Perspective

​Ideation

During the ideation phase, I talked with my interviewees to gain suggestions about addressing this issue during a co-creation phase. The following are some of the ideas from them.

​Fariha believes in addressing this issue by reducing the misconception that only doctors or engineers can make good money. She recommends sharing knowledge with students and parents about options where they could make reasonable money since she believes we cannot eradicate the fact that people need money in a middle-class society like Pakistan. Other ways could be the teams educating students and parents ensuring that it seems easy and possible, in an informal localized way. Also, she believes that sharing examples and stories of success through blog writing on the internet could help address this issue. 

However, she believes there is no solution for the marriage case but definitely, ‘’there is no guarantee that your daughter being a doctor would live a happy life.’’ 

According to Kainat, there should be awareness about fields that have scope and respect through career counseling sessions. Further, she recommends that children should be encouraged to communicate and raise awareness among their parents to bridge the gaps. She also believes that the government should increase seats and scope for other fields.

When I talked with Ms. Sadaf about her ideas to address this issue. She highlighted some deeper aspects of children’s and parents’ relationships and about raising children and perspective about children and parent relationships. She is a mother who shares that, ‘’the talents of children start getting visible at a young age. For example, if he is playing with mud and making structures, then he might be a sculpture. If he is racing cars, he is a car racer. If he is banging his head with music, he is a musician.'' She further believes that parents have a responsibility to raise their children, they cannot just give heavy fees to schools and take off, forget, or deny all their responsibilities.'' She disapproves of the reality among some Paksitian parents that ''Like bacchy paida howy and be default barry ho gye and paise bnany ki machine ban gye.'' ('Children born, grown up and by default become a money-making machine.) She also recognized that ''Not all have to be good at everything, if a student is good at history, he doesn't have to be also good at Mathematics. You can be good at one, two, three but you cannot be best at ten subjects." Her message for parents was that they should avoid considering their children as their old age fund. She further recognized that things are changing. She put forward the idea that human children are the only ones that take 15-17 years to become mature compared to other species, ‘’but you don't own your children.’’ According to her, this is a wrong perspective. Rather, ‘’you are the means to bring them in life and you are responsible to use your resources to support them to grow.’’ In a nutshell, her suggestions were of parent and couple education about how to raise kids, and understand their talents, likes, dislikes, fears, and interests at a young age. 

During the co-creation phase, we got a lot of really good suggestions and recommendations from our participants. Many of them were similar, so we clustered them when Built and I downloaded the learning and created the insight statements which we later used to develop an Idea Bank.  An Idea Bank consisted of all the possible solutions that we could explore to address this issue. We came with many ideas and decided to chose based on feasibility, desirability, and viability. However, we decided to step back and talk with parents rather than push certain solutions and explore their perspective.