Children's vocational development: a research rationale.

Vocational development research and interventions have focused primarily on adolescents and young adults. The lack of attention to career development antecedents in children has led to a serious neglect of this period of life when the foundation is laid for career choices and outcomes in later life. A harmful by-product is the frequent preclusion of gender-atypical occupational pathways by boys and especially by girls. To address this situation, the authors recommend identifying a core set of constructs that describe children's vocational development and developing sound instruments to measure them, leading to a longitudinal study ranging from childhood to early adulthood.

Many researchers and the general public tacitly accept the view that childhood is a period of fantasy and play. Consequently, children are believed to be incapable of comprehending the world of work. This is a relatively modern view of childhood. Parsons (e.g., Parsons, 1909) reportedly not only acknowledged the importance of vocational development during the childhood period, but his experiences with children may have also had a significant impact on his early work (Munsterberg, 1913). Parsons's apparent concern for children's vocational development was borne from the necessity of the times. Before 1918, the United States did not universally mandate that children complete elementary school, which at the time extended to the eighth grade in many states (Krug, 1966); then, the largest fraction of 12- to 14-year-old children were therefore working or facing an imminent transition from school to work. Parsons confirmed this by reporting that only 6.2%, 3.2%, and 7.2% of the children attending primary schools in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, respectively, were predicted to complete the last year of high school. Parsons (1909) stated,

The timing of the transition from school to work led to Parsons's concern about children's work awareness and plans (or lack thereof) and consequently motivated him to provide vocational guidance to grade school children and to support the development of vocational guidance centers to serve them (Munsterberg, 1913). Although it is certainly recognizable that times have changed with respect to the demands and expectations placed on children, the necessity to study and act upon children's vocational development is currently as acute as ever.

In this article, we present a broad theoretical model of vocational development that casts middle childhood as the dawn of vocational development and includes those core constructs and mechanisms that presumably represent the essential antecedents of adolescent vocational development (Hartung, Porfeli, & Vondracek, 2005). After a brief review of the theoretical and empirical literature suggesting that childhood is an important period of career exploration and learning, we forward a rationale supporting longitudinal research beginning in the middle to late childhood period and extending into adolescence and beyond. This rationale is supported by an ongoing and increasing interest in how gendered conceptions of work, which presumably form during the early childhood period, circumscribe and otherwise influence vocational development during the childhood and adolescent periods and beyond. The rationale is further supported by the disturbing findings that large numbers of children in the United States are failing to complete high school and that most public education systems presently offer few services to help high school students seek and obtain career-track jobs. Finally, we conclude this article with suggested steps that should be taken next to initiate a basic research program to examine how children are socialized to the world of work and how they develop an orientation toward work.

Vocational Development During Childhood

Despite the increasing delay in the transition from school to work and the tacit view of children being disconnected from the world of work, theorists addressing life span career development across the 20th century have attended to childhood as an important formative period of career development (Erikson, 1964,1968; Ginsberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, & Herma, 1951; Gottfredson, 1981; Havighurst, 1964; Super, 1957; Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996; Vondracek, 2001a). The consensus among these scholars suggests that children, as early as in the grade school years, establish a worker orientation and a coherent view of the world of work. Although Super (1957) and Havighurst have made only general assertions about childhood, other theorists, including Gottfredson and Erikson (1964, 1968), have provided deeper insight into certain aspects of vocational development, such as the processes by which sex roles shape career aspirations and when and how children establish an orientation to the worker role. Unfortunately, the majority of this theoretical work has gone unexplored in the empirical literature devoted to children (Hartung et al., 2005).

The combination of the aforementioned theoretical work and the empirical work devoted to children's vocational development (Hartung et al., 2005) yields a largely unexplored model of how children are socialized to become members of the workforce (see Figure 1) as a means of placing the childhood period along a developmental continuum that leads to adolescence and beyond. This life span model of career development presumes that children are socialized to work during middle and late childhood, and these early experiences have an impact on psychosocial adjustment throughout vocational identity development (Erikson, 1968; Vondracek, 2001a). Within the model, vocational exploration represents a pivotal mechanism that facilitates socialization and learning during this period (Flum & Blustein, 2000; Goldstein & Oldham, 1979; Havighurst, 1964; Super, 1990; Super et al., 1996). Presumably, the exploratory process of learning about work (Jordaan, 1963) in relationship to an emerging sense of self-concept (Harter, 1999) shapes the development of a vocational identity and self-concept (Schmitt-Rodermund & Vondracek, 1999), values (Porfeli, 2004, 2007), and interests (Holland, 1997), and this exploratory process may begin as early as the grade school years (Patton & Porfeli, 2007). Researchers generally agree that these aspects of development are crucial in educational and vocational planning and in choices made during adolescence and early adulthood (Archer, 1989; Blustein & Noumair, 1996; Havighurst, 1964; Holland, 1997; Kroger, 1993; Porfeli, 2004; Savickas, 2002; Super, 1957; Super et al., 1996; Vondracek, 1995; Vondracek, Schulenberg, Skorikov, Gillespie, & Wahlheim, 1995).

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Empirical Findings

Despite the theoretical advances within the field, empirical research on children's vocational behavior has gone largely unappreciated and unexplored in the broader child development and career literatures (Hartung et al., 2005; Watson & McMahon, 2005). Two factors may contribute to this fact. First, researchers and practitioners commonly view childhood as a period of fantasy and play that is cognitively disconnected from the world of work (Trice, Hughes, Odom, Woods, & McClellan, 1995). A review of empirical research during the past century suggests that children as young as 4 and 5 years old have a fairly realistic understanding of occupations, which becomes more stable over time (Hartung et al., 2005). Second, the existing literature of more than 200 articles is largely disconnected from developmental science and education and is limited to basic cross-sectional research designs and statistical models (Watson & McMahon, 2005). Moreover, many researchers in this area ask the same questions and come to similar, generally descriptive conclusions.

Despite the limitations and marginalized status of this literature, the research conducted to this point hints at the significance of vocational development during the childhood period. Five general findings derived from literature reviews by Hartung et al. (2005) and Watson and McMahon (2005) suggest that vocational development may be linked to an emerging sense of self as early as the grade school years. These findings also speak to some of the presumed theoretical mechanisms and functions influencing development through the adolescent years (see Figure 1). The five findings are as follows:

1. Children learn much more about the world of work than many assume, and 4-year-olds can accurately distinguish occupations by the sex of people who tend to occupy them.

2. Career aspirations are relatively stable and become more so across the grade school years. These aspirations are influenced by gender-based occupational stereotypes throughout grade school and beyond.

3. Career aspirations tend to be influenced by occupational stereotypes and a circumscription mechanism that channels girls away from math and science careers and boys away from female-dominated professions.

4. Economically impoverished and African American and Hispanic children tend to maintain less prestigious career aspirations, and African American children exhibit a greater difference in the prestige of career aspirations and expectations, than do their wealthier Caucasian peers across the grade school years.

5. Children tend to move away from sensational or glamorous career aspirations (e.g., professional athlete) and toward a sharper focus on realistic aspirations and aspects of careers related to their self-identified talents and interests across the grade school years.

These five main findings suggest that vocational learning and aspirations may be involved in a complex, dynamic relationship with an emerging sense of self that includes elements of sex, race, and social class. Some longitudinal research has been conducted on the theoretical link between sex and career aspirations (e.g., Cook et al., 1996; Helwig, 2001; Liben & Bigler, 2002). However, few studies have approached many of these questions with a longitudinal design, and none have done so from the grade school to the high school years.