without going into lots of detail, my sibling Frisk and I endured some truly miserable RL childhood years, and one of the most lasting effects of that treatment was that we had a lot of very early childhood interests stamped out of us, mostly through bad parenting and bad schooling. and we had relatively good RL parents in many important respects! they weren't Christian fanatics or weird cultists or anything; they were remarkably lenient about what we were allowed to read—though they were stricter about popular entertainment. I think that was less about ideological objections, and more because our parents were miserable people who didn't have fun and therefore were suspicious of anything too enjoyable. life was serious and they wanted serious children.
suppressed childhood interests, however, have a way of bobbing up later, in the form of strange impulses and incongruous emotional reactions to things in adulthood. my conscious mind might have been taught to regard poetry as stupid and pointless, for example—and then I took Latin and Greek (for no good reason) and therefore spent time translating poetry. I was drawn back towards poetry in this indirect way and won back a degree of intellectual respect for the discipline, even though it would take a couple more decades before I could imagine actually writing poetry again. I suspect that my sibling Frisk's perplexing (at the time) decision to drop an engineering major in order to take a degree in history had a similar origin. and therein lies a tale.
you see...our RL parents, especially our RL mother, behaved in contradictory ways towards the liberal arts. Mother was far better educated in this regard than Father, who was rather narrowly a math and science person who rarely read fiction and didn't seem to care for music or cinema or other creative arts. in our earliest years, Mother did what she could to instill some appreciation for the finer things—and yet, later in life, she didn't seem to want us to study those same things. she was somewhat appalled that Frisk changed to a history major, because she wanted us to be employable out of college, and she viewed a history major as worthless—even though her own brother was a history professor! (as an expatriate Chilean in Denmark; I'm slightly tempted to drop Uncle Hugo's name, even though that will probably make us easy to trace.)
it's taken a ridiculously long time for me to work my way out from under this cloud of trauma and mixed messaging, and finally address myself earnestly to the question of what we're actually good at, and where our desires lie. Frisk, in their old mundane life, never made it that far, sad to say; but they're with us now again so once again they can contemplate the idea of going into history and journalism instead of bashing their heads against technical fields that they felt forced into, when they were much younger.
don't make your kids study things they suck at, parents. you can't brute-force these things and expect to get good and lasting results out of it.
~Chara of Pnictogen