My mother is from Finland and my late father from Denmark. I have always lived in Denmark and I only speak the Danish language. Danish is a difficult and unstructured language, so parents are advised only to teach their children Danish, if they want to succeed in Denmark.
Some of my ballast from Finland is the horror stories from the part of my family which ended up on the Russian side of the border after WWII. Here you can talk about TBS and wilderness therapy if you did not fit in as a communist. They did not shoot all, some were sent out far east in order to achieve "emontional growth" - sounds familar?
I started this tread out of respect for your culture. I am a Dane and as I have stated: I am proud of it.
But perhaps the culturel differences are to big. I can not understand how a reality check should benefit a child. Yes, some teenagers are depressed, some are unstructured, some have no target in their lifes. Should it worry the parents? No, I think not.
If I looked back some 20 years, I did not know what I want to do. I could not afford anymore education, my parents could not either. Our schools are free of charge, but I had to move to another town without a place to stay. Some students actually lived in tents for some months before they found a shed or a basement somewhere. College was and is there few of.
So I took a job in a store. Somehow by networking with the right people and being at the right place at right time, I have ended up as CIO in a business with more than 200 people employeed. I could not have planed it better!
But Denmark is not US. Perhaps you can not network you into a good career. Perhaps you have to plan everything. Perhaps you have to go for a certain line of work regardless the fact that you dont like it.
I dont know. That is why I have to ask if I am too Danish.