e-Bulletin for Parents - 5 March 2021

The importance of Life Planning

Life planning is an ongoing and lifelong process for personal fulfillment. In the stage of study, life planning education plays an important role in cultivating students’ ability to know themselves, to plan, to set goals and to reflect, and to recognize and link up the various paths of further study and employment.

Parents play a very important role in the career planning education of their children. Parents can assist their children to plan and set goals at different stages to achieve their ideal dreams by understanding the character and abilities of their children, exploring their potential, and instilling the good values into their children.

How can parents help children to plan their goals at different stages? Parents play an extremely important role in their children’s career planning. Parents can follow the following five steps to help their children develop their education and employment plans to achieve their aspirations and goals.

To develop and achieve their goal is a cyclical process. In this process, continuous exploration, experimentation and review are carried out to develop a blueprint for the future. The following is the key planning process:

Understand yourself: Communicate with your children in order to help them to understand and develop their interests, abilities and aspirations. Also communicate with teachers to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their children. At the same time, give your children enough room to think independently and help them to understand themselves.
Look for exploration: Proactively seek and explore various types of information with your children and provide appropriate advice and assistance for them.
Integrated assessment: Accompany your children to integrate all kinds of information, measure related factors such as time, ability, people, and issues, and then guide them to narrow the scope and conduct assessments.
Develop a plan: After the assessment, assist your children to develop relevant plans and set short-term goals and directions.
Put the plan into practice: Support and encourage your children to try hard and gradually implement goals and plans.
Review and reflection: In the process of assisting your children to fulfil their goals, encourage them to review and reflect on whether they are consistent with the original plan, so as to improve the plan and strive to move towards the goal.

For more information on life planning, please visit EDB’s Life Planning Information Website <https://lifeplanning.edb.gov.hk/en/>.