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,

 
  There are not seats enough in the grammar schools, probably, for 
  more than one tenth of [all the children in Boston, Philadelphia, 
  and Washington, DC]. Our cities evidently do not expect or intend 
  to educate the bulk of the boys and girls beyond the primaries or 
  lower grammar grades. The mass of children go to work to earn their 
  living as soon as they are old enough to meet the law, and often 
  before that. (p. 161) 

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.