Book Club

Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Basic Books, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-01540-9

An excellent book for guidance counsellors, parents, teachers, and anyone working with teenagers, though it has somewhat of an academic bent. Readers may be familiar with Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s books on flow (losing oneself in enjoyable activities – living in the moment) and creativity.

The book describes how American teenagers develop attitudes and acquire skills to achieve their career goals and expectations, with the information coming from a wide-scale research study funded by the University of Chicago. The five-year longitudinal study took place between 1992 and 1997 with a cross section of students from inner city to affluent schools.

Part One looks at Adolescent Views of Work with information on study design, samples and procedures, then the book gets more interesting with an overview of adolescents’ Expectations of Future Careers, Occupational Values, and Work Related Motivations. Numerous tables of data, such as the occupations most frequently cited (doctor, business person, lawyer, teacher) and the occupational values students associate with these careers, are included in this section.

Part Two describes the processes by which young people learn about, and learn to work –their Images of Work and Play, where researchers asked students to categorize their various activities as work or play, Learning to Like Challenges, including a section about the importance of finding flow and Families and Formations of Children’s Occupational Futures, where the all-important role of family in career choice is discussed. There is also a section here dealing with the Quality of Classroom Experiences and their relationship to future work. This section includes a lot of information on students’ early experiences with paid employment and their feelings and attitudes toward work.

Part Three: Transitioning from High School, addresses paths after high school. The book ends with appendices with site descriptions, the instruments used in the research and a full explanations of all the variables involved in the research.