, lawyers who really wanted to write novels, accountants who dream of putting out forest fires.

It can be seen in athletic dynasties, where Dad, the professional baseball player, nurtures his Little League son onto a farm team.

Or as former National Basketball Assn. star Rick Barry says of his four basketball-playing sons: “If my kids were horses, they’d be worth a million dollars because of their breeding.”

Sound good? Sometimes it is. There is such a thing as good advice, after all, and parents often give it. Certainly, not all children with overly encouraging parents end up as miserable adults, career counselors point out. But it’s tough to figure out what good advice is and even tougher to give it in the right doses.

Experts who guide workers through mid-life career changes also see another side to parental prodding. Mom and Dad meant well, of course, when they gave their budding doctor all those anatomy coloring books and human models; however, their pressure sometimes has disastrous consequences years later, such as job burnout.

The good news, sociologists and career experts say, is that parental prodding is only one of a wide spectrum of factors that shape career choice. Other forces at work include peer pressure, personal values like philanthropy or materialism, and business trends such as the wide availability of jobs for aerospace engineers in the late 1960s.

And excessive parental influence is often nullified by that great family equalizer: youthful rebellion.

The way Alexander Astin sees it, parents play a fundamental--if indirect--role in their children’s career choices, because they are the most important factor in whether children go on to college.

But when it comes down to deciding between plowing and plumbing, parental influence comes in a poor third after the student’s values and abilities, said Astin, a professor of higher education at UCLA and director of the university’s Higher Education Research Institute.

“It appears that the parents are a very big influence on even whether students decide to go to college and, if they go, whether they decide to seek an advanced degree,” Astin said. “But we have a lot of evidence that the parents are not as important in the choice of a career as the student’s own values.”

When Loretta Foxman, president of Cambridge Human Resource Group in Chicago, was growing up, she found out first hand just how powerful parental influence can be.

“I thought everyone in the world went to college,” said Foxman, who is an outplacement specialist. “I remember when I was growing up, I never thought I had a choice. . . . In my family, the most important value was education.”

Foxman is also an example of the strength of rebellion, conscious or unconscious. Her father, she said, had this plan for her: College. Check. A teaching job. Check. A master’s degree. Check. Law school. No way.

She may have balked at becoming a lawyer, but she did heed her father’s first advice--at least temporarily--and taught in Los Angeles County for several years. Then she moved to Chicago with her husband and took a year off.

But when she began to get her resume together, and her new neighbors were pushing her to apply for another teaching job, Foxman found herself recoiling from the thought of going back to the classroom. She ended up in the personnel field instead. Today, she is president of an outplacement company and counsels men and women going through career changes.

“I was making a career change and didn’t know it,” Foxman said. “You play your parents’ tapes in your head over and over. When I went to school, the safest profession was teaching. They are putting their own values into what you should do.”

Foxman’s sister followed her father’s plans more closely and carries the weight of resentment to this day. The parental plan in her case was nursing school. The young woman’s desire was medical school. The parents won.

“My sister is still angry at my father because she wanted to be a doctor,” Foxman said. “He never thought of that as an option for her. She became a nurse. When she was in her late 30s, she went to my father and said, ‘I’m sorry you forced me to go into this.’ ”

Foxman offers these guidelines for parents: “Help your child be exposed to different kinds of career options, and if they show any kind of inclination or interest, encourage them to investigate. Too often people get into a career and find out they don’t like it. Encourage part-time jobs; the closer they are to where the person wants to be vocationally, the better.”

But there’s one caveat. “If the child reads that you are pushing him, he’ll rebel,” she said.

Which is a warning that Keith Swayne, president and chief executive of Case-Swayne Co. in Santa Ana, echoes to this day. Swayne’s father, Amos, helped start the specialty foods processing company in 1943.

Today, Amos Swayne is chairman and son Keith is his top executive. But it didn’t start out that way. Keith worked in the family business throughout his youth, but his first employer after graduate school was Dole Pineapple--not his father.

“By the time I was 18, I probably knew a great deal about the food industry, just by being a part of family discussions, having conversations with my father and just watching him,” Keith Swayne said. “My father had a very strong work ethic and was a risk taker. Those are fairly strong things to implant in a young person.”

Amos Swayne never sat his son down and said he had the young man’s future all planned out, never forced him to join the family company. And that may be why Case-Swayne remains a family business.

“If he had (planned the future), I think I would have reacted fairly negatively,” Keith said.

Sometimes the example a parent sets as a role model amounts to a far more compelling career lesson than any words of advice could be.

“I always did things when I was smaller to make him proud of me,” Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. recalled of his father, a former minor-leaguer and Orioles coach, in Psychology Today. “I went to baseball clinics, listened to him talk, because I knew he’d like me to do that. I came early to the ballpark and shagged in the outfield because I knew he’d be proud of me for doing that.”

“Sons of professional ballplayers,” the 1985 article concluded, “have two advantages over the sons of electricians, psychologists and economists in following a baseball career. First, the ballplayer’s son has a longer and more intimate acquaintance with the sport, by age 18, than do other young men. Second, the quality of the information and instruction he receives is much higher.”

Certainly, no parental prodding was necessary for the career choice of Ripken Jr. Or as he said of his father: “ . . . it seemed like his job was the best job you could have in the whole world.”