As expected, parents tend to favour certain professions that covered engineering, accountancy, law and medicine because such professions were great achievements for them that also boosted their ego.
Fast forward to the present day, things have taken a U-turn. Many secondary school leavers are under no obligation to study what their parents want them to do. They are at liberty to choose the university of their choice and also decide the course they want to study.
On Throwback Thursday, we take a look at those career choices you would have loved to make in the 80s, but your parents won’t allow you to:
1. Music
Even though many parents love music the same way their children do, they would not want their children to study it. Music was treated as a career for never-do-wells and school dropouts. Musicians were not just happy people but very broke. That was the perception parents had.
2. Dancing
It was typical to dance to music in a Nigerian home but that was where it ended. Many Nigerian parents in those days did not like to see their children become professional dancers. A wrong belief attached to dancing as a career, especially for female children was that the profession is associated with promiscuity. Dancing was like giving the child a licence to get sexually loose. However, that perception does not hold anymore. Parents now take their kids to dance lessons in schools.
3. Football
Football as a physical sport involves body contact. Sometimes bones hit bones and anything can break. This was the main consequence most parents feared about football and that is why many never allowed their kids to play football. Football was also associated with school dropouts. Thankfully, with the likes of Lionel Messi and others who earn big incomes, many parents have changed their perception of footballers.
4. Comedy
Long before comedy became lucrative, comedians were written off as jobless individuals, who go around amusing people and surviving on the penny they make from their jokes. They were seen as a bunch of jokers and clowns, — a group of fools that make living from their foolishness. Alibaba, Basket Mouth and others have become household names in the comedy industry and many parents don’t mind their children delving into comedy.
5. Modelling
In the 80s, you dare not tell your parents you want to go into modelling. It wasn’t really a popular career like Medicine and Law. As far as modelling was not popular and lucrative, your parents would most likely not allow you to go into it. However, this has changed because modelling is paying much.