You have excellent intentions. You want to help and to guide your soon-to-be college freshman. However, sometimes your good intentions can actually result in offering not-so-helpful advice.

As you seek to guide your child toward the right major, consider how your words come across. What do you actually communicate? Do your words help to guide or cause more doubt and uncertainty?

Below are three well-meaning pieces of advice that can delay the process of choosing the right college major. 

“You can be anything you want.”

A well-meaning parent may share this advice in an attempt to show support or belief in a child. However, these words of parental advice can easily be misunderstood or taken to the extreme, and this piece of advice is not an exception.

The reality is that your freshman probably can’t be anything she wants. You know this, but you want to inspire and encourage your freshman. You don’t want to dash her dreams.

Avoiding the extremes and finding the in-between is difficult when it comes to offering college major advice. Rather than encouraging your child, this statement likely can cause more of a dilemma. Now that everything is an option, where does she begin?

What can you do to help? Be supportive but in other ways. Give more specific and insightful compliments like, “You have natural ability to work well with kids. They really enjoy being with you, and you connect well with them.”

“If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day of your life.”

This advice may come from the best of intentions, but it simply isn’t true. Everything takes hard work, even the things one enjoys doing. Work, at the end of day, is work.

This advice actually has the possibility of doing great harm to a wide-eyed high school graduate. When she faces an enjoyable task that suddenly requires more effort, she may think this is a sign she should quit. When she faces a task that requires no work but is not necessarily enjoyable, she may think this must be the path for her. Neither conclusion is correct.

Anything worthwhile does require extreme effort. There will always be parts of a “dream” job that are unenjoyable. 

Be careful that you do not communicate that resistance, friction, and failure aren’t part of an enjoyable job. Work always requires diligence and times of pushing through.

“You can’t make any money doing that.”

Money is important. Consider the ability to make money needs to be part of your freshman’s process when choosing a major. However, making money is not the only or even the most important factor when choosing a college major.

Whether intended to or not, this advice communicates that money is the key factor when choosing a major. Earning a college degree isn’t simply about money. The college experience is about growing as a person, but when money becomes the main focus the desire to learn and grow often lessens or disappears altogether.

Choosing a college major is an important decision. Be careful with the advice you provide. Be understanding of your freshman’s dilemma, and offer support and encouragement when possible.