I am having lunch with a friend when I ask about her son, one year out of college: Did he get the job he was applying for?
As far as she knew, the answer was no. Or possibly, not yet. Her son, she says, is incommunicado on the subject of job hunting. She's tried to get around a direct assault by asking round-about questions, such as, what search engines are you using for your job search? He saw that one for what it was and cut her off.
"When," my friend wants to know "is it going to be okay to ask these questions? How long are we going to have to support him?"
It's not as though the lack of employment and the need to live at home is easy on her son--on any grown child. It's a trip back to adolescence. In a recent posting by Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D, he talked about a young man who, almost a year after graduating from college, was stuck in an entry level job with no future opportunity in sight. The young man--someone's grown child--was feeling anxious, disappointed, and angry. Pickhardt's suggestions to his patient may offer some insights for those of us with unemployed grown children struggling through the detritus of the Great Recession:
Pickhardt starts off with this observation: "When the reality we expect fits the reality we encounter, our emotional response is usually less upsetting than when the reality we expect does not fit the reality we encounter."
His patient has created three kinds of positive expectations about the reality he would face after college graduation. He has PREDICTIONS about what will happen after graduating. (He will find a job.) He has AMBITIONS about what he wants to have happen after graduating. (He wants an interesting job that will advance him into a satisfying career.) He has CONDITIONS about what should happen after graduating. (He should be paid a comfortable income at whatever job he finds.)
None of the three kinds of expectations came to pass. Pickhardt lays out the result:
"Because the prediction of easy employment is violated by reality, and after seven months of looking and he has yet to land a job, he feels surprised and anxious. Because the ambition for finding work he really wanted to do is violated by at last taking a routine assembly line job, he feels disappointed and let down. Because the condition of making a comfortable living right away is violated by making entry level wages, he feels betrayed and angry.
"Now this young man has two sets of problems, not one. He has the problem of choosing how to proceed with his life, and he has the emotional burden of bearing unrealistic expectations. For the sake of his emotional well being, he needed to give up his unrealistic expectations and create a realistic set instead. This is what he came up with.
"Just out of college I need to expect it will be hard to find a job, any job, right away. So I really need to look hard. Right away, I probably won't get a job like the one I really want. So I need to take what I can get and go from there. And financially, whatever job I get, I should have to struggle to get by on however little I am able to make."
Pickhardt's bottom line: "Accept what you have and you free up some energy that was spent protesting against it. ...Choice of expectations in life psychologically matters because these mental sets can have such powerful emotional consequences. Thus recent college graduates who choose to hold unrealistic positive expectations about their immediate prospects in life usually do so to their unhappy cost."