Parental perceptions of the school and work plans of adolescent boys.

[...] It is in response to these three facts that parents become concerned with and involved in preparing their son to choose: (1) there is a real choice to be made, (2) the choice is a critical one in terms of its implications for future social status, and (3) there is the expectation that it is the son, and not the parents, who will make it. The involvement is inevitable insofar as the process of occupational choice has its roots back in childhood when the child is very much under the control and influence of the parents. The process of socialization interacts with the process of occupational choice, and it is the purpose of this study to trace some of the interconnections between the two processes. It will examine parental perceptions of the child, of the kinds of choices that should be made, of the various mechanisms available to parents as means of influencing their sons and of those means which they actually employ in order that their influence be felt. [...