CHILDREN AS young as 12 and 13 are "very anxious" about their future careers. That's according to Peadar Crowley, inspector of the guidance service with the Department of Education's psychological service.

He recently gave a talk to the Institute of Guidance Counsellors in Dublin in which he called for more active participation by parents in career guidance. Much of the talk was based on his findings from a recently concluded two-year pilot project in Cork, funded by the EU, in which first-year children from six local schools and their parents collaborated with guidance counsellors in an effort to make the family more involved in career choices.

Surely, one would imagine, children of 12 years of age are not seriously contemplating their future? "With the Cork project, we did evaluation and checking as we went along. One of the striking findings was that a high proportion of first-year pupils are quite concerned about where they're going to end up in employment terms," Crowley says.

"They were actually anxious about their futures. I'd say a lot of it has to do with today's pressures. They are one of the unintended audiences of a lot of this media emphasis on unemployment and competition.

"And so you have these little 12- and 13-year-olds who feel powerless to do anything about the situation, but have this general angst about the future.

"If they are anxious about their own personal futures, the best way of dealing with this anxiety is to do something about it. So one of the strands of the Cork project was getting the children with the help of their parents, to do a simple job study. It was an attempt to get parents and child thinking about this business of employment and so on.

"We discovered that the response of the parents to this small initiative was very strong. And the children responded with great enthusiasm to working with their own parents contrary to the myth that teenagers can't collaborate with their parents."

Peadar Crowley says parents are the most influential factor in the career decision-making process of their children. "It makes sense for the school to capitalise on that and not only to work directly with the child but also to work through the family, so as to make the guidance service doubly effective.

"Schools can do lots of things in relation to working with the parents. Some schools reach out and enlist the parents as allies and give the parents support in how they work with their own children. They may use parents to provide work experience to senior-cycle pupils or to give preparatory interviews to pupils. There's enormous potential, limited only by time and imagination, as to what parents could be doing in schools.

"Ideally, schools should give parents a brief and an orientation as to what they could be doing and what they should steer clear of. For example, they might be advised to steer clear of specific advice and information which might require a technical knowledge base. What parents are best at is giving personal encouragement and emotional support to their children.

Peadar Crowley would like to see guidance counselling introduced at junior level of post-primary school, he says. However, he points out, this is not always feasible because of the demands made by senior-cycle pupils on the career-guidance teacher. This demand means that, often, disadvantaged children don't have the benefit of career guidance before they leave school at the age of 15.

"We would be arguing strongly that children should be enabled to see the value of staying on, because of the stark differences in the employment situation between pupils who have the Leaving Certificate and those who don't.

"In theory, the career guidance goes on throughout second level. In reality, most of the time it is given to children who are in senior cycle. There should be a programme of work which would start in first year, involving the parents. Most schools have something going, but it isn't formalised.

"There isn't any set guidance programme which must be followed by all schools. There are guidelines for guidance counsellors and they stress the importance of the parents' role."