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The same thing seems to happen everyday even if you don’t want it to. Our parents pretending that they know what is best tell us what to do. How many times have you zoned out when your mamon or baba start lecturing you about what you should do? Whether it is about our career paths (“you should have became a doktor” or about our love life (“you should find a nice Persian girl and settle down”), parents always know what we should do.

As much this phenomenon happens to everyone, I think young Iranian-Americans have a bit of a different experience than other Americans who had parents growing up in this country. I mean, second generation Iranian-Americans must navigate a difficult economic and social system in a country where their parents did not go through the same experience when they were young. As a result, our parents give us specific advice even though they might actually have to clue what they are talking about.

For some reason our parents all seem like experts when it comes to college and grad school. While some of our parents might have gone to a university here, most don’t know what its like to grow up in the American education system. I don’t think my dad knows the different between the SAT and the LSAT, but somehow he knows how to ace both tests. When it comes to admission essays, parents know exactly what we have to write to get into school. Even though our parents mean well, they often just don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to something they never experienced.

Perhaps worse than actually giving some unwanted advice is when our parents have no clue what we are going through and don’t give advice. I don’t think my parents have any real conception of prom and how it fits in an average American teenager’s life. Having to figure out all these social conventions by myself made it even more awkward to attend High School. They had so much advice about how I could get into college and how to do well in my classes, but they never seemed to prepare me for the social aspects of college. In hindsight, it is probably a good thing my parents didn’t know about all the drinking and partying that goes on in colleges or they would have kept a much closer eye on me.

So I guess the next time your parents are going on and on about how you should live every aspect of your life, maybe its not the worse thing in the world. I mean you can always space out and think about something else while they are lecturing. But maybe (just maybe) what they are saying isn’t always crazy talk and you could actually learn from their knowledge.

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